stevenAthompson

Here's a direct link to a PDF.

http://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Network-course-readings/Mar...

I have 64Gb, a 9800x3d, and a 4070Ti super. It's still a little slow if I set it to the highest settings, but it's usable.

Very cool either way!

I was going to argue that you seem like a bit of a rare creature, but I suppose you would know better than I. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want it to sound like a personal attack or something.

Do YOU feel that it's common for folks to change their minds about such deeply held beliefs? I've met a few over the years that I know of. Maybe there are more, and I just don't realize it.

I agree with most of what you said, and it was well said.

However, I disagree in two ways.

Firstly, while villainizing them is unhelpful convincing them is utterly impossible when religion is involved. It doesn't matter if we learn to understand their perspective, especially as logic/reason often doesn't apply and they aren't being honest about their goals and motivations.

I think the best anyone can hope for in such cases is for all parties to agree that we all have belief structures, and that we don't get to force those beliefs on others via the law. IE - "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." It's the only rational basis for a society in which different belief systems coexist. The United States used to understand this, but we seem to have forgotten.

Secondly, I do agree that it might be easier to reason with folks the further you get from the top of the ladder. The "true believers" who fly airplanes into buildings or who want to outlaw eating candy because it might lead to smiling on a Sunday didn't start down that path last week.

The issue with the bottom up approach is that the folks on the bottom seldom have any real power, and for good reason. If pawns were allowed to move backwards they would kill their kings.

they are optimizing but under differing constraints

Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.

In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.

You have a solid point. I also ignore the fact that RTO actually does improve the bottom line in some narrow scenarios, such as when it's used as a backdoor layoff in companies that don't mind losing the best and brightest.

Some companies don't see an appreciable difference in performance between those that can easily find work elsewhere and those who are otherwise unemployable. For those companies RTO is a great, though immoral, way to lower headcount without triggering the WARN act.

Has anyone backtested a stock bot that just shorts every company doing RTO? It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.

If the overview becomes a trusted source of information

It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate source content to exist.

AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually AI search engines will only have what they cached before the web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).

I subscribe also, and prefer it for most things.

However, it's pretty bad for local results and shopping. I find that anytime I need to know a local stores hours or find the cheapest place to purchase an item I need to pivot back to google. Other than that it's become my default for most things.

I would argue that all models are inherently incomplete because they are models (IE - they are the map not the territory). Rather than worrying about completeness, it's better to ask if the model is useful, and if anything would change about the requirement for tradeoffs in security if we used a more complete model?

I would answer that the triad IS useful in this scenario and further that if we used an alternative model (The 7-C's maybe?) we would still find inherently contradictory requirements for almost every security scenario. In fact, we would just MORE more of those trade-offs, further proving that security can never be "perfect."

For example, I can think of several fundamentals the triad doesn't cover directly. Privacy and non-repudiation spring to mind as concepts that don't neatly fit into the CIA triad, but they are the antithesis of each other!

Perfect privacy would require that nobody (including data-owners) can identify the user, and perfect non-repudiation would require that no access be granted without 100% proof of the current user. Again, you are forced to choose and this means that some aspect will always be less than perfect.

What would be the purpose of launching a decaying lump of monkey meat into space when the AI can explore just as well with a tiny fraction of the mass requirements?

I'd wager that it will be AI's using IRC from space, but IPv6 still won't have replaced IPv4. :)

To tell the truth, I don't remember. I've kept a "quotes.txt" file for the last two or three decades where I paste in anything I feel is worth remembering. It's been in there as long as I can remember, but I apparently didn't bother with a proper attribution.

I want to guess Oliver Wendell Holmes for some reason, but it doesn't read like something he said. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

"We do our peers, countrymen, students, and children a grave disservice by admonishing them to think for themselves without also giving them the critical thinking tools to do so, for in so doing we foster a culture where "independent thought" is equated with "contrarian thought". This gives rise to an anti-intellectual, anti-science paradigm that supports an idea not because it meets a basic standard of evidence, but rather simply because it opposes established thought. This is worse than the intellectual calcification that stagnant "herd thinking" would give rise to, because it doesn't simply halt progress — it puts it in full retreat."

I suspect that you're right, but only because of the rise in AI.

At a certain point we'll all have AI personal assistants that are easier to use, more convenient, and less harmful to us than smartphones have historically been. The cool kids will move to the shinier new format, and the poor will continue to use the moderately dangerous, addictive, less efficient legacy tech for a long while.

Maybe these things will come in smart glasses format that we interact with primarily by voice, better smart watches that don't require a phone at all, or maybe it will be something like the star trek communicator?

Similarly, I've been watching the rise of the "minimal phone", and "analog tech" with interest lately.

People have lost agency to the degree that they're looking to the very tech that stole their agency for answers, and I view that a sign that perhaps the push-back is actually beginning in earnest.

Literacy rates have been declining in lock-step with the increase in social media usage. We are now at the point that 54% of Americans read below the sixth grade level. 1 in 5 are functionally illiterate. Those numbers will be worse next year, and probably in every subsequent year.

The average person now spends more than 4 hours per day looking at their phone, but only about 60% know that social media companies make their money via advertising. Around 48% know what a privacy policy is.

These massively uninformed, heavily manipulated citizens make up the majority of voters now and democracy may die because of it. Worse, anti-science madness in the form of anti-elitism and populist zero-sum economic lunacy have begun to prevail above reason.

Screens may still spell the end of personal liberty and an abrupt end to the forward march of human progress. It's just taken a bit longer than parents predicated when they tried to ban Beavis and Butthead.

I would argue that TikTok is what terminally online means now.

66% of autistic adults admit having suicidal thoughts. 35% have attempted suicide.

If they're faking it for benefits they are REALLY committed to the bit.

This is a really great question. I checked.

Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.

Interesting either way.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9386174/

fun and easy

It's not fun or easy for anyone to find a new job. However, it's usually less painful than staying if you're poorly suited to your current role.

We all have strengths and weaknesses. The secret to living a good life is learning to take an honest inventory of your personal capabilities and then figuring out how to work with what you have.

I truly hope that things improve for you.

better allow me being late sometimes

That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?

Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.

What financial benefit would a diagnosis have?

The author's concerns would mostly all be ameliorated by logging out of TikTok and never logging back in. They seem to think that "TikTok" and "Society" are synonyms. They are not.

Those are valid points, and I appreciate you taking the time to make them. To clarify, when I misspelled "cannon" I just meant "big gun" rather than a literal piece of primitive weaponry.

More importantly, I would like to point out that while all of your concerns are valid, many of those problems were already solved in the 1960's. Project HARP[1] was able to use a 400 lb projectile to launch a 185 lb payload to a height of 111 miles... in 1966. We don't need anything close to 185 lbs of payload.

You'll note that 111 miles up is considered suborbital space. HARP was built mostly of 1950's era technology, and cost between $1000-$3000 per payload to fire. It had a 16" barrel and could be reloaded in about an hour. The payloads were encapsulated within a "sabot" to protect them, and the sabot seemed to do it's job, because primitive electronic instrument packages were deployed without being destroyed and weather balloons were deployed with success.

The long term plan for that project was to add a second stage which would push the payload into orbit, or beyond. There is no reason to believe it wouldn't have worked, but the Vietnam war happened and people lost the taste for funding space exploration. It was shut down. The enormous gun is still there, rusting where it was abandoned after firing nearly 100 ballistic payloads into suborbital space

Now, if we could fire ballistic payloads into suborbital space in 1966 what do you think we could achieve today? Honestly, the engineering isn't even that difficult, it's just a matter of figuring out how to pay for it. The rest is an incremental improvement over something we could already do in the 60's.

Sure, I'm glossing over a ton of minor issues (like the entire second stage), but those problems are also basically solved and we've learned a few things in the last 60 years. I not only think it's possible, I think someone should give it a shot (pun intended).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

A Ronin is just a Samurai who has learned his lesson.

I'm not even certain it's fair to refer to these things (or modafinil) as nootropics, as nootropics (as defined by the person who coined the phrase) should lack stimulate/sedative properties.

the engineering is rather a problem

I suppose that's my point. It's really just a series of maybe-not-that-easily solvable engineering problems, and it would allow us to not only explore further but to do it at a relatively low cost and with the ability to "upgrade" the network gradually as each generation of probe improves. More importantly, it would allow us to finally get around that pesky rocket equation and do it cheaply enough that we might actually get political buy-in.

nuclear power supply

This was my exact thought, a small RTG power supply in each could provide enough power for hundreds of years with no moving parts. Not enough for billion mile transmitters anymore, but now they don't have to be.

phased array that can steer the beam at each target

That's a great idea, and like most of the individual pieces of the plan it's kind of a thing we already know how to do. Sure, you could dedicate the next decade to solving it well, but you COULD solve it today with variations on off the shelf systems.

Really, the power source and antenna design are just a few of several hundred (thousands?) of engineering problems that would need to be solved, but all of the engineering challenges I can think of are solvable with variations on current tech.

The only reason it isn't being done is that nobody is doing it.

I'm not talking about launching a cubesat, I'm talking about launching a mesh network of thousands or millions of mass produced devices half or a quarter the size of a cubesat.

New Horizons, to use your example, weighed a thousand pounds and used a 2 meter dish transmitting at something like 12 watts to compensate for the fact that the receivers are billions of miles from earth and hidden beneath a blanket of RF noise. The inverse square law can't really be beaten at that kind of distance so everything becomes inefficient by design.

If we can pick up that tiny 12 watt whisper of a signal from billions of miles away, surely we we could design much lower power omnidirectional signals that relay between mesh nodes closer together using far less power?

Imagine a string of probes that are all within a few thousand miles of each other with clear line of sight. Yes, we might need six million of them to cover that same distance, but if they were cell phone sized devices produced using what we've learned about consumer electronics it should be feasible to just keep launching them forever, for a few hundred bucks apiece, until we eventually build a large network that could assemble high resolution data by combining multiple sources.

We keep trying to fight the rocket equation, but that's not a battle that can be won. Mass is always going to be the limiting factor for space exploration, so maybe we can just start launching lots of intelligent low mass things regularly instead of the occasional big dumb thousand pound lump of metal.

Why dont they just launch a string of hundreds or thousands of tiny mesh probes out of a canon over a longer period of months or years? They dont need to be powerful if you have a big mesh network and each probe would only need to cost about what a cell phone does.

Ignore me, I answered my own question. Encryption is still illegal on HAM bands, but legal for things like LoRa that are unlicensed (hence WiFi).