aethertap

I've been trying to write a novel for about a year now, using the planning approach as best I can figure it out. It's been a struggle because I feel like I need to take more of the pants approach except that I have an axe to grind and I want the story to do it, so it's been a big conflict between the two approaches. My latest compromise has been to try to define the story progress as a series of high-level situations for the characters, then "pants them out" to see how they work together. I'm really pretty stuck on it though, so I can't say I'd recommend doing whatever it is that I'm doing, at least if you want to finish a story in just one lifetime.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not doing it for profit, just the desire to share something that took an unexpected level of effort for me to sort out.

Eventually I plan to open source the robotics curriculum that spawned this project, along with some other stuff related to starting a new school (something I'm working on with a team that was originally inspired by the XQ Superschool competition [1]). I want to run it through its paces with some real children first to make sure it's not completely off base though.

1. http://xqsuperschool.org/

I spent quite a bit of time working through the Kalman filter content in Sebastian Thrun's book "Probabilistic Robotics"[1] a while back. I ended up making some notes [2] of the process that might be of interest to others if you're trying to get a grasp of everything that's going on with that process. One other person on the Internet that I know of thought they were useful, so I'll post the link here. This was part of a project I was working on to build a K-8 robotics curriculum (no, not teaching the kids Kalman filters, but I wanted to know how it all worked before starting to make a curriculum). The book is really good if you're wanting to make robots that can navigate uncertain environments.

Edit: I wish I'd had access to this article when I was going through that process. This is really well done.

1. http://amzn.com/0262201623

2. https://github.com/aethertap/probabilistic-robotics

> Who knew the "apocalypse" was just another 1-percenter meme, and that the self-styled "free-thinkers" walking around believing it

Interesting thought, that's never occurred to me before. It does seem strange now that you mention it that everyone expects their neighbors to turn into flesh eating monsters when the lights go out though, particularly when there's so little evidence to support the idea. It would be interesting to trace it back to its roots to see how it got started. Maybe it's an ancient holdover from the Bronze Age Collapse.

Thanks again, this looks like a lot of good stuff. I've actually read Lucifer's Hammer (several times if I'm totally honest), I had no idea he was involved in that.

Thanks for the pointer to Bruce Clayton, I'll have to look him up. I don't mean to come across as being against having the gun - I actually agree with your "kind word and gun" idea. I just wanted to get the point out about how much relief can be accomplished with that money because I think it gets missed in a lot of discussions, and of the two it seems a lot more likely to be relevant in a real disaster to me.

Good points. I was originally comparing the food to retail for a mid-level AR-15 because that seems to be one of the most common choices for a defensive rifle. You're definitely right that you could get something very capable for a lot less.

I live in a rural area in tornado alley. We also live on a major fault line, so there are a few potential "big ones" that could affect my area.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that, trying to figure out what to do in order to be prepared for a realistic disaster. What I ended up deciding was that I can afford to help my neighbors (and whoever else may show up). I have an extensive first-aid setup, stuff to purify water, tons of trash bags, and some easy-to-prepare food. If we have a major disaster in my area, I plan to distribute as much of that as I can. For a fairly small investment I have enough stuff to keep everyone on my street healthy and fed for about a month even if their pantries are empty. No Mad Max necessary.

As an interesting side note, as part of that process I did some calculating on relative costs and discovered that you can buy enough storable basic calories (white flour, stabilized cooking oil, and sugar - no health food here) to feed about 100 people for a month for less than it costs to get a single mid-grade rifle with no ammunition (about $1000). To me, that's the best answer to the idea that being prepared means getting armed to the teeth and fighting off the ravening hordes.

I may be wrong, but I agree with the thesis of this article that people tend to band together and try to help each other in a disaster, so I built a plan around that assumption.

(upvoted) It's hard to predict the alternate present from a notional past. I agree that the things we did were necessary stepping stones on the path to technology that likely could not have been avoided. We might have done it more slowly and with more limited scale and still made it to where we are now (over a longer time span), and I have no idea if that would have had better results or not. The real question for me is, now that we do have this perspective, can we make our future decisions better than our past decisions? We're now at a point where the global system has far less excess capacity to absorb our blunders. In resilience speak[1], it seems to me like we're in the late conservation phase, which typically precedes rapid release (collapse) and reorganization. We have evidence of this in the critical slowing down[2] of adaptive responses from a variety of present-day systems ranging from corals to economies. From my perspective, provoking a system in that condition feels a lot like playing with a doomsday footgun.

I don't think that killing off mosquitoes will be the final insult that causes cataclysmic ecosystem collapse; that seems pretty far-fetched. However, I don't know that, and I do think we should strive to have strong evidence for the costs and benefits of any irreversible change we make to our world at this point.

1. http://www.resalliance.org/adaptive-cycle

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-war...

There is a long list of things about our technological civilization that would have benefited from applying the precautionary principle a little more. We're in damage control mode right now for a large number of environmental catastrophes, our agricultural techniques of the last half-century or so have depleted and desertified a large amount of prime arable land, we're rapidly shooting ourselves in the foot by abusing antibiotics, and we have some huge problems with war, poverty, and other kinds of social strife. In my opinion, we should be learning to think deeply through consequences instead of looking at our track record and saying "let's do more of that." We don't need to be absolutely sure, but given our history I think we could probably strive to be /more/ sure before we make irreversible changes.

> That is already the case. If you whisper a secret into my ear, the government can subpoena me and force me to tell a court what you said. They can force you to tell a court what you said so long as it's not incriminating to you, and even then they can do it if they give you immunity.

This is true, but they can't compel me to inform on someone who had a whispered conversation near me that I couldn't hear. To me, the current bill is more like the latter scenario.

If I invented a communication device consisting of two cans and a connecting string, then sold it as a way for neighbor kids to talk privately to each other, they could not compel me to divulge the contents of their conversations because I wouldn't have access, even though I built the canmunicator. I think that in this case, what they're doing is more like mandating that I have a way to let them monitor all string vibrations.

If they want to subpoena information, they can demand that one of the parties actually involved in the communication surrender their keys. If they refuse, then it seems like basically the same situation as when both parties to a whispered conversation refuse to talk about it.

I'm not a photo power user like you are by any means, but I've been using darktable[1] quite a bit lately and I've gotten to where I like it. Here's the blurb from their front page:

"darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."

1. http://www.darktable.org/

The master branch worked without issue for me on ubuntu 15.04 and 15.10. I had to install clang-3.6 and libclang3.6-dev, if that helps.

Yeah, I'm in that boat for sure. I tend to have dozens of partially completed projects around at any given time. The best thing I've done so far to make some headway on this problem is to stop thinking of things in terms of being "done" but rather think in terms of "I'm going to spend X hours on this today, regardless of how much I get done." At least for me, deciding to just make steady progress instead of trying to finish seems to mostly eliminate the hang-up. If I focus on the process, things get done. If I focus on the goal, things fall apart.

Can't speak for the parent, but I have similar thoughts with my kids. My reasoning is pretty simple: technology that's already finely packaged and integrated might as well be magic, and it really makes it hard to want to open the hood and tinker with stuff. Personally, I think tinkering with computers had a big impact on me because it revealed that computers are just another kind of machine, subject to tweaking and understanding. I don't think of them as inscrutable monoliths as a result. I'd like my kids to have that same attitude toward technology in general, so the more they can build for themselves, the better.

Regarding why it might be the only hardware, I'm probably not as extreme on that front, but I think I can understand the motivation. With a choice between the slick user experience of a well-integrated touch device or the hacked together experience of roll-your-own Linux on roll-your-own hardware, I'm not sure how many kids would voluntarily choose the harder (but ultimately more rewarding) road. A certain amount of struggle and adversity seems to be important for making knowledge seem worthwhile and for pushing kids to explore. My own kids are most proud of themselves when they do something that's not easy for them, even though they usually complain the whole time they're doing it.

Here's the full paper:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336192/

That's very interesting and surprising (I would have guessed much less than 2.5%), but I don't see how it refutes my point that any currency's value is related to how easily it can be counterfeited. There's probably a threshold or two involved, where the convenience of having simple exchange rates between forms of the same currency compensates for losses to counterfeiting as long as the counterfeit rate is low enough.

I don't think you're actually arguing that I could build a currency that scales beyond a tribal scope out of something that's trivial to copy, but that's the point I'm trying to make. If it's too easy to cheat, people will stop trusting the currency and will use something else; therefore the technology behind the currency does affect its value.

> Just like the value of cash is not determined by the technical solution behind it (essentially colored inks on a piece of paper).

The value of paper money is actually pretty intimately entangled with the quality of its anti-counterfeiting technology. If anybody could just print viable currency on their home printers, cash would be useless.

It depends on the course, some courses are kept available and others are shut down after the action is over. I think the choice is left up to the instructors. I started downloading all of the videos when I sign up for a course for this reason actually, because I tend to go through them too slowly to finish with the main group.

There's a fun sci-fi series by Richard K Morgan that uses this concept. It starts with "Altered Carbon."

The trick for me is always just getting started. Once I actually get over the hump and start working, I generally find it's pretty easy to keep going. It's getting started without sidetracking myself that really puts up the biggest resistance.

That may not work for an author who's lacking inspiration, but in my case I found that when I sat down at the keyboard to work on my book, if I couldn't think of what to write I'd just start writing utter crap for a while until it started to flow a little better, then I was usually off to the races.

I'm a big procrastinator, but I finally found a way to get around it. Instead of thinking about the big tasks, I just allot myself a fixed amount of time that I'll be doing something, work on it steadily during that time, and quit at the end regardless of the state it's in. For some reason, it really makes it easier to face big important projects if I just say "I'm going to spend 8 hours putting up siding today, then I'm done" as opposed to "I need to get that siding put up..." I've used that trick to get tons of stuff done around my house as well as to write a book (which hasn't been published yet because I've been putting it off, so I guess there's still room for improvement).

I've been writing a web app in rust for a while now (using a different framework though, iron's ergonomics didn't suit me for some reason). Overall I've found it a pleasant enough experience. The reason I like the it is that I write code for a wide variety of domains, from web apps to compilers, and so far rust has been a decently usable language in all the domains I've tried it in. I really like the "one language to rule them all" aspect of it because it simplifies my life - chances are good that whatever problem I'm looking at will either be trivial enough for shell scripting, or will be amenable to a rust-based solution. Narrowing down the language set seems like it could also lead to some interesting interoperability potential, like an easy web UI for a disassembler library or something.

I still use half a dozen other languages on a regular basis, so the dream of being able to really focus on just one is still just a dream. However, rust is getting closer, and I'm gradually migrating most of my work to it when the choice is up to me.

Those look really cool, I'll have to pick up a set and try them out.

I don't... thanks for the tip. That looks like it would be really handy.

I'm using these rods to help my daughter (6 years old) with number sense right now. I've found them to be pretty effective at helping her build the concepts around manipulating numbers for arithmetic. The only pitfall we've run into was in connecting the manipulation of the rods with the manipulation of the more abstract numbers.

They've really helped in the area of modeling the problems. Depending on where you put the unknown, there are several ways to ask the same arithmetic question, eg:

    _ + 2 = 5
    3 + 2 = _
    3 + _ = 5

Using the rods to model the knowns and unknowns has been really helpful for her to connect the abstract ideas of the equations with the reality of what the numbers mean, and how the manipulations work on each side of the equality.

Overall I think they're a pretty powerful tool, but they require some creativity to really get the most value from them, and they definitely require the use of other learning aids in conjunction like number lines, 99-charts, and base-ten blocks. We also use money, marbles, and other things to try to avoid getting too dependent on a particular manipulative.

Actually the biggest breakthrough we had was making up a card game to learn complements of ten. If you've played "set" you know the basic idea - we lay down 12 cards numbered 0-10, and we compete to see who can make pairs or triples that sum to ten the fastest. She loves it, and she's gotten to where I really have to work to keep up.

This is what I do, and I've been really happy with it so far.

The first thing I do is try to get a handle on the libraries it pulls in (maybe spend a day just going through the high-level readme material for each one). That will usually tell me where to start looking for the entry points where I might want to start modifying things. After that, I give myself a series of small functionality changes to implement, kind of like capturing a bunch of little flags. After doing that for a bit I usually have a decent idea of how things work, and it's easier to go forward, at which point I can dig into the relevant parts of the codebase with more confidence.

The first few mods are inevitably disgusting hacks, so don't pick anything you want to keep for your first couple of goals. It is pretty easy to go back and do them right once you've got your head around the rest of the project if you do end up wanting to keep them though.

I've used this method on some decently large C++ and javascript projects (around 100k-200k lines) and it works pretty well for me. I don't learn very well by just reading the code, but doing the little mods seems to make it stick.

> I realize it adds an additional layer abstraction which one could use to build additional functionalities on top

This is what got my attention about it - it provides a link that makes it more natural to play with SQL from Rust. You get some protection from typos and type errors, and you get the benefit of working with native types. I'd feel more confident working in this environment for those reasons than I would working with string-based SQL directly in my program. As for the incompleteness issues, it's still young and that seems like a solvable problem to me.

I just happened to be doing this today myself, here's what I'm putting together (based on recommendations from the book "Hacking with Kali" which is free if you have an ACM membership).

Practice tools/lab environments:

1. https://github.com/SpiderLabs/MCIR

2. https://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Requ...

3. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mutillidae/

4. http://www.dvwa.co.uk/

Install that stuff in a VM:

* https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Metasploitable2 is a pre-packaged pentesting environment with plenty of vulnerabilities. You could run a CTF by just picking out things from the exploitability guide that comes with it (read down the page a bit) and defining victory conditions based on that.