brownbat

I feel like there's a whole series of articles that could be filed under "Tech industry decides aol really had the right model after all."

People have been doing this since the cannonballs photo in the Crimean War.

If you think a fully fabricated video is the key to lying to people I have a poker game you can join.

Here's a discussion of how far you can distort video today, in a way that is way more subtle and harder to rebut than a total fabrication:

https://youtu.be/tEGqepsFTbI

I thought they were saying the defense was like defenses of gpt-3, that it will be good someday, or it's good if you are very selective about the output, not that your comment was poorly written.

One of those readings is just musing about the state of all this "almost there" tech, the other is just randomly insulting someone's writing.

That does seem like pretty dangerous ambiguity. Akiselev maybe wrote a blue gold dress of comments where one reading is mean-spirited. I doubt it was intentional, but could have been clearer.

I wonder how much of that was by design, if any.

An old friend used to work in a chemical factory in, must have been Minnesota in the 60s or 70s.

She would talk about how they had a row of sheds with three walls for mixing certain dangerous chemicals. Each shed had an open or really thin wall facing the river.

If one went up, well, that person was probably gone, but at least it wouldn't start a chain reaction. It would explode in exactly one direction -- away from the plant, away from all the other dangerous chemical sheds.

The libre/gratis distinction is important, sure. But when rms argued against "programs as property" here, there were certain implications about pricing models that came along for the ride, whether that was his primary intention or not.

My argument is really a (somewhat tongue in cheek) rebuttal to people who think libre software, which incidentally tends to be gratis, can never be high quality or sustainable.

Well...

(1) If you believe prices trend towards marginal cost, and,

(2) the cost of acquiring a new user trends lower for more useful products, then it follows that...

(3) capping the price of software would generally improve its overall quality.

(Don't worry, I'm mostly joking. Still...)

Reminded me of Hal Varian talking about Google's dominance and (dismissing any role of) network effects back in 2008:

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.htm...

They were pretty on message even a decade ago.

Futurism from forty years ago on the unbeatable triumph of malls: https://youtu.be/2RkxhXQnVSw

"This is how we live now."

> Edit: Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for fitness level.

They specifically control for the following lifestyle factors: "smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and fruit consumption."

(Ctrl+f for "covariates")

In the conclusion, they acknowledge: "Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors."

But if someone "works out heavily and supplements," that should show up in self reported physical activity, and indirectly in BMI.

> this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.

This tracks with some self reports for the most advanced L2 language learners though, that your ability to learn new words itself improves while you are learning new words. Maybe just requires a ton of exposure.

MattVsJapan talks about drilling vocab early on, then once he hit a certain level, he could often just look up a new word once and know it almost indefinitely, more like with English.

2nd grade is, what, 8 years of immersion? Exposure to something like 100-250,000 sentences, with practice or exposure for all available hours every day? It's a lot to catch up to.

Even so, with 2nd graders, we're not talking like "perspicacity" or "abrogate." Some words and some concepts will be harder than others.

Arguably PageRank cannibalized itself, it created incentives to make the web itself worse.

You can't really improve this until the lead author doesn't have a final say on how to treat outliers.

In any given study, there are going to be hundreds of special cases in the data that you didn't anticipate, and you have to decide whether to include or exclude them.

Any researcher will subconsciously be more sympathetic to arguments to exclude subjects that go against the principal theory, and less so to subjects that confirm it.

And it's a battle of reasonable arguments, most of the cases aren't bright line fraud or misconduct, they're just humans finding some arguments more compelling and the impossibility of escaping our own biases. (And yes, sometimes it's fraud, but fraud is just the tip of the iceberg if we're talking about genuinely improving the reliability of scientific findings.)

Prepublication is helpful, but more and more I'm convinced that the only way to do proper science would be to completely disaggregate study design from study execution.

Reminds me of this Outside/In episode about (possibly) the earliest adopters of solar in the US:

http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/1/4/stoner-panels

> * (many others that escape me at this moment...)

* Threat hunting / attribution

Familiarity with clustering incidents and pivoting between actors by attack signatures.

Or before that, do you even know what an APT is? (Probably only a small percentage of CS grads.)

* Malware re

* Post incident forensics

Random tools and skills that come up...

SQL keeps coming up even though I try to avoid it. There's generally an "SQL person" on the team that drives simple queries but having the basics down will be faster.

Visualization tools that help diagram clusters of incidents, though these might be declining in importance.

Beyond the network stack, understanding common network services, how people (criminals) register for domains and set up virtual services, techniques for c2.

You can play around with riskiq as a free user. You can read some reports from FireEye, Symantec, Crowdstrike, etc. for free to see how they do it. The MITRE attack framework collects a lot of it. Most CS students probably don't know those names though or where to start.

An understanding of criminal law and/or geopolitics doesn't hurt.

I'm with you insofar as I'd prefer slightly fewer, but I have seen some important topics with unique discussions here. I think that's why the guidelines say "probably" instead of making it a bright line.

Even if it's not exactly where I'd set the dial, it's probably a rough average of the community, and the consolation prize is that controversial stories rapidly bury themselves.

That's what I thought of.

Some chat snippets here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-tha...

How long until we can get some kind of open AI project to take in incoming bad quality voice and output clear noiseless human speech (in our, or whoever's voice we want), so podcasters don't have to buy expensive microphones and try to soundproof their rooms anymore?

I know we're not there yet, but I feel like we're about to break "garbage in garbage out" with AI.

Great point.

I've been wondering -- if commute times suddenly become close to irrelevant, because most hours worked are remote, that changes a ton of housing calculations, right?

Remote work is over-represented in tech though, so I don't know how much of the population it will really effect, since we're primarily a services economy.

Not sure what the effect size is, but if I could easily live anywhere it'd probably be more remote.

Oh interesting:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/inte...

So Russia/China are already in the "further safeguards needed" camp, along with... almost all of the world?

I studied a bit of EU law in law school, but haven't kept up as much as I should. This is a helpful start to dig back in, thanks!

Will this have implications for Chinese and Russian services as well? Will the EU go fully local?

They even admit in the article it's less efficient than desalinization, which is itself hard to make efficient.

I'm all for transition assistance and a safety net to mitigate the harms, but halting human ingenuity seems like it would put far greater numbers of people at risk of misery and untimely deaths.

Lamplighters are especially useful to consider here.

How many lives has electricity saved? How many ICUs can operate continual machines because of it? How many people at risk of heat stroke can run AC in summer because of it? How many transplants and temperature controlled medicines got delivered because of it? What about its role in food safety? What about timely communications of life saving information, like those lost at sea asking for help, or severe weather alerts advising others to shelter? That's just the beginning, it seems incalculable really.

That lamplighter should have had a society willing to catch them during the transition. But imagine if it solved this problem by holding that one person's job sacred at the cost of millions of other lives instead.

It's absolutely good and relevant to worry about individual cases, but it seems like society is better off if we allow jobs to adjust to the actual current needs of humanity, rather than holding them fixed. Then we just also try to do our best to take care of as many of those who fall through the cracks as we can.

It may be harder to monetize short video content than short text or longer videos (maybe that drives YouTube revenue nudges for longer content?).

But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.

But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.

That list has some big names on it.

> Troia said the people responsible for compromising his site are the same people who hacked the databases they are now selling on the dark web and claiming to have obtained exclusively from his service.

So he's saying that these guys successfully compromised all these domains while he watched, but never did anything with the stolen info, waiting to blame it all on an intrusion into his company... in retaliation for him watching them steal it all in the first place?

That's some real Xanatos Gambit stuff right there. Maybe Troia lives in a David Mamet film.

Tim Harford has an episode about why bricks have been so great for humanity for so long, and a bit on why they are so hard to improve on:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz2w8

Engineering Explained[0] on Youtube does a good job talking about improvements across both technologies.

He says he gets this question a lot when he talks about conventional engine improvements, whether or not they are going to be irrelevant soon. In one video (which I frustratingly I can't find at the moment) he lists a series of use cases that are going to rely on conventional, maybe diesel, for a long time, especially heavy hauls across remote areas.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClqhvGmHcvWL9w3R48t9QXQ

EDIT: This is probably the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hatav_Rdnno&t=27s

I vaguely remember a stunt where Koko the Gorilla was used in a mass-chat on AOL. The crowd, enthused at talking to another species for the first time, would ask things like, "Is there a god?" and "What is the meaning of love?"

Koko would reply, "Apple juice" and wander away.

Social media is a bit like running this experiment with "the mob." Maybe it has a mind and profound thoughts and we can have a discourse with it?

Our expectations for enlightened dialogue are sometimes a bit too high.

Hmm, what makes for a meaningful broad food category word?

Dumplings range from pierogies to xiaolongbao, sandwiches include monte cristos and cheesesteaks and fluffernutters, soup includes vichyssoise and miso and samgyetang.

Why do those words work, if they do?

Stepping sideways a bit... in New Delhi, menu names shift in a subtle way with the prominence of vegetarianism. In the UK or US, you might order a dish like "chicken with seasonal vegetables." In Delhi it's often reversed, they'll specify the exact meatless dish, Malai Kofta or Palak Paneer, but just say the side dish is "non-veg" without specifying whatever meat. That slight shift in emphasis really underscores the endless variety of things you can eat beyond meat, it makes plain how the generic Western conception of a meal through classic French courses can be incredibly narrow. However we ultimately come down on "curry," emphasizing meatless dishes seems like an example of food language that probably should have been heavily exported and hungrily adopted by the rest of the world. Even if you're not a vegetarian, treating meatless dishes as first-class citizens seems to add enormous diversity to any cuisine, and a ton more satisfaction in the eating.

Genuinely reassuring to hear.

Really didn't want to toe the line into code wars too much, I'm sure there are some features of css that are the result of difficult tradeoffs and hard won lessons over the years, and I know I haven't spent enough time with it.

I think for me, I naturally gravitate towards an atomic, functional style where no segment of code knows anything about the rest of the program. Working in "inheritance is everything" mode was a sort of mindscrew, but maybe healthy for me in the long run.

"Later we also discovered that people didn't want to replace CSS and rather wanted to make it bigger."

Ha.

Just finally got around to using css in something and it felt like the opposite of PEP 20.

I hope it gets better over time. Maybe you eventually get more of a feel for things like why svg behaves differently from all other images (except when the contents of the file tell it not to), or tracing where your inherited styles come from, or nothing you write being "important" unless you tag it that way, or figuring out how to make something dynamic and responsive but only relative to a series of independent constraints.

I'm sure there are masters of css who have grown to love it. And it seems like there are some good patterns emerging, grid is great. Overall though, I found the experience painful and bewildering. Maybe I'm just uniquely unsuited for that work, but I hope layout gets its Van Rossum or a "css for humans" movement someday.