128 karma · joined July 13, 2017
And as others pointed out, breaches aren't always known or disclosed. Is it too late if you change your password 6 months after it's compromised? Not sure - maybe people sit on their exploits sometimes, or wait for a better buyer, or sell secrets in small batches.
All that said, I've never changed a password when it was newer than 5 years old, and only do it for crucial services, but if I were a bigger target, I might do it more.
>“They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs,” he continued. “They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
(https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...)
And surely media can be bad, can harm people, can lie, but "ENEMY" is interesting.
I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:
- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life) - B: chores I need to do and social debts - C: money, and whether I have enough - D: what will the future be like? - E: food, sex, safety - F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"
I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.
I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.
Instead of saying "I want my next job to be X", it's "I wonder what my next job will be". Instead of saying "I'm taking a walk to place Y", it's "I wonder where I'm walking to". Of course I can tell myself a destination, but statistically, I know it's far from certain. Looking backwards, instead of saying "You should have said hi to your neighbor", it's more like "I wonder why I acted that way". And it's not always in the direction of being helpless. Sometimes it's "I wonder why I'm exercising so much today".
At one point today, walking, I thought "I'm moving my left foot, I'm moving my right foot, my foot is touching the ground, it's weird that I don't usually think about this". That's meditation-ish, like watching the breath as a swinging gate, appreciating a normally automatic process for a bit. In my opinion, this goes beyond just breathing and walking, and extends into processes like writing and talking - words just kind of come. You can revise them and slow them down, but if you can step back, you might feel words just coming out of nowhere. Sam Harris, mentioned by others in this thread, has also described speech as being surreal in this way.
I would posit there are correlations like "people who view life as something that happens to them tend to enjoy it more, when their economic and political circumstances are good, and enjoy it less when their circumstances are bad". And "people who view themselves as controlling their life enjoy life in a wider variety of conditions". I think some call this internal/external locus of control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control)
You could probably extend those correlations to things like "societies with an overall internal locus of control tend to support the death penalty more", or "societies with an external locus of control tend to believe in magic more". Whether or not these are useful correlations, I don't know ;)
To the ~5 people I've described that to, they mostly show some kind of alarm, like they didn't realize I held such dangerous views. I guess in some people the same worldview might manifest as a sociopath personality that excuses reckless behavior, or a person with no drive that wastes their days away. In my case, I'm hypersensitive about harming people, I'm fairly risk averse, and I'm borderline obsessed with keeping high "productivity".
I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that. So I do find the narrative shifts from "I accomplished X because I decided to" and becomes "I spent time on X, and I'm glad that happened, it was fun, and I'm glad I find that fun".
I hope I'm not getting too off topic given the original article. Self/consciousness/free-will debates can go on forever, so my ideal outcome is somebody says "yeah, that is pretty weird, pretty magical, oh well!". But more often it's met with "ah, don't be so negative, you can control yourself, if you try!".
"I thought I was the originator of many my out-of-the-blue thoughts, and I found out that's not true. Am I actually the originator of the thoughts at the next level up?".
I think some people who have never meditated, while they admit to having thoughts just hit them randomly sometimes, they'll nonetheless feel that many of their truly out-of-the-blue thoughts were conscious choices to switch gears or pull on an interesting thread. A meditator might label the same low-level thought as "random", but a non-meditator would say "I did that". Can a meditator similarly be fooled, on a different level?
Sam Harris, while I never followed his meditation talk much, had one example recently that really drove home the "can't predict thought" concept. Something like "think of a song, any song", and then he challenged you to think about why you picked that song, and not one of the other songs you know. And then, despite whatever explanation you concoct, think about all the songs it didn't even occur to you to choose that fit the same criteria. It's kind of magical.
I do think all this can make us more tolerant towards other people, but it's still a bit circular. If it's all meat and electrons, they're destined to commit the crime, and we're destined to lock them up. (edit: I mean: if they commit the crime, you can't blame them, and if someone jails them, you also can't blame them)
As far as I know, the trend is that older people tend to mellow out - usually! And I think that having a sudden realization that you're not so in-control can be tough. It can catch you off guard if the time isn't right. But after a few years, hopefully people course-correct a bit and start to give themselves more buffer and steer away from activities that exacerbate those anxieties. Or at the very least, one may become more numb to it as the novelty wears off.
I used to feel very in-control of my own mind, but after intentionally sitting and monitoring for thoughts, labeling those thoughts, etc, I became sensitive to how thoughts can really come out of nowhere. You can't predict what you will think next. That strikes a little deeper than a nature/nurture argument where you might say "oh, I just behave a certain way I guess, its in my genes". You start to wonder if you're just being forced to watch the movie that is your own life.
I personally feel like my life is a mostly-good movie, and there's reason to predict it will continue that way, but for many people, they're stuck in a bad movie. Some people may feel imprisoned by that. But not feeling in control can also be liberating, depending how you look at it. So I definitely agree that it's a double edged sword, or that YMMV.
(Overall, I've enjoyed meditation, and I try to do it about once a week, just to remind myself that there's another mode of thinking that's available to me.)
That said, it can be fundamentally hard to strike a balance on that with a client.
>Should a client need [...], I'll go with it. But I'll do so only when it's the simplest and most maintainable solution to the problem, and not because I want to be the greatest of programmers in my or other people's eyes.
"Simple" and "maintainable" depends on who is maintaining the project after you, and what they know, and what programmers at-large are likely to know. I also tend to make frontends that heavily rely on server-side and jQuery. I know that an SPA might be better sometimes, but since it will take me 10 days to learn a new framework (say 30-90 to learn it well), it's never the simplest solution _from my perspective_. But, it might be fine to stick to my old ways if the client just wants speed, or if I know I'll be around for a while, or if I'm confident any newbie can come in and quickly understand/overhaul my work.
I think it's also just ok to admit to ourselves that, even if it's not ideal for a client, eventually we want to work in a way that's mentally comfortable and familiar. You want some adventures to spice things up now and then, but too much too fast is overwhelming. Wanting to work with a familiar stack seems comparable to wanting your usual snacks, noise level, view, temperature, etc. As we become less desperate for salary, or as priorities change, it ideally becomes easier to say no to jobs/clients that can't accept a certain stack.
Now, ~5k warheads is certainly enough to hit the top 10 cities in every country, which might cause chaos that we can't recover from, but I doubt they would be distributed that way.
One person seems to have narrowed the violation down to a zipfile version of the docs available on the site.
I can imagine an automated warning system like this providing some value to web users as a whole, though the process doesn't seem great to me if such tech-savvy people are still scratching their heads after 2 days.
So, that's probably not everyone's situation or experience, but it just reiterated that having control and simplicity is nice. Simplicity for some might be not having to clean, but for others it might mean not having to depend on someone else. I can't be my own Verizon or Uber of course, but some things I'm in a good position to provide for myself...
It's a very good article, though in the context of deciding how many variables should be in a model of some complex phenomenon, this example is a little tougher to wrap your head around. It's not quite a predictive model, but there were some variables left out. A naive model I suppose is "this data is generated by infallible respondents", whereas a better model would incorporate that error rate. There isn't as much of a question about which pieces of information are relevant, though, like you might encounter when trying to predict future drug use from household income, race, age, number of books read as a child, number of pets, and so on.
For my workouts, which are fairly simple (and usually involve body weight, a simplifying assumption), a shell script to log the data and a python script to analyze the data works great. When I do 20 pushups, I say "log_exercise pushups 20", with autocomplete and all. It just adds a row to a 3 column file with the epoch timestamp, exercise name, and quantity. With that log, it's very easy to analyze my pushup/chinup/plank/running activity over time. I generally limit my analysis to things like "am I able to do more of xyz than a month ago?" or "how many pushups have I done on average over the past 6 months?" (seeing "avg 2 pushups a day over the past 60 days" gets me embarrassed!).
As for web/mobile, I just put my workout in Google Keep on my phone (notes like "10 chinups, 2 miles running, 6 more chinups...") and just enter it in when I get back. For me, this pain is outweighed by having complete control in other areas.
I initially thought "oh, this must be a solved problem", so I would look for apps. Over time I realized that a lot of features just weren't necessary for me. I found that graphs of my pushups over time didn't give me additional information. I could see from a table whether or not I was doing a lot or a little. Syncing across devices or seeing it on the go wasn't important. Sharing with my friends wasn't important. Nor was seeing percent increases or goal setting. The biggest benefit was from going from keeping no records to consistently keeping records, and adding a tiny bit of structure.
The author is very passionate about all this - and I think most people would find the intensity off-putting. He manages to fill ~800 pages. I am not sure I agree with everything. While it resonated strongly, I'm also not that bummed out about the ability to launch a website from scratch in 5 minutes. But, in much the same way I feel about the writing of Nassim Taleb, despite having many statements that are incendiary and possibly wrong, it approaches a topic from an angle that you probably haven't been getting elsewhere.
I immediately thought of this book when I read the question because I've never met anyone who has read it or who has any interest in reading it after hearing about it.
Even developers with good interpersonal skills or business sense are discouraged from participating in more producty discussion. They may be encouraged by way of somebody taking them aside early in their career and saying "Hey kid, you really _get it_. You're not like the rest of these nerds. How about you start calling shots on what to build and switch to a product role?" But they'll rarely be encouraged to stay as technical while simply getting listened to more by management. Management may argue that after 2 or 3 years of getting one's hands dirty, you understand programming as well as you need to, and that for the rest of your career, persuasion trumps skill acquisition. It's somewhat taboo to cultivate both skill sets at the same time. So, I think even if you got more "people people" to study CS/whatever, a reverence for specialization will silence a lot of voices.