4,993 karma · joined July 22, 2010
I think it’s safe to assume that the “actors” that created the “surveillance state” weren’t acting from some profound philosophy of mass control but rather some more immediate KPIs be it “increased user engagement” or “reduction of terror threats” that seemed important at the time.
In other words we stumbled into this mess and now we need to figure out how to stumble out again.
> A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it
I think comfortable is the wrong word here. Perhaps "people who have no choice but accept it" is more accurate.
If you do the math, it's basically;
1. is this issue important enough to your daily life to want to make sacrifices to fight it 2. how would I effectively fight it and not just waste effort?
And a significant minority DO care - I've commented before here like the impact on sales of a secure messaging app when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587
It's always been a mystery to me why Microsoft never addressed this - they could have prevented a whole host of competitors in the "big data" space from ever existing if they'd found a way of abstracting this limit away from end users.
I’m not up on what’s been happening in Haiti but this one little paragraph at the end here tells the whole story… the same playbook that’s been used again and again.
Through lens of (social) media and through our own cognitive biases the idea of anything being done “in the open” seems more like self delusion.
I have a slightly different view of ego though. For me ego is a tool that no doubt had some evolutionary purpose. When my "ego is pumped" I tend to be highly active, motivated, confident and able to solve problems (or hunt for food in evolutionary terms) but once those problems are solved, the ego can be discarded for a time.
From doing stand-up comedy, when you "bomb" (the audience doesn't laugh) it's extremely traumatic for the ego. I look at it now that afterwards I need to "reboot my ego" and in doing so, some ideas or things that I saw as part of my identity get discarded in the process. At this point, having bombed quite a few times, it feels like an accelerated learning process and it becomes less traumatic the less invested I am in my identity.
Meanwhile - connected to the article - what's interesting to me is I think most people have a "tell" (poker term) when they are over-invested in some identity or idea, and that's when they say "I believe X" or "I believe Y". In my experience that's an indicator that they have accepted some conclusion or point of view, without having examined all the evidence that makes the conclusion valid. I think we'd do better with encouraging people to say "I don't know" more often than "I believe" e.g. "What happens after we die?" ... "I don't know" seems better than "I believe we go to Heaven"
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.
More explanation of that here... https://youtu.be/jMr-fGmRGco?t=246
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
To me it seems like the right thing for Fauci to have done at the time was draw attention to the potential conflict of interest but that admission only became public last month - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu...
Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
There is this study here - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222408325_The_effec...
"A more detailed examination of the evidence suggests that pair programming is faster than solo programming when programming task complexity is low and yields code solutions of higher quality when task complexity is high."
There are links to a few more here - https://tuple.app/pair-programming-guide/scientific-research... - none of it looks particularly compelling.
And I'm not "against" pair programming. It's just sad to see "cargo cult" adoption of practices.
There's a great interview with Alan Moore (Watchmen, Walking Dead and much more) on YouTube that is highly underrated - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBc71ROdGxU - the whole thing is great but at 4m32s he puts it beautifully...
"We tend to think, at this juncture of the 21st century, that there are only two possibilities regarding the future. One is the future will be exactly the same as today, only with smaller radios and smaller cars. So if the future is going to be the same as today, why bother preparing for it? The other alternative is there isn't a future. That is all ends in some kind of massive environmental collapse or a series of mushroom clouds. In which case why bother preparing for the future, if there isn't going to be one? Neither of these mindsets are actually doing anything to prepare us for the world in which we will almost certainly be living. Or which our descendants will almost certainly be living in. If you don't imagine a future, there's a fair chance you're not going to have one."
Elon's whole argument for Mars is based on the belief we don't have a future on Earth and that some kind of Dark Age is coming - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk...
"If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages"
Personally think we should regard it with the same level skepticism we have for door-to-door salesmen. It's a great pitch to sell SpaceX...
I'd also add two subsets of the over-engineers. One subset are those that create frameworks to solve problems vs. address the problem directly. The other are those that introduce (language / datastore / build tool / etc.)-of-the-week to a codebase in an ad-hoc manner. And I'll admit, I've been both of those once upon a time...
For example your social network may be largely people you work with - if you stop working, you lose those connections. And lockdown has shown what impact social isolation can have.
> Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse.
Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive.
But a related story from someone that was able to retire early thanks to Bitcoin - https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lz4x37/ive_...
> my advice is that you need to get prepared to deal with boredom. We grow up with our parents telling us to go to school, have a job, a car, a house and that this is life. But when you suddenly have the car, the house and everything else, what's left? Do something for yourself and have this in mind.
Most of the planet works for money because they have to. That means the majority of their time is consumed by earning money. Once you take away that imperative, you suddenly have a lot more time on your hands. That in turn effectively triggers an existential crisis - what do with all this extra time? Some people will be able to turn into taking their lives in a new direction but others are going address with drugs and alcohol.
Edit: also super impressed by how fast the “shadow layers” are calculated. I’m in Switzerland and people here will love this ... knowing exactly when you’ll get sun in a valley is super useful. This might be something you could sell to people like search.ch - they could combine with the weather at meteo.search.ch - if you want an introduction say the word
> I need an app that sends me a notification 90 seconds before the sun reaches the exact position in the sky where it reflects off my neighbor's windows and blinds me.
What’s clear is these days the popular parts of Reddit are very much “controlled discourse” which largely follow the same narratives as mainstream media. I think the tipping point was Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, where Reddit showed it could have a significant impact on voting. After that it slowly merged with mainstream media Opinion.
What enabled some of that could well have been the vetting (or lack of) of admins / employees who in turn have some ability to influence who the moderates big subreddits.
That said my feeling is Node gives you multiple pump action shotguns you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with. For example https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/dont-block-the-event-loop/
> One common way to block the Event Loop disastrously is by using a "vulnerable" regular expression.
If you're leading an engineering team, just this should be giving you panic attacks every time you hire someone new into the team.
What makes this worse is it's very hard to detect problems at scale, if you missed it in code reviews. If you have one "vulnerable regex" in your event loop that only exposes itself on certain request inputs, it means that only every now and again - when given "bad input" - it's going to block the event loop.
But then how to you detect issue? It's likely going to manifest itself first in _other_ requests that got blocked taking an excessively long time to respond.
From an operational point of view, that's a nightmare scenario. Every now and again you're going to see slow requests in your logs but when you dig into it you find no problems. And that's going to make you very uncertain on how you're doing when it comes to scaling up; instead of a gradual slow down across all requests, you're going to see erratic spikes and jams.
...which actually occurs to me it's not unlike how traffic jams occur - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azmcu1cn2vg - https://traffic-simulation.de/