jen_h

Even better, the mystery of why a mortgage lender randomly asked me about my employment history from over two decades ago (i.e., working for my Mom!) is now solved! I was like, "How do you know I worked for my Mom in the 90s? And of all the jobs to ask about, why this?" Turns out only three employers show up over multiple decades of employment.

Happy to see that the payroll processor I used for awhile for our personal companies until I started doing it myself didn't share our data, but am now really worried about future control of it.

I highly recommend hitting up a Vintage Computer Festival if you've got the opportunity (http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/). Not only did Kernighan and Thompson speak, but also Joe Decuir of Atari & Amiga fame.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007319011-Ed...

https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/

But if you don't believe anonymity is an important component for security, you probably think hashes uploaded and deleted are perfectly secure, too, so we're probably not going to come to any agreement here.

Personally, I do wish they'd decouple from phone numbers and allow users an option not to transmit hashes for their entire contact list. I don't think these are unreasonable features for a messenger that's supposed to be designed for privacy and activism.

I actually check Spam daily now, after finding support emails whose logs got snagged in the dragnet & personal stuff — even email from my Dad got shunted to Spam.

I still tip the hat, though, to Google, whose algorithms are wise enough to assiduously stow both the “jump on a call” and “donate to my campaign” emails to spam.

> "'Chemically and culinarily, you should think of them as a wonderful hybrid between an artichoke and an egg, or an avocado and an egg may be a better comparison. Again, you ask somebody 10 years ago, "What do you do with avocados?" and nine out of ten times they're going to say guacamole. Now they're in everything, almost to a point of self-parody. Same thing with uni. They are full of fat and protein, so you can use them as a source of browning. You can incorporate them into a barbecue marinade or a yakitori marinade. You can use their fattiness to enrich doughs; they make some of the best brioche that I've ever tasted. I sweated down urchins with andouille sausage and used their fat to make probably the best dirty rice I've ever made.'"

And I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but uploading entire contact lists should also not be considered a natural feature of a secure mobile messenger.

You're limited to 12 hour stints and you have to keep the window open and network active, but it's enough that I've been able to use it to run neural machine language training (to be fair, I pass model files back and forth, training on EC2 spot instances, too).

I have to believe that a good chunk of Medicare-for-All folks are middle-aged people who see how the over-65s don't worry a whit about how much anything costs, because it's all covered, while younger folks are setting their own broken bones or dying over insulin or going bankrupt due to bike accidents.

Anyway, lesson here is: The +65s vote reliably and politicians allocate benefits accordingly. Dear everyone who is not 65+: please vote.

[1]: https://github.com/jenh/sevenminutevpn

Also, think about where caregivers might have to relocate and how they might alter their futures by spending it caretaking. I have family members who sacrificed a very significant amount of their adult lives taking care of their parents and missed out on their own lives and wrecked their own health doing it (it's hard mental and physical work, and in some cases can be very thankless).

I also know people who gave up everything to take care of their parents and ended up homeless after their deaths.

One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much cheaper it is to order assistive devices -- the very same assistive devices for a quarter of the price -- online vs. the local medical device rental places.

So there's this giant catfish in Japanese mythology, the Namazu. It's captive in the ocean, under a giant keystone held down by the daimyojin Kashima. When Kashima gets tired or distracted, he lets off pressure a little, the Namazu wriggles around to get free and that wriggling sets off earthquakes and subsequently, tsunamis.

After an earthquake, there's always a rebuilding and a redistribution of wealth. And after the Edo earthquake of 1855, woodcut prints depicting the namazu and society (namazu-e), money falling from the sky, businessmen vomiting and defecating money, etc. got super popular. (https://www.illustrationchronicles.com/When-Giant-Catfish-Sh...)

As an aside, I don't know who needs to know this, but we are really lucky right now in that we now have tools that enable pretty much anyone to train a language model and translate with it, not just giant or small companies. It's not necessarily going to be any good, but the tools are all right there for us plebes and it's pretty fun.

I pulled together a tutorial just this weekend walking through doing this on Google Colab (https://sevenminuteserver.com/post/2019-10-17-machine-transl...) and EC2 Spot instances (https://sevenminuteserver.com/post/2019-10-17-machine-transl...) if anyone wants to play around with it.

My main point up there was just that I'm always kind of surprised and honestly have trouble believing it when I hear someone whose career is in network security say they don't trust themselves to secure a VPN server. If a person can tout creds securing an entire organization, a little ephemeral Linux instance that you can blow away and rebuild at will should be cake.

When you use a VPN service, though, you really don’t have any real insight into what’s going on on their servers. Run your own and you can be sure you’re running the most recent, audited version of OpenVPN on an updated operating system.

Developers (on Alexa, at least) can optionally do this now with SSML, but making it a requirement would be an audio cue to users that the “actor” has changed — without adding any delay to the interaction.

You can't really blame NordVPN for that (I mean, the Netherlands aren't even a Nordic country, my brain is just broken), but it's a data point.