kmooney

I think this anecdote says more about NNT than it does about Sontag. He claims to have tried to "forget" this incident but has held on to it for 15 long years to write about it in a Medium post.

Why does he feel the need to point out that Sontag's outraged assistant was "female?" That's odd.

Typically obituaries leave out the bits about "rapaciousness," so I am quite surprised that NNT "accidentally" found her obituary and read about the cost of her mansion in it. That seems unlikely to be true. I've reviewed the New York Times obituary of Sontag, and though it does contain claims of "unoriginality," "style over substance," and "controversy," it does not happen to contain the cost of her mansion. Perhaps N.N. Taleb accidentally read a different obituary than this one.

He claims to have waited so as to not "speak ill of the departed." But fifteen years after her death, Sontag remains dead. And there's little hope for her recovery.

NNT's account of this incident also elides whatever the buffoonish specifics of his side of the conversation might have been. Even the most precious and fragile of us aren't absolutely scandalized by merely discovering that a person makes their money from trading.

A fun aside: this commenter also leaves out NNT's later (in the linked article) glowing description of Dinesh D'Souza's trolling some college kids with a perpetually false and long discredited "us-vs-them" dichotomy.

I confess that the only work I've read from NNT (barring the linked article, a few visits to his increasingly timecube-esque website, and the occasional dip into his Twitter stream of consciousness) is "Black Swan," but when I did I was quite surprised to discover that nearly half the the book seemed to be dedicated to his dwelling on perceived past slights and settling scores with institutions and people that he thinks treated him badly.

Finally, to address the point of the linked Medium post: one is absolutely permitted to oppose an unjust system even if one is a beneficiary of it. Without dissenting voices, nothing will ever change for the better. NNT should be ashamed of himself for speaking ill of the dead. But more than that, he should be ashamed to have built the second act of his career as a "public intellectual" by policing who is allowed to have an opinion and what they are supposed to have an opinion about. Everything is connected and we all have "skin in the game."

Please enjoy the original article! I quite enjoyed it and I hope that it makes some people happy.

> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.

Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.

If you are making system calls–without too much abstraction–you are doing systems programming.

...and now it's gone from the front page. Wouldn't want to burst that filter-bubble!

Kodak has done a lot of research in the last 20 years to create digital watermarks that resist manipulation.

So they wouldn't necessarily naively hash an image file, but they could possibly create a hash from features that are extracted from the image and remain consistent even after manipulation or transformation.

Or they could hash the original bits in the file naively then insert that hash into the original image as a digital watermark that would survive manipulation of the image.

I remember the first time I played Super Mario Bros on an NES. It was like the first time I used an iPhone. It was immediately obvious that everyone else had been doing it wrong all along.