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kr0bat

248 karma · joined February 23, 2022

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kr0bat··on Military sexual assaults far exceed DoD estimates, new report finds
So that's 74,000 assaults against a population of 1,328,000[1]. So about 5.57% of the armed forces were assaulted sexually in one year.

But the United States as a whole had a reported ≈325k[2] sexual assaults in 2021. That's 0.09% of the population.

Are you really over 60 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in the military than in the general public? And are over a fifth of sexual assaults in America happening between military personnel? Somebody please tell me what I'm missing because I must be making a serious logical mistake.

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11994

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/642458/rape-and-sexual-a...

kr0bat··on 23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount
The 10 foot ceilings are too low for the modern renter's sensibilities, apparently.
kr0bat··on Partisan bot-like accounts continue to amplify divisive content on X
The picture painted was accurate and relevant

> Self-described ‘news’ accounts rapidly spread falsehoods around the perpetrator. One viral narrative falsely named him as “Ali al-Shakati”, a Muslim migrant new to the UK. This was later debunked by the police. Nonetheless, false claims surrounding the attack quickly garnered millions of views online, galvanised by anti-Muslim and anti-migrant activists and promoted by platforms’ recommender systems.

kr0bat··on The curious case of the missing period
Yep, I didn't add enough newlines. Fixed
kr0bat··on The curious case of the missing period
As mentioned, the SMTP protocol only allows for 1000 bytes of data per line. The author also mentions that they are sending html emails, which ignore line breaks.

So a message intended to be sent by an SMTP client:

DATA

Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27.00

Was erroneously formated into:

DATA

Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27

.00

.

The period after 27 will be removed. And this is how the html will be rendered.

Hello customer,

[Lots of text] 2700

kr0bat··on How I got scammed out of $50k
I consider myself technically inclined, yet up until today I didn't realize numbers COULD be spoofed

One day a few months ago I woke up to a missed call from a verified number. I had been in a car crash the night before, and I was worried I missed a call from the driver's insurance company.

I called them back, and I was told that I was talking to a civil engineering firm; the receptionist was polite, but she sounded even more confused than I was. I had googled the number while I was on the phone, and yup, it belonged to a civie firm.

At the time I just assumed some engineer fat fingered my number by mistake, but I guess I missed a call from "Amazon" or "your insurance company" or some other nonsense. Funnily enough an insurance scam might have gotten me in the state I was in.

kr0bat··on How I got scammed out of $50k
Some people lack an ear for accents, especially if they're subtle. Personally, my ear is so bad that I get Brazilian accents mixed with Eastern European accents; and west African accents mixed with Carribean accents.
kr0bat··on Silicon Valley Has a Harvard Problem
I stopped reading when he criticized Google's "Don't be evil" motto as a corporate say-nothing. Yes it's a truism, but I'd argue that it was chosen because software engineers value simplicity and conciseness.
kr0bat··on Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers
Hold on, I've heard of the replication crisis - though I don't know the scale - but are you saying that over 50% of "hard science" is bunk? I find that hard to swallow.
kr0bat··on Why can't today's young adults leave the nest? Blame high housing costs
The paper was very careful to describe the mass increase of Cuban immigrants as "immigration shock", not just immigration. I don't think the conclusions of this paper can say any one thing about the effects of our (I'm assuming you're American as well) standard levels of immigration. Also..

  These results suggest that immigration shocks do have implications for the fertility decisions and outcomes of natives, though these tend only to be temporary and short-lived. There therefore appear to be little long-term or sustained consequences for the fertility of natives from governments pursuing labour augmenting strategies through more open immigration policies.
From the conclusion. I only really skimmed the abstract and the conclusion, please tell me if I'm missing something.
kr0bat··on TikTok is making users give their iPhone passwords for unclear reasons
There's still no way for TikTok, or any app, to determine your password hash, so even if they test for validity (by conforming to OS pin restrictions), how would they test for veracity (being given the user's ACTUAL) passcode.
kr0bat··on TikTok is making users give their iPhone passwords for unclear reasons
I wish the article put more emphasis onto the facg that TikTok was requesting the password through a system prompt. They don't have anyone's passwords, just a conformation from the device that the correct password was inputted. This is such a nothingburger.

All that aside...is this an nypost article referencing a Dextero article referencing an (unsourced) reddit comment?

kr0bat··on Web Development History – Internet history for the technically curious
I'd love to read the writeup if you find it.

You might be thinking of Microsoft's Raymond Chen? I'd be surprised if he's written about the web in depth

kr0bat··on Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
How you could have enough control over the machine to reroute the error log to (what I assume was) a Pastebin api, while also lacking access to any of the files on the machine? In my mind you'd be required to ssh into the machine to upload, and if you're ssh'd in, why not just cat the log?
kr0bat··on Google OAuth is broken (sort of)
It sounds like the issue is that these service providers are obeying Google's aliasing rules, but also ignoring the fact that you shouldn't be using email as a primary identifier [1]? It's funny, if they had adhered to the spec more they'd be fine; but if they adheredess and treated alias' as distinct emails, these platforms would at least be more secure.

[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/openid-connect/openid...

kr0bat··on U.S. students' math scores plunge in global education assessment
Really, this sounds believable. How often does the average programmer use anything beyond arithmetic? I'm only a few years out of school, but I'm re-learning calculus since I haven't touched it once since college.
kr0bat··on Mathematics, reading skills in unprecedented decline in teenagers – OECD survey
Thank for for linking. This confirms that yes...

    The OECD said the decline was not inevitable, pointing to Singapore, where students scored the highest in maths, reading and science, with results that suggested they were on average three to five years ahead of their OECD peers.

    After Singapore, Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea also outperformed in maths and science, where Estonia and Canada also scored well.
Reuters DID conflate "doing better" with "not doing worse". I believe OECD pointed to Singapore because their scores were high AND INCREASING.

A quick scan of I.5.1 shows Macau, Canada, Hong Kong, and Estonia with worse scores compared to 2018. Singapore and Japan's scores went up. A less lazy reader can use the OECD database to find numbers for the other listed countries.

kr0bat··on Android 14 – Detect when users take device screenshots
Title editorialized ever so slightly for clarity.

For those wondering how applications detected screenshots in the past.

    Previously, apps were able to detect when a screenshot had been taken by listening for file changes while they were in the foreground, but this was less than ideal.
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-14-screenshot-detected...
kr0bat··on A gentle introduction to two's complement

  To find the two’s complement of 5, we invert all the bits (changing 0s to 1s and 1s to 0s) and then add one to the result.
I am embarrassed by the fact that I wasn't aware of this. I always interpreted the two's complement as the difference between the all the numbers before the high bit, minus the high bit. Aka 10000000 – 01111011 = 0101
kr0bat··on What the Hell Happened to Effective Altruism

  But the evidence was there. Personal attacks against Nick Bostrum, Robin Hanson, among other leadings figures, not for their positions on the most important issues, or even for being wrong, but for not conforming to the socially desirable position on the current thing, 
Nick Bostrum very clearly states that he believed blacks to be inantely intellectually inferior to the rest of humanity. I didn't realize that this was decidely correct, or even unimportant. Doesn't the belief of a racial hierarchy affect one's ability to decide on most optimal forms and recipients of altruism?

This blogpost just reads as a "go woke go broke" victory lap that has very little new to say about the current state of EA. At the very least I do genuinely appreciate that Chau directly linked to the detractors he discusses (even if the twitter link leads to a deleted post)

kr0bat··on [dead]
The author suggests making cultural changes that will discourage the suppression of socially unacceptable topics, and seemingly believes that the suppression of rational discourse is the violation of a basic human right.

At the same time he doesn't seem to outline any solution to dealing with the suppressing voices in society. "Ultimately, we have to accept the implications of human creativity." But how will this acceptance be achieved? There is no mechanism in place to tear down a stand in the free marketplace of ideas.

kr0bat··on Omegle 2009-2023
God, they're complaining about newposters all the way back in 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just "kids these days"?

Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts

    I don't know why exactly I think a one on one chat system would be different from an imageboard. When one makes a post on an image or discussion board, I think one does take into account that his words are going to be judged by the whole community. Even he isn't worried about preserving some identity, he still identifies with those words and responds to the reactions they get, and I think that ultimately leads to self-censorship and conformity. When there's only one person passing judgment, it doesn't have nearly the same negative impact, and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.
kr0bat··on Technology holy wars are coordination problems (2020)
As someone who wasn't around for the Python 2->3 transition, what made it so painful?
kr0bat··on As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code
https://justine.lol/ape.html

For the uniformed

kr0bat··on No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
Yup, that one paragraph left me scratching my head. In my mind the (very thinly described) image upload functionality should have failed regardless of configuration.

Maybe by "the images simply wouldn't upload." the author meant "did not display", and the file was being uploaded to the data store, was visible when viewed in the data store directly, but would not be displayed in app when requested.

I got the feeling that this is one of those 500-mile email[1] stories, where technical details are omitted for easier storytelling

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708

kr0bat··on Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
Does EA not believe in objectively better recipients?

    MacAskill writes that QALYs can be used to decide which charitable causes to prioritise: faced with a choice between spending $10,000 to save a 20-year-old from blindness or the same amount on antiretroviral therapy for a 30-year-old with Aids – a treatment that will improve their life and extend it by ten years – MacAskill argues it would be better to perform the sight-saving surgery, as the 20-year-old can expect to live another 50 years. He acknowledges that QALYs are an “imperfect”, “contested” measure but sees them as mostly good enough.
kr0bat··on Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
This might be the explanation astralcodexten was discussing [1]. Geoffrey Miller, a commenter, (I'm not involved in EA enough to know if that's a household name) says this

    I've been to about 70 conferences in my academic career, and I'm noticed that the aesthetics, antiquity, and uniqueness of the venue can have a significant effect on the seriousness with which people take ideas and conversations, and the creativity of their thinking. And, of course, it's much easier to attract great talent and busy thinkers to attractive venues. Moreover, I suspect that meeting in a building constructed in 1480 might help promote long-termism and multi-century thinking.
Of course this man didn't buy the castle, so I don't think it's fair to hold a random commenter's thoughts against CEA. I'm not big on cognitive decoupling, but I also find buying a castle for a charity event venue shocking, and I don't think there were enough numbers in this post to soothe me. If renting event venues was too expensive, couldn't they have met virtually?

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...

kr0bat··on Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
The problem with EA isn't a focus on objective METHODS to do good, but with the belief that there are potential recipients of "good" that are objectively better targets than others, and the belief that finding objectively better targets is even achievable.
kr0bat··on Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
I think the QALY criticism grazes the real fundamental problem with EA. You can't really quantify "good" good enough to create a meaningful measure. Being alive is better than being dead (in almost all cases). Being sighted is better than being blind. But is losing an arm objectively worse than losing a leg? Who has it worse, a gay man in a seriously homophobic country or a woman in a severely misogynistic country? Sure, donating money to an animal you find cute may not be the best use of money, objectively. But maybe it's better to be openly subjective, lest we end up codifying our own subjective beliefs.
kr0bat··on Microsoft now demands to know why you won't use Edge when you download Chrome
Out of curiosity I went to open Edge and try to trigger the poll, instead I found the most shocking avenue of product placement I've ever seen. [1]

Yep, Microsoft pushed an update that adds a (completely useless) launch app button to Windows Search results, and that button is being used to promote Edge.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XXi7t45.png

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