mikedilger

The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

I don't think this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

My friend and ex-neighbor Tim has worked in a blue collar machine operator near-minimum-wage job his entire life. But he's frugal as hell, never buys new things, considers coffee a waste of money. At 55 he has two houses and upwards of a million in cash and investments. It not at all uncommon.

Spending scolds don't just come out and tell people to not buy new cars or lattes. It's almost always in response to a complaint by someone that they are having trouble making ends meet. The advice is spurned because they aren't atually trying to solve a near-term budgeting problem, they really are just expressing jealousy of richer people, and in particular jealousy of their richer lifestyle. As such, any advice suggesting they adjust down their own lifestyle (which is easier than trying to earn more, as it is more fully under your own control) is to them offensive and is going in the wrong direction. I take this from two data points in my personal dealings, which is a small dataset, but considering I've never had anybody actually need and use budgeting advice I suspect it's broadly true.

TO ADD: I'm not saying nobody has a budgeting problem, I'm saying that those who don't take seriously the advice to curtail spending probably have more of a jealousy problem than a budgeting problem.

From the article in brackets to perserve their quoting: [CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.]

"They found nothing" is not other words for what the article quoted. Maybe the found something that was not criminal, suspicious or illegal, but still more interesting than stars and airplaines, and they aren't telling.

I think the author should be more explicit in their definitions.

1. On one end of the spectrum, people may think and act without tying words to concepts at all.

2. Then, they may think by forming words in sentences, but not consider it "talking to themselves" or consider themselves as "hearing" a voice in their head.

3. Next, one may say words and sentences to themselves and seem to hear them, but their audatory nerves are not involved in any way.

4. Finally, there may be people who actually "hear" the voice, but somehow know that it isn't coming in through their ears.

I would be in camp 3 whenever I am "thinking" but in camp 1 whenever I am just doing something I've done before and don't need to think about it. I talk to myself out loud, and to my dog, and sing and crack jokes when nobody is listening.

People in camp 4 who also don't associate the voice as coming from themself are generally considered mentally ill. Sometimes on the edge of wake and sleep you might hear a voice, not your own, clearly aurally, but that's not too unusual of a hallucination to have.

I've heard that in the early 20th century, anyone in camp 3 or 4 was considered insane, perhaps even camp 2 was unusual, and that normal people were in camp 1, and anybody who talked to themselves out loud was definitely insane. And I suspect that television and a lack of long boring quiet work changed how we think. And I suspect being in camp 3 or 4 is associated with anxiety and depression, but also with higher intelligence. I have no data to back up any of these suspicions.

Oh, and Buddhist style meditation drops you back into Camp 1.

I had an interviewee who was answering questions quite well but kind of shrugging me off when I dug deeper. Then I asked a question I hadn't asked before and he actually complained that the question wasn't fair because he didn't get a chance to study for that question. I recommended against. The hiring manager, to my suprise, let him go "study" and come back for more questions. The whole team being on to this, we asked very different questions the second time around and he failed miserably. We all recommended against. Again to my suprise, the hiring manager decided he liked him and hired him. After a re-org and under a new manager, it took about six months IIRC to legally get rid of the guy. Nice guy - wrong fit.

I can't see this post because my pi-hole server blocks twitter [1]. But I bet it's just grand.

[1] Actually, not just to be cheeky.

Bitwarden is also very good

I'm unconvinced by their method to assess whether temperatures truly decreased. Why wouldn't a methodological error not also apply to the veterans dataset? E.g. all thermometers of an era reading slightly hot (rather than them all being less accurate in any direction)

Scientific and social progress should continue with the near certainties we already have -- I think we are in agreement here. So long as we don't cancel contrarian scientists. We need to accept their long-shot research and be grateful for it, because we cannot predict ahead of time which one of them will turn out to be correct, as long as they couch their statements when they present them publicly. As a defender of free speech, I think that if some people want to believe in the long shots, they are making that ill-advised decision for themselves. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, they shouldn't have that choice as the effect is upon all of us. If a voting majority choose to believe the ill-advised long shot research then something is definitely broken, but it's not the existence of long-shot research. I won't pretend to know what that 'something' is.

But the Internet is mostly pull not push. If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. I think FOMO has led people to make poor decisions, driving people to Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently they find themselves overwhelmed with noise. It can be somewhat addictive too since it's cheap excitement and satisfaction; but that also erodes your willpower to do actual work. I recommend disconnecting.

If you eat that "poison" then quitting it will drop your weight. But some people don't eat that "poison" and yet they still carry a lot of body fat. So it is good general advice but insufficient for people with a genetic predisposition to obesity. I for one eat mostly salad, never drink sodas and don't really like sweet things, usually skip breakfast, hunt rabbits most days on steep terrain (for exercise and dogfood)... and yet I sit at 220lbs.

Just adding another datapoint: With no particular dieting, I tend to hover around 95kg. I was able to get down to 80kg with smart dieting. But I was miserable at that weight.. I couldn't concentrate when programming, my brain kept interrupting me with hunger signals. I put the weight back on; I'd rather not live the rest of my life in hunger-misery. 20 years later and I'm still fine with that decision. I get plenty of exercise and eat lots of vegetables and take other steps to be healthy, but significant sustained weight loss with it's side effects is no longer desirable... until medicine comes up with a pill that removes the hunger itself w/o nasty side effects.

ZFS functionality dwarfs the minor issues Linus has with it in my opinion. I find it to be well maintained, and not just bug fixes but new features keep being added as well. If I couldn't use ZFS on linux anymore, I wouldn't hesitate to setup another system just so I could keep using ZFS.

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha.

Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

I don't dispute any of that. I only wanted to head off a possible misconception that the headline might have lead people to believe that losing "one quarter" was going to be hard to recover from. It's definitely bad, but also easy and quick to recover from.

One-quarter doesn't sound like much to me as a sheep farmer. Our herds double-to-triple every year, and then get cut way back again as we turn the lambs into meat. Pigs have even more offspring: 5-6 piglets per litter, 1.5 litters per year, and can have their first litter at 8 months. "One-quarter of the pigs" should be replacable in less than a year, a minor temporary supply shortage for the meat market.

EDIT: I don't disupte any of the facts of the article, and my use of the world "minor" is from the presumption that people might infer that this is a long-term problem, rather than an acute and quickly rectifiable one which seems "minor" in comparison to a long-term one.

I didn't follow the story at the time but I was under the impression that the Comet Pizza theory and the Epstein theory were the same theory. If the Comet Pizza / Hillary Clinton / Satanic baby eating stories did not mention Jeffrey Epstein than I'm sorry that I got them confused. I'd have to research deeper to sort that out; memory works in weird ways as it's partially reconstructed from fragments.

I'm glad they are suggesting something short of censorship.

I've always supported the idea of letting people choose what they want to see. If moderators could tag posts with tags like 'spam', 'nsfw', 'graphicviolence', 'racistagainstraceX', etc... and if people could then choose what kinds of posts they want to see... and if anyone could be a moderator... and if people could then subscribe to only the moderators they trust... problem solved.

I just can't figure out how to make such a system scale. I've tried a few architectures but I'm still looking for the breakthrough to make it scale.

The problem today is if you don't like Twitter moderators you go to Mastodon or to Gab, and the community fractures into bubbles, and that drives people further apart. I think fixing moderation is going to be the next big thing.

Yes, you should always try to disprove your beliefs rather than to confirm them if you want to know if they are true.

I've researched the claims of many "mainstream" news articles and found almost zero falsehoods which would stand up in a court of law (courts are very lax and consider many statements to be matters of opinion that I would consider to be matters of fact); however, I've found pretty much every article, most sentences have excessive manipulative framing that taints or spins a story, leading the reader towards beliefs which are very often untrue, unproven, or judgemental (normative). I noticed this as a teenager in the 1980s and deliberately tried to 'unspin' stories, but gave up after realizing how much work that was going to be. This isn't something that happened in the last four years... at least not for right-leaning people. Maybe it's a new idea to some left-leaning people (other than Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman).

As for "non-mainstream" most of them are much worse, often containing actual provable falsehoods. But some of them do seem to be more accurate and less manipulative. I have to say "seem" because the ones I respect the most have the same biases that I do, so I can't see the mistakes as clearly.

Disinformation is widespread. Even this article contains some.

What the authors should have said about the "pedo ring" theory was not that it was "fake news" and "debunked" but that major portions of it were "fake news" and "debunked." Comet Pizza having a basement was clearly debunked. Bots being involved has shown much of it to be untrustworthy. Yet some of it has some support: Several claims about Jeffrey Epstein came back up and he was re-arrested and famously committed suicide; There actually was a child pedo ring, with at least Jeffrey Epstein involved; Bill Clinton flew in Epstein's plane and was reported to have been on Epstein's island by Virginia Roberts, a victim.

I don't think it's smart to take an absolute one-sided approach to this story. The story is complex and you have to hold some of it as ambiguous and be comfortable with that.

IMHO the Atlantic should wait for peer review before scaring everybody with sensational fears.

EDIT: having read further down I see this article isn't about just the one paper - maybe my comments need peer review.

Yes, an earlier version of my comment made a distinction between BIOS vs microcode, but I realized it wasn't relevant and edited it. Apparently my edit and your comment experienced a race condition.

This was a good article. Bits of entropy are not lost as the CSPRNG spits out bits 1:1. Nobody thinks that a 64 bit key is compromised after a CSPRNG outputs 64 bits.

However RDRAND should not be trusted because we know for certain that motherboard BIOSes have the capability to force the output of RDRAND to -1 every time it is called. Hardware vendors have demonstrated this to us as a "bug" multiple times, but I consider it a "wink". They have fixed it with BIOS patches. The fact that this is patchable at all indicates RDRAND is not secure. The BIOS can control this behavior; therefore it is IMHO very highly suspect and not worthy of trust. There is no legitimate reason why a ring oscilator circuit with it's whitening/etc should ever output a predictable sequence of any kind.

I can't stand excel. It thinks it knows what I mean and actually edits my data destructively, mistakenly, especially when I enter dates in day/month/year format. If you just import a CSV and then export it directly, it mangles the data. I will not tolerate such behavior.

If you have a column of phone numbers with leading zeroes, coming in from a csv, it decides it's a number and drops the leading zero, which breaks the phone number.

I don't share the experience of this author. I don't often encounter trolls. What I encounter instead is intense differences of opinion, difficult to reconcile, and a lack of respect and manners not because the people at the keyboards are trolls, but because of the psychology of arguing anonymously with an unknown and imagined "enemy".

I don't believe "traditional gatekeepers" is a good solution to the intensity and the chaos.. I think the right solution is just time. Social norms need time to adjust, on many fronts. We are in a period of upheaval, but as Jimmy Eat World says "it just takes some time, little girl, you're in the middle of the ride, everything, everything will be just fine..."

You cannot judge the web as a group. To say "the web is even more deeply co-opted" you put forth a notion that has no useful meaning. The web is made up of everybody. So you should expect every kind of information, mostly unprofessional, mostly off the cuff and less researched. Some manipulative propaganda. Some conspiracy theories. And you should also expect some brilliant stuff out there as well.

OTOH, you might expect the corporate media to also come from broadly different perspectives. Yet the corporate media output is strangely uniform in their bias, narrative and messaging ("The walls are closing in!... this marks the beginning of the end!") The appearance of Fox news made this blatently obvious, and was an utter shock to the left to see how deep the chasm was between typical right wing thinking and their own thinking. The fact that corporate media is so uniform in their viewpoint (other than fox) raises the hackles of skeptical folk like myself, and has for me been impossible to ignore since the mid 1980s. I'm not calling it a conspiracy, I'm calling it uniform enough that you shouldn't consider a story more likely true just because you heard it from multiple corporate media sources. For one: they cheat off of each other.

You don't have to look far to see how the news media is co-opted by political agenda. NYT Dean Baquet was caught on tape instructing his journalism team that for the next period, stories were all to be about racism and how Trump is responsible for racism. Slate broke that story. The next day I can't remember the exact headline but I think it was on budget cuts or something and they managed to blame it on Racism and the racism they blamed on Trump. It was laugh out loud funny -- how could budget cuts be due to racism? It was very sad.

On any given day, in any newspaper, I can point out the manipulative nation-damaging bias clear as day.

ObExample: Today, New York Times: "How a Divided Left is Losing the Battle on Abortion." This story fails to mention the most important context, context that they have repeatedly failed to mention for so long that most people are unaware of it: Abortion is not a federal issue. The 10th amendment explicitly lays out what the Federal government is allowed to do. The 1973 Roe vs Wade decision was atrocious in that it utterly overstepped the federal government's constitutional bounds. That decision is a null and void opinion of an institution that has no jurisdiction over the matter. Regardless of what you feel about abortion law (personally I think us men should leave it up to the women, but if pressed I'd be happy with a 20 week cutoff), the collapse of the fundemental underpinnings of the United States is a much bigger story, rarely if ever mentioned by corporate media. Instead they evoke images of coat hangers to get you all emotional, frame it as a human "reproductive" right to make you indignant, and use other framing tactics which speak to and draw people into the left's vision.

CLARIFICATION: I randomly picked a story. I can do that with any story, because they are all like that.

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. But the issue in journalism that I hear most often isn't about the quality of writing, it's about the editorial decisions, the choice of what to write about and how to spin it, and the lack of sufficient fact checking and investigation. I think the writing skills are fine. In fact I'd prefer that the writing skills went down a notch: I'd rather have someone just give me a dull list of facts.

I'd happily pay for a newsfeed that had only stories that I found relevant, factual and matter-of-fact rather than vapid, sensational, emotional and/or manipulative. One more story about something Trump tweeted or something about a Kardashian and I swear I'm going to break my TV. It also really bothers me that stories I hear about through back channels (overseas media, youtube live videos, government websites) are entirely ignored by most media outlets.. their choices of what is and isn't a story is IMHO way different than what I would be willing to pay for. My money mostly stays in my pocket given the dearth of good choices but there are a few sources out there I've been happy with: AgendaFree TV, Subverse News, AllSides.com. Public news radio has also been very good, and WSJ, Reuters and AP seem to be the most sufferable of the mainstream.

> It's not that their particular accusations are necessarily wrong.