saint_abroad

2 months later we have the "Spectre" - an aperiodic monotile (without reflections): https://aperiodical.com/2023/05/now-thats-what-i-call-an-ape...

Edit - a visual explanation of this journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfVwelta1fE

> Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons.

Put another way, free markets produce 67% more than required. When it comes to food, most populations that eat prefer a market that favors the buyer.

> There are any number of tools that will generate me a pretty and useful database schema diagram if I point them at a relational database.

I'd even go so far as to design database schema with these ER diagram tools in mind: if the automatic diagram is messy then that's more-often-than-not a code-smell in need of refactoring (before being hit with production data).

> his companies were earning about $800,000 a day selling diet supplements, gun paraphernalia and survivalist equipment.

It's almost as if Jones' show is a binary classification filter for chumps https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

Sound decreases by 6dB for every doubling of distance: https://www.airbornedrones.co/drone-noise-levels/

So a typical 80db commercial drone flying at 300m (CAA minimum) would be 50db at ground level (closest point), or about a loud conversation (but less than quiet road traffic).

Why is the pubkey "hash" sent to the server as a query, rather than staying client-side as a fragment?

Why does "Regenerate Private Key" not actually regenerate private key?

Why is the pubkey obfuscated by encrypting with "123NSA"?

How do I know the 624-byte pubkey "hash" doesn't contain the 32-byte private key?

How do I know the server isn't secretly harvesting IP addresses, associating them with pubkeys, and crawling referrer URLs for messages?

I'd corrupt the quote slightly to factor informational effects of propaganda: "a wealth of [conflicting] information creates [an apathy] of attention and a need to [withdraw] that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

In this way, information sources can destroy attention rather than foster efficient allocation (which is hard work).

So the only hangover from bad parties is that the party ends?

The biggest, baddest parties will always draw the popular crowd, and the same DJs will know better when to quietly slip out the back door with bags full.

How does a well-regulated party compete against that without calling for more regulation?

> Life is filled with risk. Accept them or don't.

Life is also filled with negligence. Companies (and people) have a duty of care to minimise risk or damage to others.

> Hardware is quite cheap.

Enterprise has embraced a cloud-first stragegy.

Suddenly, throwing hardware at a problem becomes throwing cash at the cloud.

Linux keeps track of "credit" for entrophy pool sources.

Anyone can write to /dev/random - this mixes data into the entrophy pool but it won't be "credited" as securely increasing /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail . https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Entropy

Similarly, systemd-boot can seed from disk but will not "credit" entrophy. https://systemd.io/RANDOM_SEEDS/

If the point of /dev/random is to provide crytographically secure random numbers, then some level of paranoia is needed for determining which sources are "credited" for initializing the pool. https://lwn.net/Articles/760121/

> Creating more money steals value from everyone who has traded their work for money, and creating less of it adds value.

Conversely, creating more debt (as is with QE) adds value to everyone who has borrowed to invest. At some point though (usually through bankrupcy) this becomes inflationary.

It is inflation that steals value from producers who trade work for money: remedied only by demanding more money this is a vicious cycle.

> Persistent inflation generally happens when an economy runs out of people.

While there is a short run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, it has not been observed in the long run. The Phillips curve was contradicted the 1970's and flatlined in the 2010's.

Persistent inflation happens when central banks are no longer trusted to manage M2.

> But they'll probably check some box for some security audit so they're used.

A WAF is useful for when a zero-day is found for that legacy application you just can't get patches for anymore because the team has "moved on".

The "Y2K bug" cost an estimated US$300 billion in remedial work, having been in production for ~40 years.

Corollary: The most expensive bugs to fix are the oldest bugs.

Deep Neural Indifference - DNNs without emotional weights to guide behaviour and interactions. Leads to impaired empathy and lack of remorse.

Indeed, maybe it's about time advertisers got back to sponsoring quality content their target audience enjoys, rather than direct marketing through the back door on the lowest common denominator.

> Drug tests generally produce false-positive results in 5% to 10% of cases and false negatives in 10% to 15% of cases, new research shows.

Most often, some tests have high sensitivity (no false negatives) whilst others have high specificity (no false positives). (Rarely both.)

So, for example, this is the reason why a positive RT-PCR test has more weight than a negative test because of the test’s high specificity but moderate sensitivity.

Lumping together false positive stats (for low-specificity tests) with false negative stats (for low-sensitivity tests) is misleading at best.

> deploying a technology with obvious potential false positives

"Okay, let's run this through the system."

"What, no match? This system sucks."

"Let's try the competitor's system."

"56% match! We're in business."

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on this point: copyright of a derivative work is distinct (but not inseparable) to the copyright of the original work.

So portions of a derivative work are covered by the original copyright, and other portions may be under a distinct copyright as a derivative work, and several copyrights may apply to a work as a whole.

In the case of a Huffman transform, the transformed work does not meet the "creativity" requirements to be eligible for copyright, over that of the original works.

> Where do you draw the line?

My simplistic view is that the following is legally equivalent:

input -> ai network -> output

input -> huffman coding -> output

So, whilst:

* compressing and decompressing a copyright work is permissible;

* output and weights are deterministic transformations of the inputs;

thus:

* not eligible for copyright (lacking creativity); and

* are derivative works of the inputs;

> There's also usually signage warning you to not do the running-through-the-nest thing.

"No drones, no dogs, and no bikes. Those are the posted rules in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach." https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/after-thousands-o...

Indeed, licences won't stop stupidity but they do help establish penalties.

> 1. Capital Gain taxes are delayed until you actually sell the stock.

By far, the greatest increase in wealth (and inequality) is due to capital gains.

> [...] capital gains are eventually taxed

Normally, one might sell assets before a decline, and at that point gains (and therefore taxes) may be realised.

This is avoided by HODL stock in holding companies (such as Berkshire Hathaway) which can rotate assets without ever incurring capital gains (or indeed income).

> If they want to sit out the development of this new tech it just gives everyone else the advantage.

Au contraire-

China is leapfrogging Western Banking with the DECP "digital yuan", and Bitcoin is competition to state-sanctioned currencies (digital or otherwise). https://www.coindesk.com/china-is-opting-out-of-us-run-finan...

Any news of other Central Banks "contemplating" digital currencies is just their way of suppressing weeds (competition) it can be worked out how to do such without killing the golden goose that is the established banking system.

> there are far cheaper and simpler methods that are also more reliable

Reminds me of crypto-nerd reality:

"His laptop's encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password." https://xkcd.com/538/

> what is the overlap between the set of people who check "just pay it out of checking/savings" (50%) and the set of people who check "charge it and pay off in full at the end of the month" (36%)?

The report plainly states:

> When faced with a hypothetical expense of only $400, 59 percent of adults in 2017 say they could easily cover it, using entirely cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement (referred to, altogether, as "cash or its equivalent") https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-economic-we...

The 4 in 10 comes from the very next paragraph of the report:

> Among the remaining 4 in 10 adults who would have more difficulty covering such an expense... https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-economic-we...

and, from the very next figure in the report, none of the 4 in 10 would use "cash or its equivalent" to cover such an expense. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-economic-we...

From this data, it is reasonable to conclude that "Four in 10 adults would not use 'cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement' to cover such an expense."

Reality is more nuanced than that. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jan/29/howard-sch...

The survey actually states, "Four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money." https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-economic-we...

Nevertheless, that doesn't strike me as having wealth.

> It's not like Americans become poorer due to inflation, because all their wealth is denominated in dollars.

What of the nearly 40% of Americans that can't cover a surprise $400 expense, due to having no wealth?

> The system may be fundamentally broken, but the market is not. This gives me some level of confidence in saying that as of April 2021, I don’t believe that we’re in a housing bubble.

Markets have the remarkable ability to function right until the very moment they crash.

If functioning markets really were to preclude bubbles then, by definition, bubbles would only form in non-functioning (crashed) markets. This is, of course, ridiculous.*

*That is, unless non-functioning markets can somehow be distinguished without the hindsight of a crash.

> They don't really explain what the digital yuan is here.

tldr;

> Direct access to central banks will allow tech-enabled non-banks to offer payment services

> In the most disruptive case, banks lose deposit base, [and] credit creation [is] funded [directly] by central bank

> fintech transformation of the global payments system will bypass the banking system [predominantly in dollars]

Digital currencies, as backed by central banks, are just fiat currencies on a digital ledger.