tslug

I disagree, RMS. For the same reason you've argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy.

What democracy needs isn't privacy. Privacy has always been a false value. Privacy is disappearing- period. No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that.

What democracy needs is respect and tolerance. Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others' wishes as to what is done with that surveillance.

We're living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station. No one on the ISS wants privacy. They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24/7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there's an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning.

What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time. That's respect, which is very different from privacy.

Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years. What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that's what they're going to have to do. After we destroy our ecosystem here, it's what we're going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside.

This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can't make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue. Privacy is asymmetric ignorance. It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.

This treatment is horrific. Solitary confinement is well known to cause severe depression and suicidal ideation.

Sounds like you just came up with a new service. LyftLeg?

Your degree is all about making sure you transform a bunch of effort into a scalar value on a bank's hard drive somewhere which represents your company net revenue. Put another way, your degree teaches you how to better execute an extremely lossy compression algorithm which reduces the complex, multidimensional value of what your company is trying to offer the world down to a scalar and then evaluates your success based on the magnitude of that scalar.

If that sounds inherently depressing, that's because it is. Scalar money commerce is an old hack and a complete wreck that has not kept up with the times, and you just got a degree in optimizing your endeavors to it.

As grim as that might sound in one sense, in another, you're also one of our only hopes for getting past scalar money commerce to a better system.

Another way to think of your degree is as a way to isolate the people inside a company from both the real and the psychological ravages of scalar money commerce, or what I think any entrepreneur would agree is "the roller coaster."

This is an extremely noble pursuit if that is your primary goal, as opposed to focusing on the maximization of that scalar net revenue number. And in fact, I'd argue that if you make this your goal, the key to treating your depression will be to find the right group of people worth protecting.

Let's say you want to copy and paste something from an earlier command line entry and put it in a new command line entry:

  % set -o vi
  % # hit ESC to go into vi cmd mode, hit k a few times until
  % # you get to this old command in your command history:
  % longasscommand -with -params -i super.dont -w ant2 -type in -again
  % # you want just the stuff from -params to ant2, so you
  % # type "f-n" to get the cursor to -params, then "yf2"
  % # to copy everything from there to -w ant2
  % # now you type j a couple times to go back down to
  % # the line you were working on:
  % longasscommand -with -oh jesus -not this.shit -again
  % # now you hit "f-nn" to put the cursor on the -not
  % # type "dW." to get it just so:
  % longasscommand -with -oh jesus -again
  % # now you're ready to paste in your copy after jesus
  % # so you type p, and it's inserted where you left the cursor:
  % longasscommand -with -oh jesus -params -i super.dont -w ant2 -again

You can use screen or tmux to copy and paste from anything on the screen, including using the mouse. It's really out of the purview of bash, tho.

Really handy tools on the Mac are pbpaste which sends any text in the system clipboard to stdout and pbcopy, which you can prolly guess at.

Woo. I wonder if this news could spark a wee run on the banks?

Ya, it's pretty amazing as far as how quickly it gets you from downtown to Santa Monica, and I experienced the same thing. It's already in heavy use.

One complaint, tho, is that the cars don't have decent accommodations for bicyclists, which is really annoying. You basically have to stand/sit w/ your bike all the way.

Also, you still mostly take it in the bum on travel time in the transfers and many bald-spots of decent coverage. I found that to get from Santa Monica to Silverlake, for example, was more convenient on the 704 bus, because there's a spot for your bike, you can sit and work on your computer the whole way, and it's a closer fit for minimizing your talking time/distance, and it's a more direct route.

The train alternative is to find and descend into a red line station, transfer through the greater depths of Union station to the expo line, and then babysit your bicycle all the way to Santa Monica, which is the bulk of the transit time.

Gotta give Santa Monica props tho for the treatment they gave that Santa Monica train station and the surrounding area. I really like it.

Overall, nice stopgap improvement, and when the world improves and human-driven cars are outlawed, it could be paved over and made a thoroughfare that allows only self-driving electric cars to use it, and they could tap into the electric mains for a recharge along the way. :)

Woz nailed it.

Also, nevermind the bands for a moment. I had a digital Timex watch in the 1980s that was more responsive than the iWatch. Form eclipses function now. That wasn't a thing that happened in his day.

Back then, when you got an Apple ][+, you got schematics, port assignments, ROM and DOS listings. It was truly your computer, and no piece of it would ever need be a mystery. It was a computer that made love to developers.

Look at how OSX is developed now. It's getting iOSified. It's not open source. You can find random processes firing up on it like Wifi_Agent or kernel_task that take meaningful chunks of CPU time, but they don't really give you the tools to easily analyze what's going on anymore. The firmware, OS, and hardware have become opaque.

That was all Steve Jobs' influence. That and the iPhone.

I got rid of my phone years ago. It's annoying. I use my computer for communication. I am a developer, but Apple doesn't give much of a hoot about us. The Mac App Store is dead. XCode is really unpleasant. Whatever they're doing in VR now, they're not playing well with others.

I would like to think if Wozniak were running the show, that he just wouldn't have allowed things to head this developer- and computer-hostile direction.

The best approach is to apprentice with someone who knows not to make them. If you can't do that, check in with someone regularly who:

  1. Won't sugar coat feedback,
  2. Has shipped games,
  3. Has a healthy sense of humility, and
  3. Is genuinely concerned about your success.

I really like sitting on advisory boards in this role, but my secret to being good at it is that I regularly ask for feedback from others who are smarter than me at the things I don't get (which is most things).

In the long run, it's like most things. It takes practice.

To the criticism that the game industry is behind the rest of the software industry in software engineering practices, I do believe the rest of the software industry can eat something phallic. :)

I'd like to see them pull off what we have to with about 10X the competition, juggling massive game assets, a fraction of the budget, finance, and exit options, needing to meet a tough frame rate budget (even more exacting now with VR), all issues GPU-ish (when was the last time you wrote a shader, Mr. Website Developer?), and having people with a huge range of technical skills requiring direct access to the source/asset repo.

I'm pretty sure fusion power will have another damaging waste footprint no one is talking about, heat pollution. What do you do with it all? It's like skipping the greenhouse gas that traps the heat and going straight for the heat itself.

Dozens of times on 3.4.3, but I've been playing it for decades.

Not once on 3.6. It's way harder.

Took a brief look. Seems like a cool idea, but it smells like early days.

The example listed on github (population count of 1s in a 64bit register) I thought was a little underwhelming. It took a poorly optimized loop, for some reason came to the conclusion that 0's would be more popular than they would be with a uniform distribution of inputs as you'd get in a compressed stream of bytes, for example (did I miss something there?), so it added some overhead to special case 0 even though 0 only takes one iteration through the loop anyway, and the loop still required up to 64 iterations if you have the high bit set. If doing population counts on compressed data (most of what traverses the internet), odds are you'll generally have at least one bit set in every byte, so it'll usually be doing a lot of iterations.

If the code matters, then on an x86_64 arch, you can definitely burn a few cache lines to use lookup tables for considerably more speed. 256 byte lookup (4 cache lines) to bring the loop down to 8 iterations, 64k (1k cache lines) to bring it down to 4, assuming you're confident you can warm that latter table up in the dcache with enough activity.

I guess it isn't making guesses with lookup tables yet, but that's when I'd get all nipply.

Summary: Capitalism corrupted software engineering, because you get rewarded for getting to market quickly and selling maintenance contracts, not for making quality software, free of defects and security vulnerabilities.

It's cheaper and easier to get food, clothes, and care to people over a fleet of self-driving, shared cars than it is over a hodge-podge network of human-driven, privately-owned cars.

I was one of the developers on the original Doom and got so sick from playing it that it motivated me to debug my code faster. The phases were no problemo, sweating, farting, nausea, then that was it: gotta lie down and hug the cold, firm floor.

I eventually became less sensitive to it. I imagine the same will happen with VR after we get our "VR legs".

I already know exactly what's going to represent a "security consideration in order to safeguard transportation security."

When you opt-out, they make you wait a long time standing next to the X-ray machine for someone to give you a pat-down. (It's almost never that the guy doing pat-downs is busy, btw- really weird.)

They're going to claim that having someone wait near the X-ray machines that long represents some kind of security threat. And then they're going to use that fact to justify overriding the opt-out, because the more time you spend next to an X-ray machine, the higher the odds you've tampered with it or have had time to assemble that tactical nuke you've been hiding in your pockets or whatever nonsense they come up with.

Thanks for fighting the good fight, Jon. I've been opting out for years, and if there's anything people like us can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask!

They clearly don't like it when you opt out. Things I have experienced while opting out:

  1. Being separated from my belongings for up to a half hour while dozens of strangers are walking past them and could easily pluck my wallet or computer out of them.

  2. Being asked to wait directly next to the luggage X-ray machines.  I think most know that we're specifically not thrilled about that.

  3. Got an "extra-thorough" pat-down by a guy who claimed it was in the name of security and procedure.

  4. Teasing/harassment for not trusting the X-ray machines.

Between this latest opt-out opt out and the collaboration with the IRS, I'm going to stop flying soon. I should anyway, as flying is one of the most carbon-awful things you can do.

I also get nothing. Was it taken down?

Agreed. With self-driven cars, you can imagine scenarios like hand-offs, where you ferry multiple passengers at a discounted rate over a common leg of a trip, and then they transfer to separate cars to go the last leg of their journey to their separate destinations, also possibly sharing with other passengers interested in only that leg, who might also be transferring onto new cars to get to their ultimate destination. You can basically specify your tolerance (100ft to 1mi) for walking and thus allow even steeper discounts and more travel options for the self-driving cars.

You can hit occupancy and distance-traveled efficiency with this that we've never come close to before, and if the pricing is sexy enough by comparison (and it should be), it's going to be the option most people use, because most people can barely pay their bills. They will still be saving time over waiting on bus transfers, which are incredibly slow by comparison.

Maybe, if the robots can self-replicate and/or self-repair and have that creative spark, but that's asking a whole lot of tech that we haven't sorted out yet.

Life has the replication shit already worked out, so if the goal is really to put intelligent life in deep space in a sustainable way, a genetically engineered super-bright octopus species in a space-faring aquarium with environmental selectors for intelligence built in might actually be more effective.

Humans were evolved to survive in a razor-thin sliver of Earth's atmosphere and nowhere else. We aren't designed for and don't belong in deep space.

We should genetically engineer smart creatures that can fare better out there, creatures with enormous capacities for cancer resistance, stupefyingly impressive energy efficiency, and staggeringly long lifetimes. They don't need all of our gravity-influenced skeletal structure and musculature. The fact that we're air-breathers is a particularly worrisome liability for being a space-faring critter. Little holes in our tin can atmospheres can lead to explosively bad results.

I'd start with something closer to an octopus and then throw (even more) intelligence at it.

I haven't found any evidence refuting Cowspiracy's claims, unfortunately, which has cornered me into eating vegan for going on two weeks now.

If healthy vegan food were subsidized as it should be, most of the issues with limited food/dish selection would probably be addressed in no time.

Thanks for your article suggesting a better way to reject peeps. It made a good point, and I'm confident your hiring and rejecting career will be a colourful one, but we're going to stick with being human and not over-analyzing others' perceived shortcomings because we decided not to pull the trigger on doing the money-in-exchange-for-services thing. Cheers!

There should be a law that requires motorists to salute bicyclists as they blow through stop signs. They're heroes for braving the dangerous roads every day and saving the planet from more choking carbon emissions.

In my experience, this is horseshit.

You should make your deck as simple as possible but no simpler. Really, you want it customized to whom you're pitching. If your audience wants to know a lot more about your financials, then one slide probably isn't enough. If he wants you to go deep about your solution, then one slide isn't enough.

If it's just you and your audience knows your background well, then you don't really need to waste time on a slide about yourself. It just comes off as self-preening. If it's an ambitious project with a lot of moving parts, then you will need multiple slides to get through your team.

Presenting to an audience is about knowing and serving your audience. A lot of people don't want to waste time on a deck, because all it really represents is time you blew on a deck.

You can clearly see how much time Guy blew on his 10 slides presentation from how gorgeously it's laid out- a lot. When you see that sort of thing, it means a lot of copy editing happened to get the text just the right length. In other words, the tail was wagging the dog.

What's noticeably missing is any meat. If 10 slides are what you need, show me actual correlation between length of deck and closed funding and how that centers around 10 slides, and isolate other factors to demonstrate causation. You won't find that in his pitch, because there is no correlation. It's mostly about who you are and/or a demonstration of progress.

I've closed more money with a demonstration of the product's progress than the right deck. It's more important to execute (you can stop here if you like) and then for extra credit, show your pitch to multiple potential backers at the same time in order to improve odds you'll have multiple options that can hurry each other along.

I'm always amused by these "here's how to protect data better" articles, because today's security is tomorrow's joke, and that's how we got here with the OPM hack.

The only way to get ahead of it is to make it so that all private data is public and thus devalued. Privacy creates liability. Visibility creates value.

The problem we have right now is the idea that one entity should have domain over any information. That's what we need to get over. It should be shared- all of it, from bank security cameras down to what you're doing in the shower. When all surveillance is shared, you find that people suddenly get a lot more tolerant, because throwing stones in glass houses isn't helpful.

The Earth is a closed system. We have finite, shared resources. Privacy creates the fiction that it's not a closed system. You think that's how the space station works? Is that how you want it to work? No, you want cameras on everything, because if someone decides to experiment with the CO2 scrubbers, it affects everyone.

The same is true here on Earth. We're now in an age where one person or company or government can single-handedly change the habitability of the entire planet, such as Exxon did in the 80s. That's dangerous.

And meanwhile, there's incredibly valuable, life-saving services and conveniences we can all enjoy if we are open with all our surveillance data. How many lives could be saved or improved if we all had a smartwatch measuring our vitals and our food intake and toilet waste were monitored? That one change could single-handedly resolve most of our healthcare issues in the US.

What we really need instead of privacy is complete visibility coupled with a code of conduct that emulates the benefits we expect from privacy. Just because we can see everything doesn't mean we have a right to bother people with what we know. That's the issue we need to address. By all means, check out whomever in the shower, but that doesn't give you a right to interfere with that person's life by commenting on their genitalia. That's the key ingredient we're missing from the privacy conversation. We like privacy because we equate it with civility and thus freedom.

If someone doesn't know something, then they can't make you miserable with it. But that doesn't really work anymore. Even if someone doesn't know something, big data techniques can interpolate what it is they're not supposed to know. What you're really signing up for with "privacy" is granting visibility to only a privileged few- the spy agencies, the multinational companies, the hackers, and anyone willing to pay for the information.

"I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents?

I believe the answer is certainly yes, but that it’s almost certainly not Snowden’s fault."

The article reinforces that bunk UK propaganda with its clickbait subject line then discredits it in the body. Classy, Wired. Doing journalism a real favour there.

This is why privacy is a flawed concept and not something we should cherish as much as we seem to. It's an eggshell defense. It creates the illusion of security, but once breached, it can make things much worse than before you had it.

It's much more challenging to figure out how to achieve security with an open system, but once you do, you don't have liabilities like this.

Yes. The trick is to pretend that they aren't and to let them feel clever about figuring out for themselves how the adult market will improve success.

For instance, Cisco's fortunes were built in large part on porn, which dominated internet traffic for years, driving sales of their "big iron" routers to the ISPs, but their product looks nothing like porn and has other legitimate uses. A huge portion of the alcohol, fashion, and auto industries are based on the premise of improving your social standing and perceived sexuality.

So one route would be to get them to fund a technology that dramatically improves your service and that happens to have valuable uses outside of the adult industry.

However, you may be better off going to the adult industry for investment. They're actually pretty savvy angel investors, often the very earliest adopters of neat new tech, and their terms are often much less heavy-handed than VC terms.

If looking for leads, feel free to ping me offline.

1. No.

2. Yes.

3. Respect the people you want to help you. For instance, let's say you want a bunch of people to take the time to read and answer difficult, open-ended questions for free in a way that could lead to vast personal wealth for you. You could demonstrate your respect for them by showing them the courtesy of proof-reading your post. As the questions are so broad, you also could show respect by sharing what you've learned in the research you've done so far to help educate them and to narrow down what you're looking for. You could demonstrate even more respect by thanking the authors of particularly good contributions.