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zxcmx

1,716 karma · joined March 31, 2017

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zxcmx··on Beirut Port Explosion
Yes, you're right. They deeply failed as a port authority and a warehouse.

I was trying to explain why civilian city leadership might not have good intuition for why the storage issue would be a problem for them.

zxcmx··on Australian Special Forces Killed 39 Afghan Civilians
Problem: how do you have an elite murder squad that just kills exactly the people you want and no others? What if grandma gets in the way?

How about Hamed, who might know a guy who knows a guy, who might jeopardise the goals of Murder Squad? How important is not murdering random people vs achieving mission objectives? What if Hamed is a prisoner and slowing Murder Squad down will jeopardise the mission?

It's eerily analogous to the AI alignment problem. It seems like not having hard core elite Murder Squads would be preferable to pretending we can ask people to do their job in a moral vacuum.

I don't pretend to be right on this, and I expect reasonable people to disagree, but if you set up the incentives to prioritise mission success over human life, you will obviously get mission success at the expense of human life and a culture that is proud to kill people to get the job done (thats what makes them different from infantry). "Isn't that what you asked for?"

zxcmx··on Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
How much of every corporate job is communicating / consensus vs doing?.

Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.

I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.

zxcmx··on Beirut Port Explosion
Have you ever thought about your house? The whole damn thing is fuel.

Do you store things in the attic? plastic tubs? How about the basement? cardboard? Do you have wool, paintings, plastic toys, plastic anything, wooden anything? Look around you and the places you keep things. Oh my god curtains they are more or less just flame conduits.

Your couches, your clothes, everything around you is fuel for a massive fire. It can be a bit scary when you really evaluate it. I bet you have never thought seriously about the risk before.

Admittedly at a city level, 3 kilotons of ammonium nitrate in a strategic location should definitely have set off some real thinking but on a personal basis most people are surrounded by fuel and don't think about it at all.

zxcmx··on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
This is also true for your computer hardware, the software you run, the medicines you take, the food you eat, the water you drink...

I guess my point is that that human trust is so pervasive and fundamental that there are diminishing returns to eliminating it.

What will always remain in style I think is accountability. So trust, but have supply chain integrity such that you know who it is that you're trusting and who is responsible when things go wrong.

zxcmx··on Better disposable coffee cups can be made with waste from sugar cane
I wonder if a hybrid approach between disposable and "keep cup" could work.

The "default" takeaway option could be the short-lasting paper cup.

For car, office or just comfort, you could have a squashy, silicone (stands high temp) outer that would usually only need to be cleaned if the inner cup fails.

A silicone shell with disposable inner would work well for me, at least. The shell would rarely need to be cleaned and can be easily pocketed.

zxcmx··on A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide
Users everywhere have had to put up with U.S law for a long time. The laws and norms of the USA are more or less "fully baked in".

Try posting a nipple or copyrighted track, for example.

If Facebook had come from a different place, all songs and body bits might be Ok but perhaps discussion of government would be banned. I can't tell if that would actually be a better facebook than the one we got.

zxcmx··on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene
There are lots of things being done, but much more could be done - and for that we need to convince governments, which takes data.

In particular we need to convince governing bodies that action is in their direct and immediate economic interest, which again takes data.

zxcmx··on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene
If you don't find the OHI (https://www.conservation.org/projects/ocean-health-index) credible, I'm not sure there's much more I could write that would convince you. Sorry :/

The point is that the oceans are large, there are different concerns, and conditions vary across location and species.

If you want to answer a question like "how healthy are our oceans?" you need to first work out what that might mean, and then measure that systematically like the project I linked you to.

zxcmx··on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene
That's a big question, and one that's difficult to orient and frame productively. This resource might interest you though:

http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/news/Ocean_Isn't_Dying

zxcmx··on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene
I think the point is that viral "dying oceans" memes and stories may be undermining conservation efforts.

They are too emotionally powerful and pull our collective focus away from the science.

It frames the problems we face as impossibly bad and tragic, which makes some people give up, while others want drastic experiments that can cause more harm than good.

zxcmx··on Your Pa$$Word Doesn't Matter
You need a way to sync them on multiple computers, use them as a guest (eg when you've borrowed a machine temporarily), do recovery flows, manage their regeneration and rotation, generate unique certs per site, basically all the management hurts. As a web site, you also have to teach everyone in the world how they work, and who wants to be the first to do that?

One day WebAuthn might be usable for all the things. I want that to come soon but it is not here yet.

zxcmx··on iFixit tools in Apple's lab
It's an interesting business model I think.

They produce IP (researching and producing very clear instructions for fixes) and manage supply chain (trusted replacement parts & tools, worth more vs aliexpress equivalents because they endorse them).

The things they make money off are largely substitutable. Their value add (well deserved IMHO) is trust.

zxcmx··on Scaling live streaming for millions of viewers
Apart from it not really being in anyone's financial interest - not content providers, copyright holders or advertisers, it would be viewed as a security risk if anyone could easily do that - e.g: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/4/18294951/austral...

The idea of using multicast in this way also ignores some of the actual good features of HLS, in particular the ability to adapt content to a specific user's device and Internet connection.

zxcmx··on Ask HN: Is truth a basic human right?
I agree that "lies" and "bullshit" seem to be among the defining problems of our time.

What seems to have broken down is trust.

In the many cases where you rightly point out the truth is discoverable, who do we trust to tell it to us?

It's a hard, long-term problem. If people have lost faith in priests, scientists, politicians and the media, where to go from there?

Any program to restore some ground truth to common discourse will have to operate by building (or rebuilding) broad societal trust in one or more public institutions. Ideally institutions which act in good faith and are in fact trustworthy.

It is very hard (in a democracy) to make true progress on societal issues without some way to achieve broad consensus that they are real.

zxcmx··on How Does Pwd Operate?
I think the spirit of the post was to investigate through source spelunking.

Since there is so much history I often find it hard to see why things work the way they do, just by looking at how they work.

If one is ready to "cheat" on the question and look at a ready made answer this one is quite good: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/413204/how-does-uni...

I would summarise the reasons behind common UNIX shell implementation(s) of this as "directory names are not stable over the lifetime of a process" and "$PWD cannot be trusted".

zxcmx··on Ask HN: Is truth a basic human right?
Truth itself is not really knowable in many interesting cases, and even scientific truths which might appear "objective" at any given point are subject to debate, change and revision.

The thing that needs to be protected is the pursuit of truth and I think this looks a lot like freedom of the press and freedom of civic speech.

zxcmx··on Review: A Counterfeit, $100 iPhone X
Passing as higher status gives you access to opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get.

It's not a vestigial impulse, it is perfectly rational.

zxcmx··on New study finds psilocybin greatly and quickly relieves depression
Broken computer. Could be hardware, could be sofware, could be both.

But even though there are common scenarios, each computer can also be broken in a different way.

zxcmx··on You might not need to store plaintext email addresses
If your account recovery works by sending an email... which then sets a plaintext email cookie, there's no actual auth, right?

To make this make sense, I think you are assuming but without explicitly stating the use of signed cookies? EDIT: "if it validates", I guess so.

The other bit which is not clear to me is, what is the key in the database to identify ownership of user information?

You need a linking record which looks like hash(email) -> uid (or user record or whatever) which does not seem any better than what is proposed in TFA.

OTOH if no information is stored against the user's email / uid / username then you probably don't need login or auth.

zxcmx··on It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth
We could "spin" the anti-space side as a religion too I suppose. It involves a bit more ascetism and self-flagellation though.

I already live in a "heavenly" future compared to most of my ancestors.

I have hot and cold running water. My waste is whisked away. I can travel far and harness powerful energies with the flick of a switch. I can summon almost any food or item imaginable to my doorstep. I can open a portal to anywhere and speak with people there. There are still mysteries however, and the human body is rich with them.

There is a growing sense that using our powers comes at a terrible cost.

Many feel that the only solution is to abstain, although some factions believe that we can "purify" our technology.

Because the problem, filtered through the human psyche, is seen as a moral one. That it's _wrong_ for so many things to be too easy. Ten dollars shoes, drive-thru fast food and plastic bags must be evil because anyone can see it's absurd that these things are even possible.

Naturally, developing new powers (such as space exploration) would come with more terrible costs, and this must be stopped until we address our sins here on earth.

zxcmx··on Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?
This seems like a variant of the "just world hypothesis".
zxcmx··on Epic says Apple ‘has no rights to the fruits of Epic’s labor’ in latest filing
Credit card companies charge ~ 3% to manage a far more complex and fraud-prone ecosystem.

It's Apple's sandpit and they make the rules, but I think it's hard to rationally justify their take other than "because they can".

zxcmx··on We Were Builders Once, and Strong
"I'm being oppressed by my own retirement fund". :/
zxcmx··on Slaughterbots
If they don't have to be computer controlled I'm rooting for the swarms of incendiary bats.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

zxcmx··on Just give poor people money
I think part of it is the images and stories used to "explain" hunger.

Hunger is usually framed as a supply failure, not as a distribution failure. The picture is swollen bellies and the story in people's minds is "crop failure" or "civil or natural disaster", to which the logical solution would be "send food".

... because the natural next question to ask if it is a distribution failure and food is just sitting in warehouses and people are starving is: "why doesn't their government sort it out?".

If the solution is to give people cash, there are awkward questions like "who are the importers and suppliers who will be collecting all this cash?" and the inevitable conclusion that "this is just government corruption with extra steps".

To be clear, I think if one is to "give well" then doing it in an evidence-based way that will provide the most benefit is best. But I think it sets off a chain of questions that makes giving more morally complicated for many donors.

zxcmx··on Apple's “Disposable and Unfixable” Airpods [video]
Ok, so I don't think airpod waste is a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

But I also don't think I'm a luddite re: disposable electronics. I think I'm the opposite. I agree that as integration and product complexity increase, it makes more sense to make a new thing from feedstock than repair an old thing.

But what we can do is recover the resources used in manufacture. Critically, the product needs to be made in a way that supports this.

I want manufacturing to be so advanced that "full circle" resource recovery is incorporated into the design. The glues have corresponding (low toxicity) solvents for disassembly, the plastic can be cheaply digested back to clean monomers, the metals easily separable. No "retrofit" processes with show pony robots, but full "reverse manufacturing" facilities built with the same care and attention as the ones that make the product.

The thing I want is more automation, and more advanced design.

zxcmx··on Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?
An unresolved question is whether we would be better or worse off, without low level colds and flu.

Do regular challenges play a role in modulating immune response and health?

zxcmx··on CVE-2020-16898 – Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Both can be true; BSOD is trivial, RCE can be very hard.
zxcmx··on Some idiot is using your tool to mass scan our network
Not exactly.

You can separate transmit and receive IPs, if your tx network does not implement source filtering.

So you can tx from one place and receive from one or more other places "sensors" that you use to receive SYN-ACKs.

You can use several (an arbitrary number) of spoofed source IPs on tx to hide your "real" rx IPs, at the cost of more egress traffic.

There is a technique involving ipids (idle scanning) you can use which does not reveal your IP at all but it is not reliable; read: not usable beyond very tiny scale. You could put a lot of effort into it but it's not worth it. Nobody beyond a few vociferous cranks _really_ cares about IP scanning.

The real way to stay off radars (eg dshield) while mass scanning is have a ton of unrelated IPs and scan as slow as you can stand. This assumes good randomization (not obviously striping across networks from the same IP).

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