James Mickens is great! He's listed his own work here:

https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

> James Mickens offers his timeless insights for free, because he loves you and he wants you to succeed. Please enjoy the undeniable masterpieces which are collected below.

Discussed back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905536

Thank you, although I'm glad this was reposted because the former Microsoft host of this pdf references in that posting is now a dead link

The name of Cthulhu is misspelt in that paper. For the author's sake, I hope that Cthulhu doesn't mind.

One thing we know for sure, is that the Old Ones used a definite lettering system with a fixed transliteration scheme into the latin Alphabet.

Lovecraft said Cthulhu was pronounced "k-tuee-tuee". When asked why he spelled it that way, he said he had no control over how cultists spell their gods' names.

It's probably safer to misspell it. I imagine it was intentional to avoid unexpected consequences.

Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!

Cthulhu's illiterate for all we know.

This is similar in spirit to the Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (https://urbigenous.net/library/alicebob.html)

Make sure you read to the end:

> In conclusion, I think that humanity should stop publishing papers about Byzantine fault tolerance. I do not blame my fellow researchers for trying to publish in this area, in the same limited sense that I do not blame crackheads for wanting to acquire and then consume cocaine.

Exactly! This is not a criminal problem, but a public health problem.

This makes it a good thing, doesn't it? Cocaine is healthier than crack.

This brings so much joy. It sums up my experiences with supporting homebrewed, half-arsed distributed systems.

And the truth is most systems of any kind seem to fail from simple things that everyone could have prevented but overlooked. Wasted engineering. Best to think like the Arpanet was designed. Have a way to heal once things are normal, not work around the bizarre failures.

I've spent a bunch of time in light manufacturing. In testing assemblies I've come to the conclusion that for ordinary stuff you just want to reduce the rate of 'bad product' below the rate of installer fuckups. If 9 times out of 10 the reason is failed it because someone fucked it up and 1 out of 10 is because you shipped a defective unit, no one cares.

You might go, well what about safety critical things. Well it's still true. Just at a much lower level of failure.

And here are a list of Byzantine generals

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Byzantine_generals

Arguably, bitcoin network is an example of a practical and widely deployed BFT protocol (although underlying assumptions are a bit different compared to the classical BFT setting). So the field is not dead yet.

It is covered by the example that broadcasts 16 gagilluon messages (because it is not optimized down to the 14 gagiliion case).

Blockchain systems are a funny case in that they don’t really need much network traffic for consensus, but they do need a whole lot of messages. All the “traffic” in a [proof of work] blockchain system consists of messages the nodes generate internally, and then discard because they’re not ‘convincing enough’ as a proof of their leadership. But yeah, if you count all those “attempted and discarded” messages up, there’s roughly a gajillion of them.

Mossad going to do Mossad things. I like reading his stuff.

Can someone explain why it was Keanu who was used as an example? Isn't he supposed to be a likeable actor?

Likable, yes. But for the longest time he had a reputation for rather wooden acting.

I don't think he's shirked that reputation. He's just taken on roles that utilize that. See Matrix trilogy and the john wick movies. You don't need to have incredible acting chops to play a fairly stoic killer/Superman.

Point Break Live! took advantage of exactly that and recruited an audience member every night to read Johnny Utah’s lines. Little old ladies saying Sir, I take the skin off chicken.

According to Wikipedia, he's received praise from critics for some smaller roles that don't fit the typecast, though.

2013.

You are misinformed. Nobody has bulldozed the graves of Russian soldiers, and there were lot of other nationalities in the red army, not only Russians. If you are referring to 2008 incident in Tallinn then the remains of soldiers were transported from City center to the graveyard. And on 9th of May people go to graveyard to pay their respects.

When I saw the memorial on the edge of town near Tallin in 2007 it wasn't in good shape. I think some resentment runs deep. The german graves are well tended. I don't think there is any deeper sub-text, its just one is a brutalist war memorial and the other is a more personal thing of headstones.

The collection of "we don't need a lenin statue" nearby was cool. Lots of standard-pose, lying on the ground. I think the estonians were careful to dismount these but not (if you will excuse the metaphor) 'desecrate' them because .. well.. there are sensitivities.

Last time I visited the Occupation Museum in Tallinn, the old Lenin etc statues were stored inside - downstairs near the toilets, quite appropriately.

There is a German soldier's cemetery in Viljandi: https://www.visitestonia.com/en/german-soldiers-cemetery-in-... ... which, as I understand it, was developed and is maintained with funding from the German government. I wonder if 'Mother Russia' bothers to contribute similarly to Russian-soldier related memorials in Estonia?

I think there is a certain degree of symmetry breaking between Russians and Germans in WWII.

No historian I read draws this parallel even when they refer specifically to the Russian invasion and occupation of the Baltic. Germans actively recruited Baltic collaborators and ran over twenty concentration camps in Estonia killing Jews from the Baltic region.

Your statement is horrible and I totally reject it.

I'm not sure who is saying what in this thread, but Russians had their share of atrocities. Note this is very graphic and haunting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

I think you're misunderstanding, perhaps I should have added /s. There is absolutely a lot of difference between russians and germans during wwii (thus there is symmetry breaking).

Thank you for the clarification. I read the sentence differently and I apologize.

I wonder what you mean. Of course there is symmetry between Russian and German invasions and occupations of Baltic (and other) countries. Both powers wanted to establish their spheres of influence over smaller countries, and eventually each other. They made the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact according to this plan, they had a common victory parade in Brest-Litovsk after they had together conquered Poland. Both powers liquidated their real and perceived enemies.

This doesn't mean they were entirely the same, but there is a lot of similarity.

You may have read too hastily. The comment said there is "symmetry breaking" (i.e. "asymmetry"), not that there is "symmetry".

Russian government is more keen on exploiting the grievances around Russian graves for political purposes than actually caring for the graveyards abroad. The bronze warrior controversy was one big manufactured outrage.

At the same time, there are people who try to maintain a monument for the minorities and political opponents that were murdered during Stalin's Purges, and contemporary Russia rewrites history there, too.

While I cannot condone bulldozing the graves... A lot of those red army soldiers fought against Estonian army. They weren't in any way liberators, just as Germans turned to not be ones.

Only in as much as the Estonian units fought on the side of Germans. There is a reason most jews who didn't flee when the Germans advanced were killed, the level of collaboration between locals and Einsatzgruppe A was very high..

My Estonian grandfather worked as a police officer in Viljandi prior to and during the German occupation. It was only when the Russians invaded Estonia towards the end of the war that he, my grandmother and mother decided it was safer to flee; the terrible reputation of the advancing Russians, murdering and raping as they went, proceeded them. Just was well, as a number of his colleagues were murdered by Russian soon after they escaped.

If you weren't a Jew, you were - in general - treated OK by occupying German soldiers, and least according to accounts I've heard from people who where actually there. The Germans were professional and courteous, the Russians uncontrolled and ravaging thugs.

Funny how Russians always see themselves as 'liberators', not 'occupiers' of Estonia. If this was the case, once they'd driven out the Germans, why didn't they then leave?

Sure, except my family was Jewish and my father's relatives who did not flee did get killed. I have no love for Soviets but I really think we shouldnt normalize Nazi Germans.

You do know Red army invaded and occupied Estonia first? With all the fun things that getting occupied by Red army and purged by NKVD entails.

Even if Russian soldiers have also fought the Nazis, those who fought in Estonia and in all the other countries which were unlucky to be neighbors of Russia, were just invaders, who during the war were notorious for stealing from civilians everything they could and for raping, and the result of their successful fight was the occupation of those countries, which allowed the Russians to steal huge amounts of valuable products from all their neighbors, while killing and torturing all possible opponents from the local populations.

The Western countries were able to free themselves from the Nazis only with the help of Russia, but they paid the Russians with only little of their own money but mostly with what was not theirs to give away, i.e. with what belonged to the Eastern European countries.

What I affirm hear is not from hearsay, but from personal experience, because in 1940, i.e. before Russia being attacked by anyone, so before having the right to claim that they are defending themselves against Nazis, the Russian invaders murdered both my great grandfathers, the reasons being that one was a teacher at the village school and the other had a minor job in the village administration, and everybody who distinguished themselves somehow from the masses were deported to labor camps in Siberia, to make sure that nobody was left there who could lead some form of oppositions.

A few younger and stronger people have survived the Russian labor camps, but my great grandfathers were old, so one was shot before reaching the labor camp, because he was walking too slowly and the other died after a couple of months because of the cold, lack of food and hard labor.

Taking such events into account, it is obvious that the Russian soldiers are not loved in the neighbor countries of Russia.

Could you please source the bulldozing bit? Just curious, I wasn't aware of that happening and quick search turned nothing up.

That's because he made it up.

Are you actually the young Kapruskin described within? Unable to reunite with the girl you fell in love with, while working in a coal mine beneath an orphanage that was atop a prison that was inside the abstract concept of World War II?