BearsAreCool

While this is slightly nitpicky, from what I gather many of those draws are because neither side can make progress against the opponent. These are positions where in order for the game to move "forward" both sides would need to individually choose to weaken their position, leaving them playing non-moves until triggering threefold repetition or agreeing to a draw.

The on-disk text is still crazy but you can turn on version tracking in node-red that lets you track any changes made.

I'm a big fan of CyberChef. One of its most useful features is "magic" and turning on "intensive mode". This will automatically detect the encoding used and can often detect 2-3 levels of encoding.

I think the intention of the poster before you was to highlight that monoclonal antibodies (likely) actually make more money for big pharma than a course of vaccination. A lot of anti-vaccine rhetoric revolves around vaccines being a big pharma cash grab.

For context, each dose of most of the covid vaccines is about $40 while a round of monocolonal antibody treatment is around $1,500. The vaccine has a dramatic effect in limiting the affects of covid and (as far as I a non-doctor know) stack with monoclonal antibodies if needed. Its just dramatically cheaper if people are vaccinated and not as many people need this treatment.

Its not exactly that, but Mr. Robot is excellent if you haven't seen it.

Doesn't this require conversion between currencies, inherently adding a ton of risk?

While elliptic curves may sound like they're related to analog data (sinusoidal curves etc), they're actually used in an incredibly discrete way. You have discrete points on an elliptic curves modulo a prime and use them in elliptic curve algebra by multiplying them by integer values, which correspond to drawing lines between different curve points.

This is an easy excuse but one I find hard to believe as being at all legitimate. Out of all the things that lead to promoting sexualization of minors I highly doubt that anyone is going to look back on their chidlhood and blame a book. I also can't help but wonder if I was somehow super sexualized as a high schooler or not. Comments like this and people talking about banning books for high schoolers makes me wonder if somehow I'm the freak. Everyone I knew when I was that age had graphic (misconception filled) images of sex already, actual pornography was pretty easy to access. I almost wish I had instead gotten this from a book, maybe there would've been less damaging misconceptions.

That said, I've been trying to find an example of a book in the "book ban" discussion that contains problematic graphic sex content. I've tried looking and so far everything has turned up pretty empty.

I use freenom for a small website I run, they're definitely weird. That said, I've never paid them anything. Freenom combined with 000webhost was the perfect tech stack to host a small website for a friends gaming guild. Weird stuff happens, but I've not paid a dime and I don't think anyone got malware. I keep regular backups of everything and if it goes down I can just rehost elsewhere and let my friends know.

I really relate to this. I gamed excessively through high school and parts of college (think thousands of hours a year), largely as I just couldn't think of anything better to do. More than anything it was just embarassing as it made me into the worlds least interesting man which probably compounded the issue, almost all my free time went into a bunch of games most people don't even know about. I feel a lot better about myself now I can point to side projects or similar when somebody asks what I've been up to.

One important thing to note which may be lost in the headline, this is for concealed carrying and not open carry. That said, as someone who in the past 5 years went through the process of getting licensed to carry in my state I think the mandatory "firearm safety" course was something interesting and honestly vital. While I want to avoid getting too far into the muddy waters of high profile "dumb civilian" incidents involving firearms, they all could have been avoided if people had paid more attention to this.

If you are considering carrying in a state with constitutional carry, please research the following. Civil liability in a situation where firearms are used, for instance if you discharge your weapon and damage a car, you are probably on the hook for that. There is no situation ever where your weapon should not be concealed and you aren't shooting someone directly. You should only fire your weapon if you can argue before court that your firing of that weapon was necessary to prevent you or someone else being killed or gravely injured. Don't be an idiot, avoid creating dangerous situations, even if you survive and stay out of prison they'll ruin your life. You pay your own legal fees regardless of if you were in the right.

No warning shots or fancy attempts to hit somebody in the legs rather than the center of mass, those could hit bystanders instead or result in a jam. Brandishing a weapon means someone else (including police) could assume you are an active shooter and shoot you. Ever showing your weapon or signalling you have a weapon means that should a bad situation arise, an active shooter would shoot you first likely before you could respond. Do not ever display you have a firearm in the form of bumper stickers on your car, your car will get robbed and now criminals have your guns. The same goes for your house.

In summary, keep the gun in your pants. Only remove it while firing into someone else's chest if there is no other option to prevent someone from dying or getting killed.

With all that said, while I theoretically agree with the idea of "constitutional carry", I'm not sure if I would have learned all of this if my state had this.

With a linear time O(N) first pass you can identify the minimum element in the list. This reduces M from being the largest element to being the difference between the largest and the smallest element.

I'm really not sure what the motive to lie is. You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar, time to explain what happened before they continue to treat you like a common criminal. Doing a pentest and refusing to state it was a pentest is mind boggling.

Has anyone from the "research" team commented and confirmed this was even them or a part of their research? It seems like the only defense is from people who did google-fu for a potentially outdated paper. At this point we can't even be sure if this isn't a genuinely malicious actor using comprimised credentials to introduce vulnerabilities.

I hadn't actually found the original source material! I've amended my post to considerably tone down my accusations since it appears I was working with an incomplete picture of what the original presentation was. After an initial flicking through of the presentation it definitely appears that this is more nuanced than what I was working with and what has been reported on!

DISCLAIMER: I initially did not have access to the original presentation. The original presentation is far better from what I can tell compared to how it has been represented in both right wing and left wing media at presenting their claims with nuance that has largely been left out of other reports.

Many of the conclusions drawn in the paper and in articles reporting on it are overblown or misleading on their own. There was good reason John Hopkins added a five paragraph disclaimer and a "RETRACTED" watermark to this on their own site.

If you doubt me or disagree, look at the claim of the paper that has been reported on by various media outlets. It essentially states that looking at cdc data there is drop in other forms of death that was replaced with covid deaths, meaning that there was no actual increase in deaths. Now, go pull up the cdc data that breaks down how many people died of each cause per week for 2019 and 2020 [1]. Using either the on-website graph creator, python notebooks, excel, or your data scientist tool of choice try to recreate a graph showing all causes of death by week that supports this paper. I quickly got a graph that showed a simple reality, compared to 2019 there has been an increase in deaths per week that almost precisely corresponds with the numbers of covid deaths per week.

If you want to argue the number of covid deaths is too low to worry about or it was handled well, go for it. Just don't get sheeped into believing that covid deaths aren't real.

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-a...

EDIT: Apparently the video presentation this paper is based on is out there at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKJN61aflI . Since I have not finished it I've amended the post considerably and added a disclaimer since I used some strong words originally. Many thanks to the commenter who pointed me to the youtube presentation.

Sad to see downvotes here but the Benford's law thing is absolutely one of the weakest claims of fraud finding. It sounds good initially (tool for finding some kinds of fraud used to find other kinds of fraud) but it is almost entirely flawed with how it is used in this context. It truly is the best current example of statistics lying.

If you've seen the handy little graph of the first digit statistics that each candidate got in big cities, I dug into this a bit but the basic summary is precinct sizes aren't random at all and that messes up the entire premise of that analysis. I made a quick repo that altered the initial repo to show things like how just getting 70% of the vote would screw up benfords law in most counties [0].

[0] https://github.com/BeesAreCool/2020_benfords

I've dug a fair bit into the statistic based claims and most of them just don't hold much water. The benfords law one that picked up steam being the main one I dug into, I even made a nice repo with fancy graphs but the meme had died out by the time I finished so I never shared it. However the main summary was "Benfords law just doesn't work for proportions of a precinct"

However, if we want to go deeper into the rabbit hole, if there was a coup to steal the election I'd expect there to be ample fake claims of election stealing that would be easy to debunk.

If anyone is curious why some senator called Graham seems to be popping up in every bill that poses a threat to the internet, its because he sponsors or co-sponsors most of them. On congress.gov you can get a nice listing of everything he's done recently [1]. In summary, he either sponsored or co-sponsored this encryption act, the EARN-IT act (more anti-encryption), the OCPA (make websites liable for moderation errors), and another seperate law to amend section 230.

He has also co-sponsored legislation in support of privacy of personal identifiable information, but not for the general population or anything just US Federal judges [2].

[1] https://www.congress.gov/member/lindsey-graham/G000359

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/471...

Why is it that this is only attacking google search? I'm not that well versed in antitrust legal matters but why isn't there attempts to break up the broader Alpbabet into sensible smaller companies that each do their own thing? In my head that seems like it should be simpler.

A lot of us spent a fair bit of time on hardcore free speech platforms and "saw what that got us" with cesspools like the various internet chans. A society that doesn't police itself is anarchy, and that really isn't helpful for any civil discussion or learning. While there should be no rules in private between friends etc, public forums need restrictions in order to have some level of functionality without descending into flamewars.

The hill I'd really worry about with free speech is when punk hacker types turn on encryption, the current ultimate guard ensuring free speech.

Edit note: I'm not pro the twitter blocking of the article, especially not in DMs as some have noted is occurring. I'm just slightly disillusioned to unlimited speech on the internet superhighway thanks to trolls, flamebaiters, frauds, and more.

I highly doubt that this will ever succeed due to the S&P 500 and similar stock indexes. Over the past year (looking at September 6 2019 comparing that to today) there has been 15% growth in the S&P 500, which is insane considering the global pandemic and economic shutdowns. This means it is on track to double every 5 years. For a bit of context, if you were given 1,000 dollars on your 18th birthday and instead of buying a cruddy used car you invested it and made 15% interest every year, you're have over $700,000 dollars by the time you hit 65 and can retire on it. This 15% is including the massive dip that happened as the world came to a halt, without it who knows what insane growth there would have been reported.

Now with that out of the way and established, this was literally all due to big tech. All the profit is from monopolies. Apple specifically experienced over 100% growth over the last year, taking into account its weight[1] of 7% in the S&P 500 that means if my math is correct that roughly half of the growth of the S&P 500 was entirely apple. When you calculate out the weights of AAPL (Apple), MSFT (Microsoft), AMZN (Amazon), FB (Facebook), GOOGL (Alphabet stock 1), and GOOG (Alphabet stock 2) you have 24% of the total S&P 500 index. Their total change in value over the past year averaged based on their weight in the S&P 500 shows that they had a growth of 69%, when multiplied by .24 you get a bit over 15%. Making the S&P 6 most of the S&P 500s profit. By this math, which may be incorrect, it appears the remaining S&P 494 unsurprisingly is slightly down about 1% over the last year, pretty good considering the pandemic and all but the people demand stonk.

The % of S&P 500 profits attributable to each company (google stocks combined) according to my excel sheet: Apple - 48%, Amazon - 26%, Microsoft - 20%, Facebook - 7%, and Alphabet - 5%

With this in perspective, it isn't that surprising that lawmakers will never bust these companies. The DOW is slightly more resilient to big tech (only a quarter of their total profits were microsoft and apple, they didn't have the other 3 big tech companies) and there are of course other stock indexes. However, politicians love to point to the stock market as proof of their economic successes and the S&P 500 is one of the common ones. If big tech is broken up, these companies will obviously make less profit once they're no longer a monopoly and with them the stonks go away.

It also really isn't a surprise why Buck is focusing on "conservative allegations that some platforms have tried to stifle conservative voices". Of those companies, only 2 could really be considered as having social media platforms. Both of which are the small fries when it comes to weighted profit on the stock market.

Sorry for going so long winded, but this article sparked over an hour of poking around and I wanted to share.

tl;dr, big tech monopolies cause most stonking and politicians love that too much

[1] - Apparent weightings for S&P 500 https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-s-and-p-500-stocks-by-in...

Not OP, also not advocating for totally open borders and am specifically focusing on the claim related to borders and their effect on peace.

From my own experience it is far easier to dehumanize and even demonize someone or some group of people that you don't personally know. I was lucky enough to have the experience of living in another country outside of the US for a large period of childhood and personally knowing and loving people in that country has shaped how I view every "dispute" between the US them. It reminded me that these countries are not faceless titans battling each other like some kind of Olympic competition, but rather are made up of individuals whom I care deeply about and any blow to the country is a blow to them. They are not just a soulless "them" but are instead individual people and it hurts me when they are hurt. I can talk all day about utilitarian ethics and maximizing happiness on all the globe but at the end of the day I care so very much more about those who I know. While war is not even really close to being on the table for this country, I know that I would vehemently oppose it. If borders were more closed it is very likely I never would have gone to that country, in fact restrictions in place already made it difficult though achievable. Even if someone has not traveled to a foreign country, every immigrant that he or she will meet is an ambassador for their home country.

Of course, many of the more despicable acts in history come not from physical borders between countries but borders put in place by more invisible factors like societal norms. Barriers between men and women, the old and young, and naturally between those of different caste and ethnicity. To continue the parallels in the article, with privacy we have seen the borders shift from some vaguely defined border on individual social media platforms to closer and closer to each individuals mouth, where we increasingly act with restraint on what we say for fear of retribution from friends, family, or even the government. As you touch on with things like immigrants being fodder for exploitation, when the borders of a country open we often simply move the true borders between humans from those of a country to those of society.

Not OP, but I'll give it a shot. At a low level pretty much all standard integer math is mod arithmetic, typically mod 2^32 or 2^64 depending on if a computer is 32 or 64 bit. This means that when a number goes above this limit it "overflows" and only the part left after dividing by the mod size is left. Additionally, negative numbers are stored by essentially counting down from the maximum number that can be stored + 1, in scholarly terms this is the twos complement. For instance on a 32 bit system -7 as a signed integer would be stored identically to the unsigned integer (2^32)-7. For anyone new to programming, unsigned meaning an integer variable that can only be positive and signed being an integer variable that could be positive or negative.

Now all of this combines to make addition, subtraction, and even multiplication essentially identical for signed and unsigned numbers. On an 8 bit system (so integers can be between 0 to 255 inclusive) you could be trying to add the signed number 40 and the unsigned number 200. Naturally, this is 200+40 or 240. Now inside the computer, 240 is stored in the exact same way that -16 is so it is important that the software knows the correct way to handle the variable. This is equivalent to subtracting 56 from 40, and the signed integer -56 is represented in the exact same way as the unsigned integer 200.

Now this is where it starts to get crazy. What if you add the signed integer -5 (represented by 251 in the unsigned world) and the unsigned integer 100? Well it is equivalent to 251 + 100 = 351. However, now we encounter modular arithmetic, because this is an 8 bit system and the maximum value for an integer is 255 we calculate everythihg mod 256, so ar left with 351 % 256 = 95. You can mentally view this as the calculation occurring with 1s and 0s, where everytime a 1 is added to a 1, there is a single bit carried and the last bit is dropped, which is exactly how full and half adders work in a processor!

This also works for multiplication! If we multiply -5 by 5, we get -25 easily. But for computers we do 251 * 5 = 1255. The modulo math starts to get tricky for us puny humans but for a computer it is trivial, 1255 % 256 = 231. As a signed integer that is equal to -25, as it is equivalent to (255+1-25).

For division, everything is just crazy. 250/5 is way different than -5/5, no amount if mod arithmetic will save it. Unsigned 50 and signed -1 have completely different representations, and this is even an example without fractions and rounding.

I may have went long winded, but hopefully this helps someone!

I notice in your other replies you have several interview questions that seem to be targeted at previous experience. What kind of side projects, cybersecurity or just programming related, do you find the most appealing in a candidate?

One thing that bothers me about most of these algorithms is how conceptually difficult they are for me to understand. I don't have that strong of a background in cryptography but there is something special about how with RSA you can do it at a small scale by hand. With very limited notes I can explain to a group of high schoolers almost exactly how this vital part of encryption functions and even vulnerabilities in it (small exponent values, etc). While rolling your own crypto is bad, with a bit of work I'd expect almost any programmer to be able to implement RSA without too much difficulty.

I'm not sure how important being able to explain encryption algorithms in detail to high school students is, but I'll definitely be sad when RSA and other non-quantum resistant algorithms join the likes of the enigma machine and exist for demonstration process only. I'm hopeful in time less crypto minded people (like me) will better understand module learning with errors or lattice based cryptography and maybe we'll get better at explaining it. It would be a shame if even more of cryptography into an unintelligible black box to eke out performance gains.

From my own attempts at hobbyist 3d modelling, computer generating a human with clothes is far harder than furniture. Looking through the computer generated images for IKEA almost all of them are hard body (solid objects) with very few soft objects (clothing, tablecloths, etc) and nothing that is alive. Creating realistic clothing renders is quite difficult, and it gets even more difficult when a lifelike human needs to be rendered as well.

After seeing a lot of comments here discussing accreditation, I figured it may be beneficial to many readers to know about low cost, more transferrable, options for college credits. I have to stress though, there are lots of a-hole universities so try to find one that is ok with transferring large numbers of credits. You can't get an entire degree from this, but you can get most of the fluff class requirements you don't actually need for your major done.

Ordered based on cost. First 3 are online.

saylor.org - You only pay the fee for online proctoring. Has a list of roughly 20 total lower level courses that are ACE accredited. Self paced.

aleks.com - Like 20 bucks a month and they have some classes at the level of college algebra and precalc ACE accredited.

straighterline.com - Self paced, overall better course quality than saylor. Has professor graded writing assignments sometimes. ACE accredited courses. Normally $60 a class with a $99 a month membership fee. To keep costs down sign up and do as many courses as possible in a month.

The GED - You can get up to 10 college credits by doing well on the GED. Not online sadly, requires a testing center. If you have a non-traditional american high school background you probably need one of these to get into a university anyway.

CLEP exams - Are very cost efficient at $90 each and allow you to "test out" of many lower and higher level classes. Not online, requires. testing center.

Facial recognition along with just cameras in general have historically struggled with the faces of non-caucasian individuals. This typically results from biases in training sets and in many cases cameras simply creating images with far more contrast for lighter skin tones.

Is there a master list of companies like this?

I've been wondering why my chromium installation has been feeling slower recently, thanks for the heads up.

Any insight into why LastPass slows everything down so much? It seems like it has a relatively simple job to do.