fatdog

This talk is a rare example of what I would call beautiful thinking.

If I interpreted that correctly, implementing a turing machine in CGoL that runs CGoL was delightful.

Where is the line between assertiveness in an environment where people are so-called "equals," and harassment? People (men, women, etc) use leverage to achieve their goals, and most managers in tech aren't equipped to resolve power dynamics.

Most of what guys do to each other to get leverage when they are "equals" would be considered harassment by a gentler temperament.

There is a counter narrative to the progressive political one that has some valid questions.

Maybe they just take it more personally when they have chosen to victimize their identity?

A lot of white guys in startups recognize racial nepotism and can't call it out, so instead they go and start their own companies, or get politically isolated, quit, and go somewhere else. Maybe some of them vent frustrations on extreme subreddits and vote trump, but they aren't going to HR or the news over it.

There could be a diversity effect in their data, given demographic changes as a consequence of immigration patterns, relationship to authority, and cultural attitudes toward alcohol.

Gladwell has written a predictable hatchet job of a perceived libertarian hero. Surprised that it was him, not surprised it was done in the NY-anything.

More interesting question is: if one were going to orchestrate a pseudo-intellectual takedown of the forces of popular discontent, who would one go after next?

Can't say for what/where, but, yes. Use it to super-scale work of human analysts who evaluate the quality of some stuff.

Work in software, key problem in my industry is a lack of leadership.

decision :: ([slides], hope, naivety, GSachsClient) -> greaterFool

naivety = foldl hope slides

map naivety GSachsClient

ah who am I kidding, I could never get the hang of monads anyway.

Fascinating. Just reading about probabilistic data structures in general, and would like to know if there is an efficient general method for generating statistics about the FN rates. Are they related to ROC curves?

Can we train up a sentiment analyzer on the delta between the stories and comments this week vs. all others, and then apply it to discovering "political discussion?"

What is hilarious about "general problem solving skills," is that when you actually master something with instruction, the person who teaches it to you tends to tell you the reason something works in a specific way is because of the general principle at work. Actually doing things gives you general problem solving skills.

A lot of people believe, "everything happens for a reason," but people with practical experience don't need to believe that because they know everything happens for a reason: it's called "the cause."

Apprenticeships are the most valuable education anyone can get, but the practical aspects fly in the face of pseudo-intellectualism that passes for modern non-STEM scholarship.

What kind of mobile filesystem wipers and SIM wipers are available?

I use Signal for txts, and while I believe it does not store plaintext txts on the SIM card (haven't analyzed it), SSDs strew cleartext data all over the place. Border guards using a disk imager like EnCase or something similar would get significant fragments of browser and communications history.

Key thing is if you have an iPhone, don't use TouchID, or as I call it, "Apple Bad Touch," because they can just hold you down and run your finger over it.

It's best to travel with a burner. Maybe we need a cyanogenmod image that includes a "duress key" like TC had, and old RSA tokens, but if there is anything on your phone that could be used against people you know, don't take it across borders.

It's important to discuss. There is a lot of stuff out there that screams snakeoil about MCT and coconut oil products, and it can have the effect of both discouraging legit research and duping the dupable.

If there were only a way to test medical hypothesis like hacking on code. Maybe a platform to crowdsource data for experiments then control for factors and double blind it.

not to reply to own thread on theme, but want to also add ketogenic diet was also used for treating "epilepsy," now known as a general class of seizure disorders, which are related to many issues, among them brain lesions. I have zero medical background, and if you are searching on this stuff, my point is that beyond the political stuff, there is something up with sugar.

There is related work on dementia as well, wish I could find it. Something to do with increasing dietary ketones (using oils) to make up for glucose processing issues in people who were long term pre-diabetic.

It was a dinner conversation, where a guy was reasoning that some degenerative and autoimmune diseases were related to tissue starvation as a result of inhibited glucose processing, and he was using ketones (with some perceived success) to treat symptoms of his own auto-immune disorder.

It's not evidence or confirmation in any way, but for any biohackers out there it's something to play with.

Left needed a new boogyman because the old ones were getting stale. "alt right" is a perfect candidate.

If you believe people who agree with some of the alt-rightist views must be held accountable for the standard racists who use that worldview as cover, then logically you must also make it incumbent upon people of muslim faith to tug a forelock to "us enlightened folk" in shared outrage and be accountable for the extremists who act in their name, and for random jewish people to be accountable for settlements, for catholics to feel they owe you something for their Irish "freedom fighters," etc.

Great honeypot as well. If a malware analyst dumps one of their intelligence agency canary strings from one of their spyware packages, they can use it to track the discoverer.

If I were a spook, I would totally be releasing reversing tools that alerted on my encoded code words.

Nice wysywyg security tool that will teach people concepts behind the interface. In my day we'd just use perl or python, but this opens up the field to beginners.

King of Mars. Called it.

It is a fascinating idea. Let's explore it:

The app would let users signal need from a buyer so that workers in their social network could agree on the price to give them.

If buyers managed to find the service somewhere else, users could snap a picture of the person/company who won the business and "review" them so that their network knew not to help the winner out, like if their brakes were about to fail or their house caught fire or whatever.

Signup would be free but users would pay like %5+ of their paycheck, which they will be fine with because of the increased benefits they get, and we would use the money for expansion and blocking competitors. Uber failed at getting political support because they were greedy capitalists who create injustice, so campaign contributions will be one of our big cost centers, but the returns will be well worth it.

Instead of an auction for services and market making like the apps we have today, it's a way to collude to fix prices. If they act now, YC can get %5 for a mere $50m.

Imagining the utility elevator pitch, "...no, no, like Grindr but for comrades!" An app for creating labor cartels.

What will I call it? "Koloodr."

Stoicism is fundamentally subversive to the Hobbesian leviathan that has been constructed from within the post-enlightenment university system. It is the foundation of western morality and ethics, (the Bible borrows heavily from it).

Stoicism is not taught in public schools because it would make citizens ungovernable. Most education today is about training dependents, where stoicism teaches a kind of spiritual freedom. No grand conspiracy or anything. When education was elite, students learned elite ideas. Now that it is common, for cohesion they must learn common ones instead. Universities wouldn't have survived centuries if they produced graduates who would overthrow their governments, or obviate them entirely.

To cosmopolitanism, great and principled men are dangerous and anathema. Irony is that its most prominent works were by the rulers and elites of city states. Some people on the alt-right spectrum have taken that strain and created a kind of genre-philosophy out of it, like what John Williams is to classical music, some alt right thinkers are to classical philosophy.

The new Prime Minister Theresa May does not hold any principles that would place limits on the powers of the government. She was a well known "champion of the snoopers charter," (wiki) when she was home secretary. There is a british tendency to be overbearing authoritarians that provides fuel to their various secession movements. Britain is unlikely to maintain its current borders for many years after Brexit.

It is in the interest of every state to discredit Wikileaks, hence Russia "letting slip," they were behind the DNC leaks right after the election.

The intelligence community doesn't get an opinion. Arguably, any comment from them about domestic elections only reduces the legitimacy of their mandate.

The thing nobody really talks about is that the agency in question is a "domestic" security intelligence agency. It has no foreign intelligence mandate (unless that's changed recently.)

Reporters call it "Canada's CIA," but it is mandated by the government in canada to spy only within the country. They are not a police force and cannot arrest their targets. Canada has a bunch of police intelligence agencies. It is hard to see what democratic function a domestic spy agency plays. Maybe there are good arguments for them.

I've had a lot of fancy bottles in a lot of fancy places, but all things equal, I've never tasted a good wine in poor company.

Funniest thing I ever heard about it was a girl from Cornwall saying "Ah, New Zealand, the thinking man's Australia."

Want diversity? Teach diverse people to start companies.

The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize.

When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.

People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges.

If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer.

The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to.

Everything about e-mail is abnormal.

It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.

Good architecture is leadership based on transparent principles.

The hardest thing for a lot of people to hear is, "you're not wrong, but the thing you're thinking about isn't the essential one." Architecture is about finding the principles and axioms that apply to the situation. It also requires an ability to "let go," in that if your design is good enough, you are no longer personally necessary because the rest has been made obvious, and anyone can implement it.

Elegant thinking can seem obvious, and transmits a great deal of understanding simply. The purpose of architecture is to formulate something that benefits in scale to the efforts of multiple cheaper, less experienced people.