snarf21

As someone with an pretty unusual name, I think kids will always find a reason to make fun of you and it isn't always just the name.

True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.

But isn't the next step where your employer tasks you to codify all these tasks and capture your "process" and "reasoning" and then you can still walk on the beach all you want but you won't have work to do. Isn't the next step for a junior engineer or a single verifier to just add a minor human verification step at a higher level to remove you from the loop? I feel like there is not enough discussion about this mindset shift. Early adoption is taking away the employee moat that some people have but we don't seem to be considering that it is going to be recursive and repeating.

It reminds me of the 7-minute abs scene in Something About Mary.

I think it is slightly different than that. I think it is more about active brain activity versus passive. Learning how to play Riichi Mahjong (e.g.) would likely show a similar effect. A lot of people push brain puzzles as a tool against dementia, etc. but it is only helpful when learning a new puzzle type. Once you over learn it, our innate pattern matching takes over and you start playing on auto-pilot, it stops "rewiring" your brain. Just sitting on the couch binging streaming or swiping through shorts is likely to atrophy your brain.

Obviously being out in nature has other mental health benefits. The key thing is to keep learning and stay curious. Drive to some new nearby town on a weekend and learn about its history. Learn a new hobby like full f-stop photography or learn how to bake or cook (learn all four base sauces). Take up board games and explore all the different kinds of experiences they provide today.

As a board game designer, I was even more curious what this could mean. Also disappointed that it was just about a game with a digital oracle and hacking their app.

That being said, you can reverse engineer a board game and that partially happens a lot in normal design. You have to understand the systems if you want to build on a concept or riff on it. It would be interesting for someone to do a full write-up of the whole process to do so and turn it into a new game that fixes a game's issues but is based on the reverse engineering. Comment if that sounds interesting and with a game to do it on (not something 6 hours long like TI4!) and maybe I'll carve some time away from design and do one. :)

I see this as the eventually end game. Open source models and local hardware are going to be the only path forward for companies as the AI providers move to a constant need to increase prices to drive profitability and stock price.

I disagree on K4. People are claiming they solved it every day using AI but it doesn't pass the verifier. I would be shocked if it was ever solved by AI.

I personally think it is a weird OTP (effectively). We have the book but the algorithm is so unclear it could be anything.

Exactly, a warrant is a transparent and accountable step in convincing a third party that this is probable cause.

Agreed, and a lot of the volatility comes from weather which is an unknown that can swing wildly.

From what I read and watched on this topic, not all of the canals are all gravity fed and there are sections that require pumping. This gives a great local source of power to use in all operations in processing and moving this water.

The main idea in this that scares me is trusting the State of Alabama (e.g.) to protect their private keys. Humans tend to be the weak links in all of these chains.

The problem is that these system are setup specifically to be able to be used incorrectly. Flock is getting all the rage right now but they aren't the only vendor. An acquisition and rename later and everyone will have forgotten this all. Police (others?) are setting up stingrays. Stalin's secret police had a maxim: "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime." Remember, everyone who installed a Ring doorbell camera paid to help set up these kinds of networks. (all so that a porch pirate might get caught even though Amazon will reship for free). These systems also set up a huge target for bad actors to hack outside of the law.

If these things were only ever used with the a valid search warrant, that would be a great step forward. But even that will only stop "honest" people from abusing the system.

I regret that I had but one upvote to give to this comment. Well played!

Yeah, this is the greatest movie of all time and I don't think it is even close. No other movie covers everything it is to be human and in such a sometimes subtle way.

I would argue that the change isn't really about the church as an institution. It is about a 'thing' to belong to and a place to go to every week/month. I've been reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning and it he talks a lot about having a purpose. That is the thing that we have lost. This is why so many feel so lost. We have always been a tribal species. This is what makes "othering" so powerful in today's political climate. Anyone who looks/thinks/behaves different is bad even if we would otherwise be best friends. Instead we go through each day covering up our loneliness and lost feeling with anything that will distract us.

This isn't even new but it is rapidly accelerating. Roll back to the 40s where all houses had a front porch and people sat around talking to each other. Everyone knew their neighbors and kids played freely and everyone felt more safe and actually connected. Then television came along and people rushed to the living room after dinner instead of to the front porch. Now almost no one knows their neighbors beyond superficial "How are you?"s let alone knowing and hanging out with several. It is so bad now that people in the same family sit on the same couch with the television on but all they are doing is scrolling their phone. And this isn't the last chapter, it is going to get worse when all AI and VR merge into custom hamster wheel content that fills but doesn't satisfy. The solution is for us to re-find our purpose, find a hobby, go outside for a walk, volunteer with a cause, visit people, make phone calls and write letters.

The issue is that the people claiming things are rigged are the same ones creating this opportunity and it has nothing to do with digital voting. I live in PA and the current law is that mail-in votes can't be even started to be counted until after the polls have closed. (This law had good intent so that a potential fraudster couldn't know exactly how many votes they needed.) During Covid, Democrats tried to get this law changed and Republicans categorically refused. The only reason not to is that the mail-in (especially during Covid) leaned heavily Biden so they could pretend there was fraud.

I get that people want results very quickly but I don't think paper is a restriction to that. There can just be a law that says you count votes every hour and add them to the tally. So at poll close, you only have to count a small number of late ballots and submit your totals. Everything would be done by 9:00 pm. The thing with double verification and recounts is that for 99%+ of races, the results aren't really in doubt. I do think that deviation from historical statistical patterns for a precinct should be an auto recount as well as results that are less than 1% (X votes) different. This is also where the FEC needs to step in and saw that there are federal rules for how voting must happen as this is a constitutional right, not simply a "do whatever you want" rule. Honestly, we need a new amendment to protect voting rights and stabilize the system a bit more.

We should never allow digital voting ever. Machines should only be allowed to help count with the ability to hand count the paper. There are so many exploits and leverage for software/hardware in any system (even closed ones) that has to be updated every year. It becomes very very hard to create a million "passable" paper votes out of thin air. It is trivial to do with a digital system.

It becomes a scorecard. Success in life is strictly about making the number go up. It doesn't matter if they could spend $100K a day for life and never go broke. They must have a bigger number and be higher on the Forbes (e.g.) list. Some people are so obsessed with it they lie and make up things to claim their number is much higher than it actually is.

Not everyone always has the money not to.

It is largely about insurance reimbursement. Your health insurance won't likely cover something the FDA hasn't cleared.

Yes, this has been going on a long time. However, I think there is quite a bit of data about who is in charge or the White House and Congress when taxes go down/up or the deficit goes down/up, etc. It doesn't take more than one online search to see a very distinct pattern.

I think some people get on this train and they don't really know where to get off or what to do whenever they do get off. So inertia keeps them riding along, doing something that is comfortable (even if they don't enjoy it) to postpone figuring out what to do next. Eventually the train gets to the end of the line and they have to get off and figure something out.

I think this is part of the tragedy of our parents generation pushing college at all costs. It is very hard to know what you want to do for the rest of your life as an 18 yo. Even worse to take on all the debt in the world for something you don't end up loving or without a good path to repayment. In previous generations, some of these people would have done a stint in the service or taken a gap year but now there is too much pressure to know "now".

Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?

There is a new Diplomacy card game (The Golden Blade) that is that is shorter and more approachable (plus no player elimination) and not solvable. You still play secret orders; it is just that now your "borders" are your left and right opponent. You can still work together for extra benefit or betray your neighbor and backstab them. Obviously, there is a lot less potential for complex tactics each turn but it still gives some of the vibes of the classic in a format that is easy to get to the table. There are a lot of YT videos from content creators that you can get a sense of how it plays.

Source: I designed it :) (sorry for the minor self promotion)

The bigger question is that given all the consolidation and monopolies, if the top 2/3 companies do this, what is the alternative? Even for something like car insurance in the US, all the ELT at those want EBITDA at all costs. I'm not sure what fall out will be.

I meant Republicans more broadly. Whatever bad things Reagan did, it is a shadow on current Republican tactics.

Not voting against evil is indeed voting for evil and that is what the net majority did.

The minority doesn't have a charismatic leader to rally around so we don't have a "movement" that can fight back against the corruption at scale. Democrats need to stop taking the high road and start thinking "WWRD?" and out do them.

What a great quote from PKD! He had so much insight into what the future would become.

So there was no terrorism or crime or trafficking or money laundering prior to encrypted comms?

It is also frustrated that this was meant to be a temporary hack during WWII that never went away. People should just get $$ into their HSA from their employer and but whatever plan they want.

Serious question: Wouldn't it be better to just have them always be on with red light that is much less disruptive to wildlife?