You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.
I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
That’s like asking why a fair and just executive shouldn’t be interested in eliminating the overhead of an independent judiciary. Synchronically, it should. Diachronically, that’s one of the things that ensures that it remains fair and just. Similarly for transparency and leakers, though we usually call those leakers “sources speaking on condition of anonymity” or some such. (It does mean that the continued transparency of a modern democratic government depends on people’s continual perpetration of—for the most part—mildly illegal acts. Make of that what you will.)
So SpinQuant learns a rotation for activations and weights that, to my understanding, "smear" the outlier weights out so you don't get extreme values in any one weight.
Random anecdote warning - In the old days, before vector search became AI and everyone and their dog offered a vector database, I had a task that required nearest neighbour search in a decent amount of high-dimensional vectors.
I tried quantizing them to bit vectors in an index and scanning through it to get an initial set of candidates.
Performance was actually quite decent - reading through RAM linearly is fast! But the selectivity wasn't great.
Somewhere along the way I found this paper[1] that iteratively finds a rotation to apply before quantization to reduce the quantization error. Very similar goal to SpinQuant, but focused on bit quantization only.
As it turns out the 'random rotation' baseline they benchmark against worked great for my use case, so I never tried implementing the fancier algorithm. But it's a pretty rare day at work that "apply a random rotation matrix to a 128-dimensional vector" is the solution to my problem.
> We provide evidence that the incomplete adjustment of share prices to splits or reverse splits can be attributed to heterogeneity in traders' cognitive abilities.
Or you could have done the same for free by setting the packet TTL on all client devices to 65. Carriers check if a device is using hotspot by looking at packet TTLs. Anything coming from your phone directly has a TTL of 64, but anything connected via hotspot loses one TTL hopping through your phone, so it comes through as 63 (or 127 for Windows devices). Overriding your client TTL to 65 means that carriers will receive the packet with a TTL of 64.
You put words onto page with which given a thousand I could not have equaled. We will all follow, in time.
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I'm given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."
Also, to acclimatize them to the structure of working where we spend massive amounts of our time carrying out arbitrary tasks with arbitrary deadlines. The core work skill for many jobs is our ability to both believe and co-create the shared fiction that they are important enough to even spend time on in the first place.
rlwrap is fantastic. here's a multichannel text chat system for other people who can ssh to the same host, with command-line editing, cross-session history, and logging provided by rlwrap:
#!/bin/sh
# Simple chat system frontend, wrapping gyap in rlwrap and maybe ssh.
: ${GYAP_LOGFILE=$HOME/gyap.log} ${GYAP_COMMAND=gyap}
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then
rlwrap -C gyap -l "$GYAP_LOGFILE" "$GYAP_COMMAND" "$@"
else
host=$1; shift
rlwrap -C gyap -l "$GYAP_LOGFILE" ssh "$host" "$GYAP_COMMAND" "$@"
fi
the actual chat system is another 10-line shell script called `gyap`
#!/bin/sh
: Simple chat system. cf. rgyap. ${nick=${1-$USER}} ${chan=${2-/var/tmp/chat}}
echo "Chatting on $chan as <$nick> (override with $0 \$nick [\$chan])"
touch "$chan" && chmod 666 "$chan" 2>/dev/null
sign() {
echo "$(date +%T) * $nick signed $1 ($(date +%05Y-%m-%d))" >> "$chan"
}
echo "Press ^R if a chat line appears as you are typing. Recently:"
tail -Fn 16 "$chan" & pid=$?; trap "sign off; sleep .1; kill $pid" 0
sign on; while read t; do echo "$(date +%T) <$nick> $t"; done >> "$chan"
it's not secure of course; anyone can spoof anyone else or fill up your /var/tmp disk, or read the log without signing onto the channel
it would be nice to have rlwrap options to customize tab-completion, for example for expanding to recently-mentioned nicks or slapping someone around a bit with a large trout
Reminds me of Planck's principle:
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
fwiw I totally understand the sentiment! it's actually a bit sad to me that so much of our content is moving from the shared, open web to platforms like twitter, unfortunately there seems to be too much value add around built-in discoverability, comments, ease of authoring, for many people revenue sharing, etc.
"and block its websites." So this keeps Israelis from reading Al Jazeera.
Now that's new. Israel started Internet censorship in 2017.[1] Initially it was limited to "terror group websites, online illegal gambling, prostitution services, hard drug sales". At the time, "due to warnings from rights groups that the law poses a slippery slope toward additional censorship, the final version of the legislation dictates that rights groups may appeal the decisions."
Then, in 2021, there was the "Facebook bill", authorizing very broad censorship.[2] That does not seem to have passed. It was first proposed in 2016, almost passed in 2018 [3], tried in 2021, and tried again in 2022. It doesn't seem to have passed.
But something new happened recently. Wikipedia has a note at Censorship in Israel: "This article needs to be updated. The reason given is: New ban issued by the knesset on foreign media channels. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (April 2024)"[4]
The Knesset gave the government the authority to ban foreign media on April 1, 2024.[5]
This isn't just about preventing outside media from reporting from Israel. It keeps Israelis from viewing media the government doesn't like. Haarez has good coverage.[6]
The US White House press secretary issued a weak statement condemning Israel's action, but it was on April 1st and the costumed Easter Bunny overshadowed that statement.[7]
Not sure if this answers the question but one time I took a ridiculous amount of 2c-b(100mg) and and it was like everything was stuttering. Continuous sounds like my computer fan sounded like a repetitive banging sound instead and movement was discontinuous as well.
I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations.
> Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement.
In the earliest days at amazon, we had a customer who had placed an order for several books. One of the books was no longer available, and when we notified the customer, they wanted to replace it with a different book that cost more than the original. They had paid by check (!) for the original order, but wanted to use a credit card to pay the difference.
Myself and the other founding programmer groaned - our system was not designed to have multiple payments via different payment systems for a single order, nor to handle cases of a partial payment that did not correspond to the value of an entire order.
Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever".
I'm not proud of what Amazon has done or become, and there is much to criticize or even protest about. But this level of committment to customer service, to whatever extent it has actually survived the last 30 years - that's something that was both eye opening to me and something to be just a tiny bit proud of.
although the definition of ‘free’ has been adjusted over time, mostly to mean no money changes hands. Just watch a few ads, allow the content providers to share your data with the world, and enjoy a lifetime of ‘free’ content.
And it stays this way, because attention and personal data are magically exempt from AML/KYC.
If I "pay with my attention" by watching ads, no AML/KYC is required.
If I "pay with my data" by being tracked, no AML/KYC is required.
But if I want to pay with real money, AML/KYC is required. And the cost of doing AML/KYC is prohibitive for micropayments.
We have outlawed micropayments-with-money while allowing micropayments-with-data and micropayments-with-attention.
The result of doing this should surprise absolutely nobody.
> They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.
That's exactly correct, and now we are one step closer to understanding the precession of simulacra of identity.
The crude maps of the 16th century cartographer were of such low fidelity and accuracy that it became impossible to confuse them with the territory, with all its contours and nuances elided from the scribbles of ink on parchment. Contrast with Google Maps, that has captured the earth in such exquisite detail, down to the meter, that we now regard it as a more or less one-to-one representation of the Earth in itself; a simulacrum of the "first order," which "is the reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard 1981).
But the representation does not stop there; now with things like listings of local businesses, we have progressed to a simulacrum of the "second order," which "masks and denatures a profound reality" - does your business even exist, if I can't find it on Google Maps? If your road has signage calling it one thing, while Google Maps calls it another [0], which name is correct? How will your GPS navigate such a world when the map and the territory have diverged this far from one another?
The end game of the precession is the creation of entire virtual worlds and maps (think, de_dust2) that represent no territories at all, but are a territory in their own virtual right - a simulacrum of the "fourth order," or "the hyperreal:" "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
Alan Watts spoke of a similar phenomenon in one of his lectures on meditation [1]:
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
We are now at a stage where the newer generations have confused these symbols of ourselves - Reddit, Facebook, Instagram accounts - with the actual people in themselves. It has become possible to capture, record, misrepresent, mask, and denature our lives and the people within them to such a high degree of fidelity, that, just as it has become possible to confuse Google Maps with the territory of the Earth itself, it becomes possible to confuse the Reddit account for the real person. The social media account, having "precessed" far past the point of "denaturing a profound [person]" through Photoshop and Instagram filters, has now achieved "hyperreality," where the Reddit account now _becomes_ a person in its own right. The real person _is_ the Reddit account, and the Reddit account _is_ the person.
If it happened with God in the quarrels between the iconoclasts and the idol worshipping iconolaters, it can happen with mere mortals, too:
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today. [...] that
deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever
existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own
simulacrum-from this came their urge to destroy the images.
- Baudrillard, 1981.
It's worth also noting that the spycraft involved a coordinated harassment campaign of the original maintainer, with multiple writing styles, to accelerate a transition of maintainership to the attacker:
In the film, the technology of the Matrix isn't intrinsically viewed as a terrible thing. The people of Zion use it to learn, to train, for pleasure and for work. What they're really fighting against is those who control the Matrix, who are using it to exert control through orchestrated cycles of violence. The enemy isn't even AI itself, most of the artificial intelligences are as much a slave to the system as the humans are.
Our failings aren't the fault of technology, though technology can exposes the failings in ourselves. It's easier to blame technology than people, though it's not like I don't relate. I've yelled at my computer before.
I keep thinking about parking cash in box spreads on SPX directly -- pay net $98,000 in option premium now and earn $100,000 in a few months, effectively lending to the market at the rate implied by highly liquid option prices.
The section 1256 tax treatment is especially cool not so much because of the 60/40 taxation but because if you have several consecutive years of 60/40 gains you can edit your past year's income by incurring a current year loss and having a carryback loss.
Articles (and the ensuing comments) always miss something major: construction and software are not even remotely the same thing.
For example, in construction you have:
* Architect (designs the building)
* Designer (prepares the technical drawings)
* Engineer (signs off the drawings)
* Manufacturing (makes building parts to the drawings)
* Surveyors (make sure the land can be built on)
* Builders (build the building)
* Roofers (put the roof on)
* Site managers (make sure the builders build the building)
* Building Control (government sign-off on the built building)
* Sparkies (put wires in)
* Plumbers (put the pipes in)
* Plasterers (put the plaster on the walls)
* Painters/decorators (finish the walls)
* Fitters (put everything else in)
All of these are separate businesses and I'm sure I've missed some things, or misnamed others. And, despite a number of people being legally liable for shoddy work, we still see things like Grenfell happen.
Software engineering, by contrast:
* Product manager (figures out what to make)
* Designer (figures out how it should work/look)
* Software engineer (writes the code)
* Auditor (compliance with relevant standards e.g. PCI DSS or SOC2)
There's also a bunch of stuff supporting that but I left them out because I'd add 5x more on the construction side.
My point isn't to say who has it harder, or which field is "better," just to point out that the fields aren't comparable at all.
The fact that your entire life's story, your narrative, is also forever preserved in the archives of the net, also lends credence to the illusion of a permanent, unchanging, fixed and immutable self.
People don't change. They can't change. It's impossible to act "out of character," because if you act in a manner that is opposed to how you have been depicted, represented on social media in the past, people will say, "oh, that's not the real you!" and reject all your attempts at self transformation, reminding you of who you were, where you've been, what you were wearing in that group photo last Friday...
It's fundamentally changing our concept of self, ossifying it in our digital fossil record. It's impossible to introduce a discontinuity into the thread of your life's story when the cameras are rolling 24/7. The cognitive fluency of being able to access thousands of self-representations, facsimiles of who you are, makes it easier to identify with the selfie on the screen. Easier to identify with the profile picture or the avatar. Easier to become locked into the constraints you imposed on yourself when you decided to freeze a snapshot of your person and preserve it in a digital time capsule. Easier to fall prey to the delusion that the self is permanent and immutable.
You never step in the same river twice. It just looks like the same river when we take a picture of it and frame it on our wall.
> Boeing should move the its HQ back to Washington state...Microsoft had the same problem when Balmer was in charge, focus around sales and not engineering.
While Balmer was CEO the HQ was in Washington state :-)
More seriously, Balmer is an excellent example, because I believe the Boeing case is more mendacious, yet more banal.
Balmer seemed to have the right idea, yet utterly the wrong intuition. It's especially strange in that he was there pretty much from the very beginning, and influenced the growth of the business, yet fatally he never learned what the business actually was.
When Balmer took over MS, the business rested on several pillars:
1 - A captive client base based on CIOs and IT departments
2 - A dedicated and committed employee base
3 - A huge army of outside developers who benefited when MS succeeded, so helped the latter happen.
4 - A consumer business ultimately driven by the size of #1
He was over focused on #1 (in the classic "The Innovator's Dilemma" style) which is why the iphone not only nuked their phone business but opened up a BYOD movement which eroded IT's power (ironically Apple had done the same with the Apple II+Visicalc, which Microsoft shrewedly took advantage of and rode to domination...while Balmer was there).
2 - Picayune things like replacing free snacks with vending machines told the staff that he didn't give a shit about them, rather thought of them simply like a resource.
You can see from the "developers developers developers" video that he really did value #3, and much as I dislike him as a businessman I loved him for that. But eventually it became clear he understood its importance to the business but didn't understand why.
4 - this pillar flailed due to neglect under him, including Xbox, Skype etc.
He grew up with the car business, but grew up when the industry was in the shitter, surviving on momentum, and got his MBA in the intellectually (in regards to business) terrible 1970s. He appears to have learned nothing from his long time at MS before becoming CEO and ran the business like a shitty 1970s car company.
Note that the US car industry only got its act together after 1 - getting their clock cleaned and 2 - going back having gearheads as CEOs.
The Boeing case is similar, but worse. I never believed that Ballmer was subject to lazy or misaligned incentives; he was simply wrongheaded. I do thing the MCDD guys who took over Boeing were incentivised by their comp plans to optimize for the wrong things, all in the short term. The same thing destroyed HP.
For something more rustic, an .inputrc file with this:
# history-search-backward / history-search-forward bound to the up and down arrows
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[C": forward-char
"\e[D": backward-char
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on
Will search through anything matching what you've already entered. Type something like "gr" and scroll up or down to see all your previously used grep commands.
Saw this long ago on here and it's on every machine I use now, can't live without it. Thankyou to whoever originally posted it.
Why do people carry out muggings? Because they gain from it. Morality and legality aren't just divergent - they're orthogonal. Just like one can perform moral and immoral actions in physical space, one can perform moral or immoral actions using the legal system. Despite the goal of the legal system being to punish immoral behavior, being able to actually formalize that is up against the limit of complexity - as soon as rules are made to discourage bad behavior, the lawful bad actors move on to using those very laws to carry out attacks.
A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.
The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.
The edge cases are the important cases though. Those parties I throw are the highlight of my year. My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah I have a desk job but that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies.
I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring.
Where I think this article goes a little wrong is the assumption that a RACI is about risk management. A RACI can tell you who is responsible for running the risk management process, but the R (responsible) and A (accountable), are not meant to move risk and absolve all others. They're just markers for "who is going to get this work done". They are about managing work, not managing the risks that can arise from that work.
Risk management is something a lot of people talk about, some people over-complicate, but few seem to do well.
I have an approach that is a mixture of agile and formal methods that is actually quite simple, and includes voices from lots of groups. I've done this on many dozens of software projects.
First of all there needs to be a list of risks. This list needs to be contributed to by all stake-holders, including third-parties responsible for any part of the delivery.
"We all agree these things could stop the project being successful".
Then you need to quantify the risks to prioritise them. The best way I've learned to do this is a number - between 1 and 10 - for "likelihood" and "impact".
A 10 on likelihood is "this is certainly going to happen", a 1 is "it very probably won't, but it could".
Impact is a bit more subjective, but a 10 is "if this happens, the project is guaranteed to fail and it's going to be awful", a 5 is "it would be pretty serious, but there are things that could happen to save the project despite it" and a 1 is "this probably doesn't matter".
Talk it through, everyone needs to agree these are sensible estimates.
"We all agree these are reasonable quantifications of the impact and likelihood of the risks".
Then multiply the two numbers. Low likelihood (2) but high impact (8) gets a score of 16. High likelihood (8), high impact (7), gets 56. Low on both (2 and 2), gets 4.
Order them. Start at the top scoring one. Figure out mitigations.
Mitigations are actions. They have dates by which they must be done, and owners who are accountable for those actions. They can include third-parties, but if they're not at the table, somebody with a contractual relationship with that third party who is at the table (say, the customer), is going to have to own the mitigation and be accountable for it.
Keep going until you get below a threshold (say, a score of 20), or you have eliminated anything above moderate score (say, 4), in either the likelihood or impact columns.
You've now got clear insight of what your risks are, quantified how important they are, identified mitigations and their owners and due dates, and can have regular conversations.
Mitigations could be rows in the RACI if they are strategic recurring processes or large items of work. But you can't just put it in there at the start and hope it gets managed, you need to actively manage to get it in there.
"We all agree these are the actions that will be taken, and by whom, and by when, to manage the risks we have agreed and prioritised together".
You will need to revisit this list - sometimes called a risk register - multiple times as the project progresses and you learn new things (agile isn't just for engineers).
This, I think anybody would agree, is project management.
Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca's Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]:
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes. You have something to do: wrestle bravely with disease. If it shall compel you to nothing, beguile you to nothing, it is a notable example that you display. O what ample matter were there for renown, if we could have spectators of our sickness! Be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
And if you have lost, or are losing, someone you love, read Letter 63 [1]:
So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: "The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed." If we take the word of Attalus for it, "to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?"
Very sad, but beautiful. The following passage especially stuck with me:
"Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.
"The illusion protects us…from realizing how transient our preferences and values are which might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.
"Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Okay, that’s kind of a mouthful. I’m not good at pithy marketing slogans. Knowledge of Jake’s impending death brings with it the certainty that my life is about to undergo tremendous, nonconsensual upheaval, inevitably changing my preferences and values, though I don’t know any details except that I’ll change in likely vast and unexpected ways. Without the comforting illusion of stasis, what can I do to assuage the anxiety caused by reality? That’s what the videos are for."
I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.