At a Starbucks years ago, a woman next to me requested to plug into my USB charger, which had an open port. Since any interaction of mine with a new person was doomed to awkwardness, of course I ended up with the sadly comical three-try, two-rotation final insertion. She made a crack about Schroedinger's USB port and I smiled, then she began to explain to me that it was a physics thing. After I replied that, yeah, that was my undergrad. It turned out to be hers as well. Then we found out that we had both gone into programming. She was doing programming in medicine, and, when prompted for further details, mentioned working on the software for one of those multi-beam radiation gizmos.
I mentioned Therac-25 and we were off to the races. I think we talked for about two hours on programming in high-risk situations, hers in those machines, mine in location services and routing for emergency services. That maniacal technician who irradiated that poor boy (the names escape me) was brought up. At one point we hit on the Challenger disaster. I was comforted to meet another programmer who had certain philosophies about making reliable niche software. I'm not at that level, but I think it is something to which I ought to occasionally aspire.
That's close to what I have gleaned. You'll recall in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, HST goes on and on about the American Dream, as if the duo could locate it in a physical place, like finding the source of a river. In this case, Las Vegas.
I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.
The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract, it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you than not busting your ass, but there are no guarantees. You can only approach the table and go again. Another role of the dice or the hope that you haven't drawn a bad beat.
I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores, background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth. You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still alive, but never met.
Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section of them are products lifted from the mud and polished for public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators' sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.
As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn’t be the _only_ people informing you on society.
You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.
I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.
If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.
To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.
Gracious, I never said that they were the only people informing me on society. They make for some interesting seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a series of books, not really something I can cram into even a page.
I have a very vague concept for this, with a different implementation.
Some, uh, sites (forums?) have content that the AI crawlers would like to consume, and, from what I have heard, the crawlers can irresponsibly hammer the traffic of said sites into oblivion.
What if, for the sites which are paywalled, the signup, which invariably comes with a long click-through EULA, had a legal trap within it, forbidding ingestion by AI models on pain of, say, owning ten percent of the company should this be violated. Make sure there is some kind of token payment to get to the content.
Then seed the site with a few instances of hapax legomenon. Trace the crawler back and get the resulting model to vomit back the originating info, as proof.
This should result in either crawlers being more respectful or the end of the hated click-through EULA. We win either way.
I seem to recall some online lawyer saying that much of what's actually described in EULAs isn't strictly enforceable, simply because it is mentioned.
For example, a EULA might have buried in it that by agreeing, you will become their slave for the next 10 years of your life (or something equally ridiculous). Were it to actually go to court for "violating the agreement", it would be obvious that no rational person would ever actually agree to such an agreement.
It basically boiled down to a claim that the entire process of EULAs are (mostly) pointless because it's understood that no one reads them, but companies insist upon them because a false sense of protection, and the ability to threaten violators of (whatever activity) is better than nothing. A kind of "paper threat".
As it's coming back to me, I think one of the real world examples they used was something like this:
If you go to a golf course and see a sign that says, "The golf course is not responsible for damage to your car from golf balls." The sign is essentially meant as false deterrent - It's there to keep people from complaining by, "informing them of the risk", and make it seem official, so employees will insist it's true if anyone complains, but if you were actually to take it to court, the golf course might still be found culpable because they theoretically could have done something to prevent damage to customers cars and they were aware of the damage that could be caused.
Basically, just because a sign (or the EULA) says it, doesn't make it so.
In Canada and the United States, the penalties for breach of contract are determined based on the actual damages caused. Penalty clauses are generally not enforceable. The courts would ignore your clause and award a dollar amount based on whatever actual damages that you can prove.
That said, I am not a lawyer and this may not be true in all jurisdictions.
How I learned it, as a mere undergrad, was that the mass of the virtual particle for the field in question determined exactly how long it could exist, just by the uncertainty principle -- much like the way the virtual particles drive Hawking radiation.
In short, a massive virtual particle can exist only briefly before The Accountant comes looking to balance the books. And if you give it a speed of c, it can travel only so far during its brief existence before the books get balanced. And therefore the range of the force is determined by the mass of the force carrier virtual particle.
There's probably some secondary and tertiary "loops" as the virtual particle possibly decays during its brief existence, influencing the math a little further, but that is beyond me.
I love ffmpeg, but yeah, some bits are a little ... obscure.
Right now, I am looking to normalize some audio without using ffmpeg-normalize, a popular Python package. Nothing against it on a personal level, I just ... want to know what is going on, and it's a lot of files and lines of code to do what is basically a two-pass process.
I have a growing interest in metadata and that's also a case which I do not find is often well-addressed.
This seems to be very forgotten tech. First time I used that was to load NetHack to ram instead of the slow diskette on my Atari. Now I still use it as webcache for work to not bother the database with so many requests.
When I set up the server, the ramdisk didn't have a way of shrinking when space wasn't needed so had to make sure it doesn't eat up all memory when growing unlimited. I bet it's smarter nowadays.
Ok, but it was very forgotten in my circles when I suggested we use a ramdisk. Ours was at /dev/shm/ I think. Noone had heard of ramdisks and sounded a bit skeptical but the server is still running and no problems with sluggish pages any more.
Ramdisks are so very handy now when you can have much more than 512 kB ram... :-)
I wonder what the people against anonymity would make of the Federalist Papers, if they even remember them. Many of the "founding fathers" of the United States wrote under pseudonyms or other such distractions. Probably a dismissal of the "that was then, this is now" variety, which they only haul out as a defense they do not hold in any great breadth, as those same folks will gladly go on about generational trauma, reparations, and so on. Convenient only.
I have deep but vague thoughts around the concept. My first intuition is that we have put too many things under NULL and None and such.
Partially, we use ... and I'll be very broad here ... "variables" as boxes we look in for answers. Answers to questions, answers to "Hey I put something in there for the time being to reference later." If I went into programming terms rather than just SQL, sometimes we get meta-answers.
You haven't made the box yet (declared the variable).
You haven't decided how the box is structured (picked a type or a length or something).
Okay, you did those but the box is virgin (nothing has been placed in the box yet).
That kind of thing. An empty set for "yes, you asked but nothing meets those criteria."
Do not have faith. Once they pick some dumb track, they will stick with it until they either lose legally or lose in the court of public opinion (donors). See also: Oberlin.
If this is a one-party state, record those calls!
Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free is heading in that direction.
I mentioned Therac-25 and we were off to the races. I think we talked for about two hours on programming in high-risk situations, hers in those machines, mine in location services and routing for emergency services. That maniacal technician who irradiated that poor boy (the names escape me) was brought up. At one point we hit on the Challenger disaster. I was comforted to meet another programmer who had certain philosophies about making reliable niche software. I'm not at that level, but I think it is something to which I ought to occasionally aspire.
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