Gene_Parmesan

They made multiple drops, one for $30,000, another for $70,000, following months of correspondence. There's plenty of context if you read the link -- unless you are for some reason accusing the FBI of wholesale fabrication of a story leading to the arrest of two relatively unimportant scientists.

No judgment is meant here - I am always so curious about people who think water is bland. When I'm thirsty, cold ice water is the best tasting thing on the planet to me.

I enjoy the taste of diet pop, but I also find myself reaching for it sometimes out of sheer boredom rather than thirst. If I drink some water and I find it bland, to me that's a sign I wasn't actually thirsty.

I don't think there's anything unusual about reaching for a soda as a treat for its taste. But in terms of pure thirst-quenching - damn does water hit the spot.

It's worth noting that chess grandmasters can burn up to 6000 calories per day while competing in tournaments. It's an absolutely exhausting endeavor, and I imagine sheer endurance can play a huge role.

So yes, performance does fall off with age, though not as intensely as something like hockey.

The problem is education won't reach everyone, and the broad, easy availability of the drug gives people the incorrect feeling that it is much safer than it actually is. ("If they let you just buy it, how dangerous can it possibly be?")

Any drug where the toxic dose is that close to the suggested dose is going to be dicey when we let people buy it OTC. Notice I'm not saying we should prevent it from being OTC -- as someone who is not a doctor I have no clue on that. Just saying that I don't think it's fair to categorize people who take took much Tylenol without realizing the potential deadliness Darwin Award candidates.

* I'm also going to make an edit to say, you suggest education, but isn't that exactly what this article is doing? If you want people to take warnings seriously, the warnings need to be serious.

I think when most people talk about "ending censorship" they are talking very specifically about speech. Any link between the idea of speech and the sharing of child abuse material or drug marketplaces is extremely tenuous. Most non-anarchists agree that there are reasonable limits that must be placed on behaviors and enforced by governments. Trying to claim "not letting me buy drugs online is censorship" feels like little more than mental gymnastics.

It was great for rap lyrics - which makes sense because it's a heavily lyric-centric genre. Sometimes the artists themselves would provide annotations, people would provide context for veiled references, etc.

So to me it makes all the sense in the world that they struggled to expand beyond that niche. The idea that the rap lyrics site would expand into annotating speeches or acts of Congress just doesn't scan.

It's the difference between textual mimicry, and what we humans do, which is communication. We conceive of an idea, a concept, that we wish to communicate, and the brain then pulls together appropriate words/symbols as well as the syntactic/semantic rules that we have internalized over decades of communicating to create a statement that accurately represents the idea. If I want to communicate the fact that X and Y are disparate things, I know that "not" is a symbol that can be used to signify this relationship.

The core of the difference to me (admittedly not an AI researcher) is intentionality. Humans conceive of an intention, then a communication. This is not what models like GPT-3 do as there is no intentionality present. GPT-3 can create some truly freaky texts but most that I've seen longer than a few sentences suffer from a fairly pronounced uncanny valley effect due to that lack of intention. It's also why I (again, recognizing my lack of expertise) think expecting GPT-3 to do things like provide medical advice is a fool's errand.

Nah, not really. Video games have been shown to be very good at increasing problem solving, planning, and fine motor skills. The problem is parents (including mine) who didn't/don't put reasonable limits on their use. A kid who plays video games a couple hours per week is going to turn out just fine.

I think there are also serious qualitative differences between games in the 90s/00s and mobile freemium games of today.

I spent six years working as a lawyer and absolutely despised it. Early on during this hell I rediscovered a curiosity in programming I had as a child. I became obsessed with it and within about six months knew I had to try to do it as a career.

It took me four years but I did it. What I will say is this -- I have definitely lost a hobby, in the sense that a hobby should be something that allows you to be creative while not feeling or reminding you of work. While I was still a lawyer, software dev (and learning it) was my hobby. I would be at work dreaming of coming home so I could tweak whatever project I was working on.

Now that I'm getting paid for it, I am completely in love with my job. Partly it's that I work for a great company now -- e.g., we get 25 days PTO (and yes, it's an American company, and no, I'm not a senior level). But partly it's that I spent time on the other side -- doing something purely because it provided me with money. Is programming work now? Yes, definitely -- but it's work I love doing.

However, I realized quickly after I started that I no longer felt like programming very much when I came home. I know that's kind of a no-no to admit to in this field, but it's true. I still do go through phases where I'll go really deep on some project for a while. But mostly I'm content to let my programming happen on the job. When I do program at home, it's still fun but it's colored by all the new relationships the activity has to work.

It certainly does, depending of course on where you migrated from. Someone from a first world country and who has established assets is going to be in an easier position than someone who doesn't. And unfortunately, in this country credit isn't really an option, everything from potential landlords to employers can use it against you.

Okay, but search and browsing history is not a good way to extend this data for these populations.

Personally, when it comes to technical topics, I have not ever found an extended analogy that made a subject less confusing. Analogies are fine as a quick way to introduce the flavor of a topic -- saying "Kafka is like a river..." at least gets me started on the right footing. But when they extend onwards and onwards, I always just end up feeling like the analogy-creator is sort of reveling in a semi-poetic alignment they have found. Such alignments can be very strongly linked in one's head to a topic, because that's how brains learn -- they learn by linking new things to already-known things. However, they can also be quite person-dependent, and rarely do they contain enough hard & fast detail to count as helpful in the context of a technical explanation.

Someone can write lots of paragraphs on this Kafka/river analogy (just one random example), but that doesn't impart in my head the same neuronal linkage that they have. Instead I am left, like the post author, trying to figure out how far the analogy extends, what the limits are (okay, so messages are like notes-in-bottles dropped in the river... but what are the fish? are there fish?), and so on. I would rather get clear, detailed explanation, and then think through the subject on my own time in a way that allows my brain to build its own relationships with the information. Maybe instead of rivers, my brain begins to understand Kafka as, I don't know, highways.

I don't know anything about MathBox, but manim's niche is animation for videos.

This seems to be a viral inaccuracy: https://www.howtogeek.com/664624/does-zoom-really-monitor-wh...

That article claims that Zoom does have a feature allowing hosts to see whether people have the zoom window focused while someone is presenting, but it doesn't allow the host to actually see running processes. Note that I can't, nor do I claim to, vouch for the accuracy of the explanation in the link. Just something I found.

Nah, not really. Automobile pricing is closer to traditional K offer/acceptance laws. Additionally no car dealer would advertise such a deal without including a clause stating the price is subject to (usually many) conditions and could change at any time.

False advertising is a rather narrow doctrine, one that by necessity has to interact with standard contract law. Cases where false advertising involves prices usually include issues like hidden fees (telecoms signing you up for X a month but then your bill includes Y fees that weren't disclosed to you). More commonly, false advertising concerns things like consumer deception - claims that something is "clinically proven" when it actually isn't, for instance.

In general, in contract law, if the changed price is communicated to you before you have accepted the offer, then there's no issue. There are literally hundreds of years of precedent going back to the English common law describing what does and does not constitute an offer and what does and doesn't constitute acceptance of an offer.

The sort of well-to-do 40+ lawyer you describe is really only something found at "biglaw" firms, and not only that, but people at biglaw firms who have managed to make partner. Getting hired into biglaw is like getting hired into big tech from CS school, but less predictable because it's almost universally based on law school rank after your first year. And law school rank is almost universally dependent upon exam grades. In law school, your grade for a class for the entire semester is dependent on one exam; mine often had somewhere around 4 questions. You can know the material back and front objectively, but if you have not managed to divine how the prof wants their questions answered, you will score poorly.

Everyone goes into law school thinking they will be the one to get high grades, but in my experience, working hard was not well correlated with good grades. Even if you work harder than anyone else, it still somewhat comes down to a coin flip. This can be so frustrating, I cannot even begin to describe it.

Even if you then make it into biglaw (a low percentage), you then need to make partner (an extremely low percentage). This is far more about a) office politics, b) connections, and c) your ability to "rain make" by bringing in big new clients; than about your skill as a practitioner of law.

I would also caution against looking at numbers like salary in isolation. Law is full of unhappy rich people. 36% of the profession suffer from alcohol use disorders, compared to ~12% of the general population. Nearly half experience depression at some point (compared to 15% in the general population, in the stat I was able to locate). It's not a happy field.

Phew. Good luck to all of them.

I was part of the crowd that used law school to avoid entering the job market on the tail end of the 2007 crisis. I actually really enjoyed law school itself; it's a good fit for people with brains that are a combination of analytical and philosophical. Of course, it's trite at this point to mention the reality that law school does not prepare you whatsoever for the job of being a lawyer. Imagine if med school classes were all about the 'idea' of medicine, the philosophy of medicine, that sort of thing, and actually practicing medicine was limited to electives and extracurriculars.

I went to a school that was T20 and on the cusp of being T14, so a good school. I had a half tuition scholarship on $40,000+/yr and still walked away with nearly $150k in student loans.

Law schools are extremely cheap for universities to run, but they can get away with charging astronomical tuition because everyone is convinced law school will make them rich. (It won't, unless you have a dedication to the work of being a biglaw attorney that most people don't have.) Universities love law schools because they can use them to pay for more expensive programs (science labs, etc.).

The idea of making multiple six figures is almost universally a myth that schools love to cultivate. You only really have a shot at this if you go to a T20 school (or are highly connected). And even if you do get this sort of job, it is soul sucking work; your job at that sort of firm is simply to maximize billings. Nothing of value is created. You will work 70/80 hour weeks creating nothing. I had many friends from school go to these sort of firms and, almost to a one, they have all quit the biglaw scene.

But what the law schools don't tell you is how oversaturated the legal employment market is, and oversaturation => depressed salaries. If you are not one of the few to go biglaw (or do not want biglaw), good luck. I worked as a criminal prosecutor because I found the work interesting. I started at $39k -- in a fairly major city, too. I know so many people with eye-wateringly expensive law degrees who are thrilled to be finding contract or temp work at $20 an hour.

As for me, it took me about six months to realize the practice of law wasn't for me and a total of six years to get out of it. I ended up rediscovering a love of programming I had had from when I was a kid, and spend 4 years self-studying CS/software dev. I transitioned to a software dev role going on 3 years ago now and feel like a new person. I can't really say I regret law school, firstly because I met my wife and many good friends there and in the legal profession generally, but secondly because there's a chance having the degree from a well known school could pay off down the road in some sort of management role. However, was it worth the cost? Almost certainly not.

I'll close by saying, if you are someone who loves building things, you will likely not do well with the law. It is mental work, yes, and logic is involved definitely, but the 'products' you will be creating are motions, briefs, and memos. If you are someone who has a love for collaborative problem solving, you will likely hate it. There is very little I found collaborative in law. Even in law school, absurdly competitive attitudes abound, and in the big firms themselves, the ones who will succeed are in constant 'cold war'-style competition for things like partner track. If your work is litigation, then by definition the work is the polar opposite of collaborative. This was what probably put me off the practice the most; I would be handling a criminal case and my brain would be aching for an easily available compromise, but being an advocate means fighting for your client (in my case, the "people").

Wow that's dumb. I've done some reading on 3d computational geometry for hobbyist game engine reasons, and in my admittedly limited experience, very few of the algorithms involved are intuitive enough to be derivable in an interview setting.

If you take the name National Security Agency at face value, it makes sense.

Why does anyone think abolishing copyright is a good idea?

Your friend writes a novel. They've never been published before, so they shop it around to various publishers, but no dice. A little while later, they see a hot new entry on the bestsellers list, and surprise, it's their novel word for word - one of the publishers took it.

Without copyright this can happen to writers, musicians, film creators, artists, and so on.

There should absolutely be limits on copyright. Disney should not be allowed to turn the copyright laws into their own personal tool. But I see so many people who get angry when corporations take advantage of copyright, and so few of them seem to consider the fact that the same laws protect the little guy against those same corporations. Unless we want Disney to literally be able to get away with stealing art from anyone and everyone, we need intellectual property laws.

As for patents, the general idea behind patents is that in order to get one, you need to describe your technique. The motivation is furthering shared knowledge - we give you the promise of exclusive use of the patent for a limited time in order to encourage you to divulge your invention. Patent law is more ripe for abuse than copyright but its general policy motive is still sound.

> A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well.

I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to live in a mild-to-moderately isolated community - moving to Hawaii, northern Alaska, some random island. It's fascinating reading blogs by people who live there, and many of them have a "So You Want to Move to _____" type of post. In virtually all of them, there is some comment along the lines of "It's really hard to find all the things you're used to buying out here, but at least Amazon delivers to us." One of those that I was reading about Hawaii said the big island only has a few big box stores but Amazon can deliver in two to three days.

Just thought that was an interesting tidbit.

Definitely components are the way to go. These have gotten very well known recently in the game dev world thanks to entity component systems, which is what I would call "heavy components," but you can also do "light components." Meaning, you don't need to organize your entire system around an ECS in order to take advantage of some of their benefits.

They make changing behavior dynamically extremely simple. Instead of needing to hardcode classes for each different type of thing players may want to create in your world, you just assign and unassign components. Give a rock the Moveable component and now it moves. Remove the PlayerControl component from the player and put it on, I don't know, an orc -- now you've implemented body swapping. They're even more useful in a game like traditional roguelikes, where you don't have to worry about animating all these dynamic states.

I've actually never thought about how a component system might fit into a more traditional business application; it's an interesting thought experiment but I'm not quite sure it would be a strong benefit.

I unabashedly love WPF but I 100% agree on the need for a CSS-like interface for styling. It's a blind spot that was forgivable ten+ years ago but nowadays there's really no excuse for it.

In fact, this is what they mean when they say it's almost impossible to know who the real sociopaths are. The true ones are so charismatic and good at manipulation that, unless you are extraordinarily close to them or get on their bad side, they just seem like the sort of person that everyone likes.

Interestingly, a minority of people seem to be somewhat able to see through the facade. I have ADHD and a brother who's very nearly on the autism spectrum, and both of those conditions seem correlated with this ability to have an unbiased sense of a person. Perhaps it's due to the way we are slightly detached from normal social interactions, or the highly analytical way our brains function. All I know is that there are definitely times I feel this. For instance, if you look online, there are tons of relatively recent videos that have special forces types (SEALS, rangers, etc.) commenting on movie scenes or so on. The comments are always full of people talking about how they seem like such a great person, or how funny/charming/positive/etc. this person is. Meanwhile, I just come away with this feeling of being very deeply unsettled by them almost every time. Everything about their demeanor unsettles me. Now I'm in no way saying every special forces operator is a closet sociopath. But the job does attract a certain personality type, and many of the ones on these videos are the most charismatic of the whole bunch.

Back on topic, John always seemed to be to be a pretty typical narcissist to me. He did some stuff that I found to be funny in kind of a black humor sense (that video of him supposedly telling you how to uninstall McAfee antivirus), but the idea that he was a truly positive person I just totally don't see. I mean, think about it -- the OP's story involves John having the guy call his wife and tell him how great he thought John was and how great his ideas were. That's pretty typical narcissistic behavior.

Snip and sketch allows you to save a copy of your snip. For me, that's the tool that comes up when I do the Win+Shift+S shortcut. Really handy tool and shortcut.

I think the whole idea is cool! It doesn't have to be useful to be cool, in fact some of the coolest projects are eminently unuseful.

I think this is an awesome resume project. They've built an IDE (which is impressive by itself), and then they've got this whole parsing code from OCR thing on top that's not necessarily useful but man is it cool. The fact that it shows a good sense of humor is just icing on the cake.

Like, search and replace on pictures of code contained in PNG files... Just amazing.

Well, technically it's a disorder at that point - delayed sleep phase disorder, which I have secondary to ADHD.

Circadian rhythm is genetically determined and all long term studies of delayed sleep phase show it's essentially impossible to change. However it's one of those things that's a disorder only because it goes against what our societies expect.

I used to think I had insomnia for years, because I would try to sleep at "normal" times and struggled. When a sleep doctor suggested I change my sleep patterns to match my genetics, my perceived insomnia immediately disappeared. Now I just have to deal having with a sleep pattern that everyone else identifies as belonging to disaffected teenagers.

FWIW, a recent study found a physical cause for this - something about a genetic mutation that causes our sleep-signaling hormones to be created without the tails they usually have to navigate to the correct spots in the brain. So once again, the people claiming "It's just willpower" are proven wrong. Funny how the more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that willpower as a concept fully within our control doesn't necessarily exist.

> There are also catch-all laws in the US that one can go to prison for, basically for acting in "bad faith" but never actually doing anything else criminally wrong.

As someone who used to be a criminal prosecutor in the US, I would be very interested in seeing citations to whatever statute you are referencing.

As far as being charged as an accessory, you generally need to have known that a crime was or would be occurring, and to have provided some form of assistance. That doesn't need to be direct actions in the act, it could be financial or emotional assistance.

And no one is going to prison over shoplifting unless we're talking about repeat offenders or large amounts of cash. Let alone just happening to know someone who shoplifted and failing to report them.

Having said that, definitely don't talk to the police without a lawyer present.

Unfortunately this is significantly harder than you might think. The perps tend to be citizens of countries who happily turn a blind eye to their activities so long as they aren't infecting their domestic systems. What interest do Russia or post-Soviet states have in prosecuting cybergangs that destabilize Western business and infrastructure? I mean, maybe we can create such interests/motivations, but now we are talking about a major geopolitical issue.

If major infrastructure continues to be hit I think we will eventually see this happen, but we absolutely cannot count on foreign states to 'do the right thing.'

I have found (and know several who agree with me) that Google search quality seems to have taken a dive in recent times. It's almost like instead of just searching, it makes assumptions about my purpose for searching and funnels results according to that assumption. If one of my search terms aligns with a current film, it assumes I want show times. If I search for a city, it assumes that I want to book travel there. Ditto for essentially every search I do.

If it guesses my purpose correctly, it feels almost like magic. But it's wrong more often than not.

However, let's not be revisionist. Back in the day, Google was light-years ahead of anything else I had used.