KirinDave

I read hundreds of pages of such writing a week and I can assure you that if this is a practice, it is not well observed by academics or engineers in the field.

I don't understand why you think that writing on a very technical subject needs to build you a ladder to climb on as a prerequisite. There is a link to a very high quality talk right at the top of the article for folks who wanted to dive deeper that specifically makes that effort.

I found the article quite good, and if you had genuinely been motivated to engage with the content you could have highlighted the acronym and searched for it. There is a wealth of good info for "CRDTs" that comes up on the first page of Google, Bing or DDG.

Does the acronym actually illuminate what they are or how they function? I submit to you that it probably doesn't.

What's inappropriate about the behavior here, I wonder? The interviewer got exactly what they asked for, and an awful lot more signal than they probably were expecting.

I guess my question is: as an amateur radio enthusiast, why should I tolerate a special exception for THESE people to broadcast data if I can't even do something as simple as coordinate club meeting addresses in private over the airwaves?

Even if I saw HFT as a valuable thing (I don't), it's unfair to create a new exemption for these people just because they have money. And if you suggest that he government shouldn't be involved, then keep in mind the only practical force stopping someone from jamming these transmissions is the exact same government bandwidth allocation guidelines.

This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs. It should be understood as the radio waves of the world being a public, shared resource and folks asking, "Are we changing these rules now?" If so, it should be done equitably.

The bloom filter wouldn't stop you from confirming folks gathered around any specific page that has content, and would have a fixed probability of leaking data even if there was no data there.

And that ignores the problem that you're not going to be able to sync the bloom filter in real time, so now you're going to need to have a very merge-friendly design for these annotations.

No, I'm not being pessimistic. This is just a candid analysis of the difficulties of doing this competently. If you'd like to do it incompetently, feel free.

Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.

Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.

This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.

Haha, as a certified fan of the Wrecker call-out of Chapo I doubt I'll last long there.

Sure, but anyone who talks about that there is a punching bag. It's all awful people. They don't need to do that work, the users do it for them.

Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform."

And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

I guess Tusky's decision to ban a blocklist a bunch of instances citing that policy is looking pretty prescient, now.

I think maybe folks got the model number confused. There are strips where the entire signal is passed verbatim without being reformed to every package on the line, but everyone stopped using them because they're awful.

In my experience, slow microprocessors are WAY more tricky to deal with than a 3V3 logic voltage for these strips; and often lead to crazy hacks. I'd way rather just put a modestly powerful resistor or a buck converter in my project than deal with trashy old Atmel chips, given how absurdly cheap ESP32 and ARM M7 packages are.

The pricing for Google Cloud CDN doesn't look outrageous to me.

If all you're doing is hosting and CDNing static content, the US cloud providers can do this very, very cheaply.

Sure, but all 3 cloud providers have free tiers for this stuff, don't they?

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need.

Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our product is extremely fast. We were all very sad for Cloudflare and watched the whole affair closely, as we've got a few customers that use our services alongside Cloudflare's.

Doubly ironic since in doing this, they created a system where a protocol is the SPoF; namely nonsensical or false BGP advertisements can quickly kill the internet as a whole if done correctly.

That's not actually a contradiction. When an individual website is considered as a system, it will have multiple points where the failure of a component inhibits the system. It's possible to have both cloudflare and your database as "SPoFs" and that "single" is not meant to imply everyone only gets one.

It's absolutely true that if us-east-1 in AWS has a bad day, a significant fraction of the American digital economy will shut down. For some companies, the same is true of Azure and Google's various comparable offerings.

I read your post as skeptical. Why would you be skeptical? If you care about keeping your product up, you absolutely should have a fallback for cloudflare if you're a customer of theirs. Now, you might not care (and actually, for most folks I submit you need not care), but the folks making sure Ambulances get timely push notifications and realtime driving instructions probably care quite a bit.

Isn't that my point? That we shouldn't be afraid of cultural change if it brings about more of the values we want and less of the values we don't?

"Cancel Culture" is much feared by many, as an example, but in practice it actually intensifies public debate among questionable issues while not wasting time allowing folks with classically racist views to muddy the more pressing issues, so while it can feel painful sometimes, it seems like a net good.

Panels and strips using more than 24V are extremely rare, with 12V being common and 5V existing for the hobbyist crowd. I've never seen a 24V rig for hobbyist uses (although some Ikea strips run there).

You don't wire them in serial anyways. In general if you care about blocks of LEDs at all you don't wire them in serial.

At that point I'd just grab a heavy resistor of the appropriate value and wire the controller down rather than accept a dead pixel in my line.

Usually this is a problem for 12V LED lines with 3V3 microcontroller like the ESP32.

Well then allow me to extend a hand from the other side of the aisle and point out that articles like this off and read like love letters to a much more authoritarian era. Often containing words like "value" and "culture" which appear to be little more then a thinly-veiled rebuke of cultural liberty.

In the top posted article here, it's a depressing truth that it's impossible for us to tell what the author means to say until they write more about it, because words like "the west" and "Culture" I've been deeply co-opted by reactionary discourse.

So I'm keeping an open mind, but I definitely want to point out that there's nothing special about Western governments when it comes to a slow slide into fascism.

> it's the rise of a new type of Totalitarian Fascism which is supplanting Totalitarian Communism

If the argument is "putting capitalism in a box and using it to motivate government hegemony" is "the rise of a new type" of "fascism" unique to China, that's not true at all. Avoiding comparisons to certain "western" governments, Germà Bel argues convincingly that Nazi Germany was deeply committed to this strategy [0].

It's the western party line that this is exactly what the post-revolutionary Soviet Union ended up doing sometime after Stalin, ultimately leading to its dissolution into what can only be called an Oligarchy.

And uh, I think it's at least worth debating if the US responded to the Great Depression by doing the same thing; essentially using the notion of "jobs" programs and "public works" projects to move lots of money into corporate government supporters rather than directly providing relief.

> , it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China

Maybe, but if that's the case than that's them simply noticing what various other economic projects the US in particular was already engaged in. I'm still not convinced "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by Perkins is entirely made up.

> Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.

Perhaps so. But any government is only a few leaps from fascism. See, for example, the Philippines. The US's response to COVID-19 and its current use of loyalist "border control forces" to "defend federal monuments" while violating subject Miranda Rights, States Rights, and arguably the US Constitution should remind us that it is not so long a fall for any organized nation.

Two bad things can be bad.

[0] http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.pdf

This seems like a very, very sketchy definition of "progress." The later 1/3rd of Rome was not exactly full of memorable technological and intellectual progress, especially compared to its neighbors.

Roman's are sorta famous in history for their lack of interest in anything but making war. There's a reason we don't refer to many roman math treaties; they were often very dogmatic texts referring to greek works and heavily influenced by the lens of military problems; and often fantastically wrong.

If you came here hoping for good resources on how to set up and control LED strips, angry that the article linked was bad and devoid of any good details, here are some useful resources.

#1: AdaFruit loves you and has a guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide

#2: Andreas Speiss has a phenomenal youtube channel that offers a lot of solid tips and tricks for new makers looking to avoid common pitfalls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIl5nDjfkjY

#3: GreatScott! (another great youtuber) has a really fun article on what I'd label a very "intermediate" LED project to get a sense of how to put everything together to make a unique object that is not simply a matrix and a lot of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXfMg8y1Fs4

Good luck, and one last tip: remember to be careful that your microcontroller may be fried by the voltage your LED strips needs. It may seem that there is an obvious solution to that which is, "Just use 2 power supplies" but with 3-wire LED strips group loops can exist and ruin your ability to control the strip. Don't despair, search for "buck converter board" and then look up how to tune it. You'll get a system efficient enough that you can drop 12v to 3.3v and it won't drain your battery or overhead your enclosure. Linear regulators are not your friend, they're usually cheaper specialist tools for folks who care about radios.

I believe the word you're searching for here is "clickbait."

Controlling LED strips is not a boring project and it's a wonderful entry into the hobby since it often works with very safe voltages and is happy with cheap components.

But this article is clickbait, and it's probably the most detail-free article imaginable on the subject.

It's not at all clear to me why we should be concerned with the decline of a proposed "west." Many of the traits folks laud the "West" for were in fact the products of a series of influences from many other cultures at the time.

Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers.

Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.

> If you understand systems-- why and how they work-- you don't need to necessarily challenge everything. In fact, if you don't sufficiently understand a system then "challenging everything" can signal a lack of awareness and tacitly limit your options.

But how would you reach that recognition of the system with confidence without interrogating it? What if your confidence in the system itself was informed by coincidence, bias and genetic fallacies?

> For example, the local mechanic can look at the queue of other customers and decide it isn't worth the time to attempt to convince Socrates that fixing the steering fluid leak is urgent.

Oh my, "something something Engels was wrong..."

Nevermind that, Socrates might still be inclined in an era of plentiful information to get a second opinion and quote on a damage car if the bill is quite large. This is not at all unusual. Perhaps we might appeal to a parent who says, "Oh yeah, that mechanic has never left me dissatisfied" and then at least we are slightly decreasing the chance that pure proximity and chance defined our preferences?

Which you in fact suggest, in the next paragraph. Is this not at least some form of interrogation?

> In fact it's "turtles all the way down," because even when Socrates told me of that encounter, I could see just how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to go to have any effect on their course of action. So I did my due diligence with the weaker position of, "I've never gotten a suspicious estimate from that mechanic." Same with at least two other people Socrates talked to.

It seems though like even this modest decision is something the article urges us not to do, because evidence self-doubt or deliberation is itself a novel "mind killer". The article itself is somewhat incoherent on this point, suggesting that:

>> We live in the age of abundance. It's never been easier to passively consume the opinions of others. It's also never been more dangerous.

Isn't a professional and authoritative opinion exactly what Socrates is paying his mechanic Euthyphro for here? I think maybe you've misinterpreted the article. The article urges folks to avoid consuming the opinions of people who don't agree with you already, because their opinions might be compelling.

>> Our minds - when fed the first piece of information you come across - are like crops without a ring of protection. They’re vulnerable and waiting to be destroyed. By being deliberate about what we consume and what we believe, we develop a ring of protection.

Which is a bit weird because, well, did these opinions the author wants to defend emerge from a perfect void housing only the spirit of Descartes? Is not the ultimate implicit and coincidental bias the one our parents furnished us with? The author is arguing that people dare not consider any opinions than these, because they might be invalidated.

But it's not clear why that would be so bad. Who says changing your mind when new information presented is bad? If we're prone to proximity biases, genetic fallacies and post-hoc rationalizations; then aren't we approaching something closer to objectivity by re-evaluating our opinions over time? While we will never remove all bias, we can certainly strive to remove some and that seems somehow better if we accept the article's premise that it's somehow bad to be manipulated by others.

Honestly, I wonder if you read the article carefully.

Is the thesis of this article: "it's important not to consume media or accept popular opinions that trigger cognitive dissonance BECAUSE our preferences are often determined by arbitrary aspects of our environment, bolstered by post-hoc rationalization?" If so, that seems like the exact opposite of a good idea, because the dissonance is probably there because of the exact same arbitrary forces.

It also seems to imply that majority opinions are things to reject, rather than interrogate. It applies a sort of inherent "don't be a sheep" mentality, but if it's very cold outside then covering yourself in wool and keeping your calorie ingestion up might actually be the most reasonable way to stay warm.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I think this realization leads to the need to challenge everything about your environment, accept the idea that different points of view exist, and carefully evaluate if ideas are good and truthful independently of their popularity. Implicitly siding with the minority opinion every time leaves you just as open to manipulation as trusting the majority every time, and we see both approaches used in many nation's politics.