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ajamesm

571 karma · joined June 15, 2016

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ajamesm··on A Message to 2600 Readers and Writers
It's an interesting parallel you draw. In one case, Canadian students played pranks on an out-of-touch professor, and in the other, the incoming presidential administration in America is taking actions that have historically preceded mass deportation and genocide, both in the sense of "necessary" and "sufficient". Not to say the two aren't directly comparable -- though the queer kids are real dark horses vis-a-vis establishing and normalizing concentration camps.

Perhaps the lesson to draw is that, really, we're all authoritarians in some degree. Some of us want our uncle to stop saying the N-word at the Thanksgiving dinner table, some of us don't identify with our assigned gender and lash out at the opposition with responses of disproportional magnitude, and some of us want to classify people by religion and detain them. America truly is a melting pot.

ajamesm··on A Message to 2600 Readers and Writers
I guess we could have a long conversation about whether it's Clinton or Trump who would have ultimately been worse in terms of national infosec implications,

but that conclusion is far away from "Trump is not bad for infosec, actually" especially when you look back further than the Obama administration and remember that the US government used to classify cryptography as literal munitions.

ajamesm··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
> But of course we know that there are all kinds of configurations of matter, like a motorcycle, that are faster than a cheetah and even look a little bit cooler.

yet more inflammatory rhetoric from the Pinboard guy

ajamesm··on Encrypted messengers: Riot, not Signal, is the future
conflating the specific binary instantiation with the general cryptosystem. Regardless, depending on your threat model, you can take increasingly { reasonable | paranoid } precautions like manually compiling and loading Signal, as it's OSS.

edit: "private group" can encompass a lot, especially in other ecosystems like Google and FB. If said "private group" adversary is, say, a prominent and wealthy Silicon Valley businessman and enterprising vampire who collaborates with fascists, then you can see the potential of compromising someone's security by coercing Google or Facebook engineers to run you a Hadoop query or conditionally inject malicious JS.

ajamesm··on Encrypted messengers: Riot, not Signal, is the future
The most prominent example would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa

and then the long, storied history of American strike-breaking &c.

ajamesm··on Encrypted messengers: Riot, not Signal, is the future
I'm not a fan of opaque baseband firmwares either, don't get me wrong, but what's the alternative? Not for the DoD, I mean for union organizers making $50k a year -- people who aren't going to get murdered by Mossad, but still need to authenticate and encrypt their communication channels. What device would you recommend?
ajamesm··on A Message to 2600 Readers and Writers
"We have to open it" means "we have to make apple turn over decrypted communication." The next point in this argument involves a sentence diagram and a dictionary. Do we have to go there?
ajamesm··on Encrypted messengers: Riot, not Signal, is the future
Sorry, am I missing something? It's my understanding that Signal is ETE encrypted. All an NSL would get you is ciphertext and metadata.
ajamesm··on Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model From Its Employees’ Brains
oh no, I'm sure this particular Great Thesis of Logic and Ethics and Objectivity will enlighten us all. What business organizations have been missing is 40 pages of this schlub aimlessly restating the Golden Rule.

> You must be calm and logical. When diagnosing problems, as when identifying problems, reacting emotionally, though sometimes difficult to avoid, can undermine your effectiveness as a decision-maker. By contrast, staying rational will serve you well. So if you are finding yourself shaken by your problems, do what you can to get yourself centered before moving forward.

This reads like a parody of the DSM criteria for Asperger's Syndrome.

ajamesm··on Encrypted messengers: Riot, not Signal, is the future
Federation concerns availability, not security. "unplug the ethernet and write plaintext to /dev/null" is extraordinarily secure and 100% decentralized, though badly unavailable.
ajamesm··on A Message to 2600 Readers and Writers
the "Apple should unlock the phone" part
ajamesm··on An Introduction to Geometric Algebra
> Similarly, to rotate vectors you have to create matrices, which don't exist in ℝ2, and apply them to vectors through matrix multiplication.

You don't "need" matrices, they're just one way to represent linear functions that map vectors, and the complex field is another (for R^2).

Coincidentally, most of the concrete implementation described for operations in G^2 here are applications of Euler's formula.

This article drops off in extending the lessons from R^2 to R^3. Comparatively, matrices excel for comprehensibility in this regard -- if you know how to apply matrices in R^N, you can apply the same knowledge to R^N+1.

ajamesm··on A Message to 2600 Readers and Writers
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/think-donald-trump-blasts-appl...

> "To think that Apple won't allow us to get into her cellphone? Who do they think they are? No, we have to open it," Trump said during an interview on "Fox & Friends."

> The Republican presidential front-runner called it a matter of common sense:

> I agree 100% with the courts. In that case, we should open it up. I think security overall — we have to open it up. And we have to use our heads. We have to use common sense. Somebody the other day called me a common-sense conservative. We have to use common sense. Our country has so many problems.

ajamesm··on Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8
Vim never needed async, it Just Wo ESC j j j j jjj ESC rks(TM):q :wq
ajamesm··on Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model From Its Employees’ Brains
FYI, I was able to dodge the paywall and read the article by copying the URL into Google to get their referral, then clicking the top link.
ajamesm··on How to Be Unpersuasive
He guessed correctly because he was shallow-minded enough to buy in, not because he had some special insight into the American psyche.

Regardless, American media makes for an abysmal benchmark.

ajamesm··on How to Be Unpersuasive
Scott Adams is a washed-up cartoonist turned reactionary collaborationist pundit whose only recent accomplishment is getting owned on Twitter all day. What does he know about persuading people?
ajamesm··on How Discord handles over a million requests per minute with Elixir’s GenStage
if that kind of information had any value whatsoever, Reddit would be worth billions
ajamesm··on 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience
This vividly reminded me of PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL7/Sloane/sloane15.pd...

I get that lin alg maybe isn't your picture of elegance, but you can't say that proof is laborious or esoteric. Any intro-level LA course is enough to grok it.

ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
I didn't find the post itself to be snobbish. I liked the tone and pacing, I think that your algebra makes for an interesting topic, and it was laudable for you to write about it.

What I dislike is the bait-and-switch, wherein the lede implies a digression on an math topic, then the bulk of the content is going over mundane Haskell code.

I don't care if Haskell coders want to get together and code golf their homomorphisms all day, but I find it exploitative to package that up as an excursion into algebra. As someone who's interested in math, but honestly couldn't care less about Haskell, these posts are all noise to me.

ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
Like what?
ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
Oh, yes, we should definitely draw lessons from academic mathematicians about what is accessible and convenient to understand. THAT's a field that's never had a problem connecting to laymen.
ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
Yes, this is matrix addition in a cumbersome disguise.

Haskell is a fine language, it's the authors I can't stand. I'm anti-snobbery because snobbery keeps people from understanding stuff. Programming languages are about building a standard and a foundation for common understanding -- Haskell articles are all CV-fodder about byzantine type algebras.

ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
It's not really 'extending the dimensions of the matrices' -- we live in a universe with an infinite number of distinct vertices, so the matrices are necessarily of infinite degree. It's only the sake of notation that we project them to finite dimensions.

  A:  x x x   B:  y y y
      x x x       y y y
      x x x       y y y

  A join B:

      x x x 0 0 0   0 0 0 0 0 0   0 0 0 1 1 1   x x x 1 1 1
      x x x 0 0 0   0 0 0 0 0 0   0 0 0 1 1 1   x x x 1 1 1
      x x x 0 0 0 + 0 0 0 0 0 0 + 0 0 0 1 1 1 = x x x 1 1 1
      0 0 0 0 0 0   0 0 0 y y y   1 1 1 0 0 0   1 1 1 y y y
      0 0 0 0 0 0   0 0 0 y y y   1 1 1 0 0 0   1 1 1 y y y
      0 0 0 0 0 0   0 0 0 y y y   1 1 1 0 0 0   1 1 1 y y y
This becomes much less accessible when dressing this up as a novel 'algebra of graphs' and obscuring it in Haskell syntax.
ajamesm··on An Algebra of Graphs
Leave it to a Haskell coder to make an incomprehensible mess of matrices under addition.
ajamesm··on Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
> For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.

Okay, I've flagged this one thread titled "Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week". It was this strange and laborious screed about how political speech is harmful or something?

Privileging "non-political" speech is an implicit endorsement of the status-quo, and thereby, an incredibly political action.

ajamesm··on Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
Imagine HN banning crypto-related discussion for a week after the Snowden revelations, because it was too hard to deal with.
ajamesm··on Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
How is it "assumption and hyperbole" to take statements at face value? The incoming administration is on the record with their intents.
ajamesm··on Hustle, a text-distribution tool, raises $3M
If you're not spam, how do you prohibit bulk unsolicited SMS?
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