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haltingthoughts

49 karma · joined April 19, 2017

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haltingthoughts··on Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms
The point is that things are connected. By physically accessing one machine you bring down not just one machine but the entire network. The importance of physical security just went up by a factor of the number of machines on the network.

At some point you are going to have to focus on the network part of security. Getting physical access to one Google server shouldn't allow you to bring down all of Google.

haltingthoughts··on Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS
Fair enough on the passthrough to consumers.
haltingthoughts··on Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]
How is that a terrible definition? What do you propose?

What metric do you want? Infant mortality? Life expectancy? Subjective happiness? Unrest? Hunger? Global inequality? All of them are drastically down globally.

Within country inequity? Flat.

https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction/ https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/

haltingthoughts··on Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS
The receiver of the surplus (Walmart vs consumers) is kinda important...
haltingthoughts··on Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]
Why on corporations? Most of the burden is passed on to consumers in the form of more expensive goods.
haltingthoughts··on Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]
You sure that globalism has contributed nothing to the development of poor countries?

The number of people in poverty has decreased drastically over the past half century. Do you have any other candidates other than trade liberalization?

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

haltingthoughts··on 10+ years of experience and no hash maps or Fizz Buzz for data engineers
You can abstract out how things are setup. If you have an inversion of control framework that creates all your objects and makes sure services get started in the correct order then you don't really care about the exact details.
haltingthoughts··on For an Inclusive Culture, Try Working Less
OP was expressing frustration at having to deal with explaining third rail topics and the lack of awareness of the asker of how annoying it can be.

It doesn't need to be in bad faith to be annoying. To illustrate the problem, I had a visible medical problem that didn't resolve quickly and had to deal with constant questions about how it was going. While I appreciated the sympathy, it was a bit annoying after answering the same question to tens of people.

haltingthoughts··on Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data with private parties
Great, now we can sue them. Oh wait, there's that whole sovereign immunity and standing problem
haltingthoughts··on Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I
That is for a recent tournament. Now computers are just better. But for up to 5-10 years centaurs were better. Eventually human Go players won't be able to improve on computer evaluations, but that is may not be for another few years.
haltingthoughts··on Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I
The space of playing go is rather large and humans only need to be better at a small portion of it to improve upon AlphaGo. Humans+Computer was better than just Computer for chess (at long time controls) for nearly 10 years after BigBlue beat Kasparov.
haltingthoughts··on 1Password Travel Mode: Protect your data when crossing borders
Blow up Sovereign Immunity ffs. If someone gets detained they have no recourse or compensation to mitigate it being used as a threat.
haltingthoughts··on Guaranteed Minimum What?
It's basically not possible to do that without making those things cheaper somehow. Convert the entire US federal budget to UBI and it is around 10k per person. Healthcare alone per person is already 9k. Housing is maybe another 5k. And this is before those things get more expensive as people consume more of them.
haltingthoughts··on Guaranteed Minimum What?
Exactly, there are many laws that result in those being very supply limited.
haltingthoughts··on Guaranteed Minimum What?
Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.
haltingthoughts··on Silicon Valley: A Reality Check
Tech nearly always reached the rich first.

"Computers are type writers for rich snobs who can't type."

haltingthoughts··on Silicon Valley: A Reality Check
Marginal decisions are still probablistic.

A doctor with that success rate is terrible because value of success is lower than the cost of failure. A VC with low hit rate is good when value of success is 100x the cost of failure.

VCs are going to have to choose how liberal/risky to be in investing. They could maybe choose to invest less and we'd not have Juicero but we'd also not have many other successful companies. When you investing in many companies some are going to be bad.

Extrapolating Juicero to all of SV is like critisizing a hundred billion dollar infrastructure bill because of one fairly useless hundred million dollar project in it.

haltingthoughts··on Code as text is a problem
Why do we not consider code generation/editing APIs/tools as an expected feature of a language instead of an editor?
haltingthoughts··on A critique of trends in tech
I sure hope not.
haltingthoughts··on A critique of trends in tech
The alternative is not homelessness, starvation, or joblessness. The alternative is the next best option.

In most cases the alternative is perfectly fine. Making trade more free makes the alternative better. If it is as trivially costly to find a new job or a different appartment as finding another restaurant, then consumers have a better bargaining position.

haltingthoughts··on A critique of trends in tech
How do these apply to what we are considering here?
haltingthoughts··on Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
If an average is unusually high/low it will tend to go back to the mean after time.

In the stock market this means that looking over a short timespan one will see large variance in the returns but over a long timespan (30+ years) the returns will be more consistent and nearly all positive.

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