m3047

You might look into (Norbert) Weiner functions.

Wrong. Although the National Guard is indeed called up for active duty, their primary purpose is an offramp for the "well regulated militia" language in the US Constitution and to defend the State from which they were called up.

I moved to $Satellite_Urban_Area from $Urban_Area to take a cybersecurity job. In $Urban_Area we would almost certainly have had metal detectors and other measures. Due to the military presence here in $Satellite_Urban_Area this place has a reputation for being armed to the teeth. Although there was no open carry in the office, I know for a fact that a number of mostly ex-military brought sidearms to the office. A part of this area was at one time "the murder capital of the country" and is infamous for a shootout between residents of that part, gangs vs military. The place has a rep.

Is that a bad thing?

I don't view metal detectors and huge cast concrete reception desks as a good thing, I view them as indicators that earlier interdiction has failed; I try not to hang around places like that, unless I know that there are also actually people with guns who are trained to use them.

It deserves scrutiny, certainly. But this:

“It’s like they brought people here from all across the country, just to be here [in Washington DC]...”

What about the politicians, and all of the people hired to work for the politicians? Looks like about 29% of the population were born there. Is it a bad thing that our troops have a common, shared experience of spending time in the US Capital?

You'll probably need to enable some "secure memory mode" in BIOS, e.g. a boot error that you ignore which says something like "KVM disabled by BIOS" needs to be made to go away.

Research is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/flock-safety-says-its-cameras-d... Flock Safety’s FreeForm tool logged 6,736 people-description searches in 2025 while the company insisted its cameras target only vehicles

https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/06/15/flock-says-its-came... Company’s newest devices use AI to follow pedestrians, while protesters are mapping nearly 90,000 surveillance cameras nationwide.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/flock-cameras-are-... camera provider has rapidly expanded its products, functionalities, and customer base, creating a vast network of video cameras, audio detection devices, drones, and mobile security trailers. This expanded offering is powered by AI algorithms that process far more than drivers' license plates, recording vehicle profiles, pedestrians

https://www.rsn.org/001/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-n... Cops have used Flock's FreeForm search feature to look for people with tattoos and wearing specific sport shirts, and searches sometimes include the target's race, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. [yeah, 404 Media, you might start there]

https://wlos.com/news/local/asheville-flock-cameras-paintbal... officers identified the juvenile suspects through an investigation and the use of Flock cameras... [wait, there's more, keep reading, KEEEEP REEEDING] Officials who support the use of Flock cameras have argued that the cameras help solve crimes and find missing or endangered people.

Here's how we say "hello" in Swedish Meatball: "Uff Da!" Bumper stickers available.

1) Flock is a company.

2) One of their products is a license plate scanner / reader.

3) This scanner / reader consumes camera output which includes license plates.

3) One of their products is a tracker / alerter / searcher.

4) The searcher / tracker isn't limited to license plates, it can correlate on other aspects in the photo. These other aspects concern the vehicle, the vehicle occupants, objects and individuals elsewhere in the photo.

Speaking from the perspective of someone who experienced the beginning of the Internet in one of the places where it began...

The real difference with phones is that they come with their own network, which vaguely incorporates the internetworking protocols. In the pioneering days of the internet, the ISP was the closest thing to you which was actually connected to the Internet. Early email paid attention to store-and-forward protocols, nowadays mailing lists are forced to use DKIM in order to deliver to the large ESPs and can't get it right.

The availability of network connectivity is much more pervasive today, clearly store-and-forward has mostly gone away. (Not to be confused with MTA-MTA hops, although these days most of my mail has exactly one hop on the actual Internet, again demonstrating the pervasiveness of connectivity.)

Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but Facebook was (dunno if they're still in the phone business) the de facto ISP for large numbers of people in the third world.

I think I figured it out: there's wrought iron over the window...

The serious backwoods rock climbing cohort calls that "goon coefficient". I (also) have a high goon coefficient.

"Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away.

Edits:

"two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm.

Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.

LinkedIn today is so serious about its cookies it can't do proper logout. As long as there's a cookie, I don't know if it's random or what's going on, but if you log out... there's a > 20% chance if you leave for a while and then go back to LI... you're still logged in!

If you log out, and then (in Firefox) close the window... oh wait, you're not really logged out. Try again.

If you log out in Firefox, wait until the window is quiet, then delete the cookie... LinkedIn creates a new cookie... which still sometimes logs you back in but not as often.

Opening a new window, deleting the LinkedIn window (fuck watever it's doing), and THEN delete the cookie in the NEW window... then it seems to stay gone at least as of today.

Well that's pathetic, only three new FQDNs. Two of them are on CF, one on AWS. Where are the effing CNAME chains?

And this is something which I learned which is surprising to me: github.com resolves to AWS. WTF? GH has its own netname and a /20. It's literally one hop, somehow, from my ISP. WTF? It's not MS and it's this shite? WTF?

TLDR: nobody is testing irrigation water for cyclospora, it's a blind spot.

"For Twain, though (and one suspects for Paige himself), the dream of mechanically mimicking human actions was what fascinated him most. Twain’s writings... came to see the Paige machine as a “creature” in its own right."

History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

I spent a few years hanging around the VC-adjacent scene in a major city, met quite a few of them (because I'm that way. elevator docent during events... priceless).

There is publicly performed theater around VCs which is pretty consistent, taught in incubators, etc., etc. So that's how they manage set and setting (grooming) for the marks. Internally there are certain tells, that they must act a certain way. There are arbitrary character tests and whatnot which provoke a "culture" if you will, similarly to how computer languages and tech stacks form distinctive cultures if left unchecked; there could be self-selecting pressures (for these behaviors) as well. This is unsurprising to me as someone who analyzed voting patterns, and was asked numerous times variations on the question "is it something in the water or 'new car smell'?" (I don't have an answer for that question.)

However VCs are much more stovepiped and cliquish concerning their actual selection process than people realize, I've heard it publicly described as "mafia like" by someone who I worked for and whose name many would recognize. I don't understand why this person, like so many others, invested so much effort... enough to get some serious butthurt IMO.

It's a distraction, it effectively destroyed a different company I was working for.

Why wouldn't it move underground? Create analogues of the AMOC?

Feel free to use https though, it's a self-signed cert. http://athena.m3047.net/pub/fwm/rfc-tree.pdf

I'll give +1 for that.

What is a "winning argument"? Let's say two parties in an argument both make ad hominem arguments against the other party. Is the winning party's ad hominem "winning"? Just because the party won? There is no question of merit? What if both parties level the identical ad hominem argument against the other party? It's "winning" because survivorship bias and convenient amnesia (the winner gets to rewrite history)? What's going on here?

We're not talking about sports here. If someone is a possible candidate for a clinical trial, there are probably other treatment options, maybe not preferable.

I could buy "cancer insurance" if somebody sells such a thing. I probably couldn't buy policies which paid out (to me) for random strangers. But I could probably buy it for relatives (still pays out to me). Employers could probably buy it for (key) employees (paying out to the employer). In case your unstated objection is profiting off of the misfortune of strangers. However depending on the risk being mitigated, I could see placing individual bets on a large number of strangers.

If your objection is betting on something with no intrinsic value, well for starters there are probably some bored apes out there but I digress. People take options on the stock & commodities markets. In stock and commodity markets there are real goods which typically have a "long tail" and all the value doesn't typically evaporate over night. But it can happen.

If your objection is people paying different amounts in a betting pool for e.g. hurricane protection, nothing says a mutual association has to charge all members the same rate. The difference is that there are no underwriters making the decision.

Insurance companies can collect whatever information they want regarding you and your property as long as it has some vague relevance to underwriting. They can and do sell that information on, along with information on claims. Do betting markets do better here, focusing on external facts: where the hurricane makes landfall, how much snowpack there is at a certain location on April 1? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. What's the objection to focusing on the actual risk, and abstracting away the actor placing the bet?

Regarding that hypothetical clinical trial:

1) Someone could bet that the clinical trial's outcome is successful because if they live through it they're going to need money to survive.

2) Someone could bet that the clinical trial's outcome is failure because it's cheaper than burial insurance.

Could I prevail on you to try harder?

Edit: Is the real objection that nobody gets to invest and profittake on the pool?

I have concerns regarding insider trading (as I certainly do regarding the stock market), but Kalshi's statement seems straightforward: "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger,"

I remember a time not too long ago when storm insurance was unavailable for large portions of the Gulf states. Horrible horrible people, betting on where hurricanes would make landfall, just horrible. /s

Explain to me like I'm 10 years old: what's the difference between a mutual insurance company and people betting on an outcome?

"We all could have done more.": said by every politician. Which is easier: writing good code, or winning a political battle over crappy code? I mean, if you're not capable of coding, and creating an appropriate architecture for the the domain: which course of action gives you the most control over risk management? So yeah most fights about software are about politics and crappy code.

Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.

Brazil. Last year I effectively blocked Brazil for a while. Ultimately I settled on three possibilities for the traffic I was seeing:

01: DDOS

10: Residential proxies

11: Somebody DDOSing residential proxies

I blocked AWS incoming traffic a few years ago. I wrote a blog post about it. I get maybe dozens of actual visitors a week; I got around 15,000 real people views of the post in about three months. Amazing how quickly things like that drop below the memory horizon for people.

I also got a free pentest. I've expanded since. Takeaways: my mitigations and pipeline are solid. If the people on HN pleading for the poor LLM users and google search have any relationship with the people providing the free pentest... I mean, they don't? Srsly.

As for blocking IPs... the survival pressure has forced 90% of the bot traffic to VPNs. Man, they're lighting up the VPN endpoints like christmas trees. Little points of light, very pretty. Thanks for the fish. I could make feeds of the one-shot wonders available, my infra is solid, you'd need to be properly vetted and I'd need to approve the use case.

This is fun.

Seems like the programmers at LinkedIn never imagined that the network isn't reliable, and can't invalidate the session on actual logout; it only happens when whatever page is replacing the logout page finishes loading.

Is it could be a bug (IMO yes, a credential disposition / security bug), or it could be a "feature tax" to keep the tracking context hot for whatever page you logged out of LinkedIn to avoid being tracked...

Another journalist was picked up in a different state with another dealer plate (on a different vehicle) with the same partial match. TLDR: what's in Flock is a partial, but when Flock gives the pic they snapped to LEO they aren't giving what they alerted on they're giving what's in the pic they snapped and LEO is taking this pic with no provenance to the original report as gospel truth.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/inside-the-flock-dragnet-how-s...

+1 for "...may not be understandable as a normal distribution." "Rogue" might just be the operators wishful thinking. Hammer nail (something from a prior life), politics isn't normal: http://athena.m3047.net/elections/dist-not-normal/distributi... Time to complete software projects is another. :-/

So that people know what we mean. There's also Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution