m3047

Thank you everyone for the love.

I read Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K Dick many years ago. I've been observing a recurring feature in human thought / organization ever since. People in this thread have done a pretty good job with the functional psychosis part, but I encourage considering percept / concept as well: what this is is the notion that what we see influences our mental model, but it works the other way as well and our mental model influences what we're capable of seeing. Yes, sort of like confirmation bias, but much more disturbing. For example, in the CIA's online library there is a coursebook titled _Psychology of Intelligence Analysis_ (1999) and one of the topics discussed is: "Initial exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information be- comes available." Particularly fascinating to me is that people who are first shown a picture which is too blurry to make out take longer to correctly identify it as it is made clearer. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/psycholog...

My father was a psychiatrist. I'm interested in various facets of how people come to regard each other and their surroundings. I'm fascinated with the role language plays in this. I personally believe that computer programming languages and tech stacks provide a uniquely objective framework for evaluating the emergence of "personality" in cultures.

"Diagnosticity is the informational value of an interaction, event, or feedback for someone seeking self-knowledge." https://dictionary.apa.org/diagnosticity

Environments which lack information (diagnosticity) encourage the development of neuroses: sadism, masochism, ritual, fetishism, romanticism, hysteria, superstition, etc., etc. I have observed that left to stew in their own juices the spontaneous cultures which emerge around different languages / stacks tend to gravitate towards language-specific constellations of such neuroses; I'm not the only person who has observed this. I tend towards the "radar chart" methodology described in Leary's _Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality_ (1957); but here's a great talk someone gave at SXSW one year which explores a Lacanian model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk

> it's essentially impossible to ever gauge the efficacy of AI in doing anything...

... compared to humans? Yes. This is a philosophical conundrum which you tie yourself up in if you choose to postulate the artificial intelligence as equivalent to, rather than a simulacrum of, human intelligence. We fly (planes): are we "smarter" than birds? We breathe underwater: are we "smarter" than fish? And so on.

How do you discern that the "other" has an internal representation and dialogue? Oh. Because a human programmed it to be so. But how do you know that another human has internal representation and dialogue? I do (I have conscious control over the verbal dialogue but that's another matter), so I choose to believe that others (humans) do (not the verbal part so much unfortunately). I could extend that to machines, but why? I need a better reason than "because". I'd rather extend the courtesy to a bird or a fish first.

This is an epistemological / religious question: a matter of faith. There are many things which we can't really know / rigorously define against objective criteria.

I think you are correct, and incorrect. However: set and setting. Another of Lanier's observations, which he relates to LLMs, is the Boeing "smart" stall preventer which crashed two <strike>Dreamliners</strike> [correction:] 737 MAXes.

Who can argue with a stall preventer, right? What one can, and has been exposed / argued with, is the observation that information about the operation of the stall preventer, training, and even the ability to effectively control it depended on how much the airline was willing to pay for this necessary feature.

So in reality, what matters is studying the methodology of set and setting, not how the pieces of the crashed airship ended up where they did.

It was put forward in 1960s (maybe? Robert Anton Wilson? and for parallel purposes Philip K Dick's percept / concept feedback cycle) science fiction, and having therefore casually looked for phenomena when support / disprove this hypothesis over the intervening years: that people in power necessarily become functionally psychotic because people will self-select to be around them as a self-preserving / promoting opportunity (sycophants) who cannot help but filter shared observations through their own biases, this is profoundly unsurprising to me.

If you choose to believe as Jaron Lanier does that LLMs are a mashup (or as I would characterize it a funhouse mirror) of the human condition, as represented by the Internet, this sort of implicit bias is already represented in most social media. This is further distilled by the cultural practice of hiring third world residents to tag training sets and provide the "reinforcement learning"... people who are effectively if not actually in the thrall of their employers and can't help but reflect their own sycophancy.

As someone who is therefore historically familiar with this process in a wider systemic sense I need (hope for?) something in articles like this which diagnoses / mitigates the underlying process.

If you happen to drive east / west through Yakima on a semi-regular basis you've probably noticed the Rattlesnake Ridge slide over the past half a decade:

https://www.heraldnet.com/northwest/landslide-near-yakima-mi...

https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/lower_valley/rattles...

+1 for the article, don't have an answer to your question.

I'm not sure I understand the mental model you're basing your inferences on, but my model leads to a far different outcome:

If you've got a good enough bot and it's pre-qualified to spend money, then it can use the special "register as a bot" API and provide personal information and whatever else I want to understand that there is a "real human" behind the curtain. A credit card alone is not enough, they can be (trivially) stolen. The way I see it using agentic bots will ultimately require you to provide more personal details than an actual human would.

Very nice. Maybe that should be submitted to The Register for their units of measurement menagerie.

> you're guaranteed a consistent ser/de experience

Are there that many implementations of protobuf? How many just wrap the C lib and proto compiler? Consistency can be caused by an underlying monoculture, although that's turtles all the way down because protobuf is not YAML is not JSON, etc.

Off in the weeds already, and all because I implemented a pure Python deserializer / dissector simply because there wasn't one.

> This is because standard TCP packets max out at ~65 Kb.

BTW, frags are bad. DNS infra is still kneecapped by what turned out to be an extremely exuberant kicking of the can down the road packaged as "best practice". I think the architectural discussion must have been "100 nameservers for an AD domain, plus AUTHORITY and ADDITIONAL, not to mention DNSSEC..." "Oh UDP is fine. Frags aren't a problem, the routers and smart NICs will handle it fine." "4096 ought to be enough for anybody." "Good. I'll have another Old Fashioned then." And then the clever attacks begin.

Jumbos are great, but the PMTU has to support it. Localhost or a datacenter, maybe a local network. Somewhere between BIND 9.12.3 and BIND 9.18.21 the default for max-udp-size changed from 4096 to 1232. Just sayin....

Focuses on the contiguous US States. It gets more interesting when you're accessing resources not located in North America / Western Europe. It gets even more interesting when neither you or the resources are located there.

I don't quote the following to discount what the article is saying, I think it is what the article is saying:

> This may or may not be OK for your market—"good internet" tends to be in population centers, and population centers tend to contain more businesses and consumers.

and this:

> That said, I'm deliberately not making any moral judgments here. If you think you're in a situation where you can ignore this data, I'm not going to come after you. But if you dismiss it out of hand, you're likely going to be putting your users (and business) in a tough spot.

Dropping packets is not the whole story...

> If you are dropping packets and losing data, why would it matter if you're making one request or several?

Let's just focus on the second part: why would it matter if you're making one request or several?

Because people make bad assumptions about the order that requests complete in, don't check that previous requests completed successfully, maybe don't know how (or care) because that's all buried in some frontend framework... maybe that's the point!

> Believing that one request maps to one packet is a frequent "gotcha" I have to point out to new network devs.

What is a "network dev"? Unless they're using UDP... maybe you're thinking of DNS? Nah probably not. QUIC? Is that the entire internet for you? Oh. What about encryption? That takes whole handshakes.

Send one packet, recipient always receives one packet, is a "gotcha" I have to point out to experienced network administrators... along with DNS requires TCP as well as UDP these days, what with DNSSEC, attack mitigations, etc.

I don't know. I still use telnet for things, but I can use nc in a pinch. I would be more inclined to wish for expect.

What I don't get is all the SSL kids never mention s_client, as in "...use s_client instead". Granted, most of the time ssl will work for, you know SSH (port 22). Are you really going to negotiate the cypher by hand, mate? I get it, how many of them can identify what "\x16\x03\x01" is?

"problem child" is an allusion to Hoffman's own characterization.

I don't know that this is a particularly good article, but it touches on two elements of games based on incomplete / imperfect information.

One of these elements he refers to as "leverage" and I think he does an ok job explaining what it is, although maybe not how / why it works.

The other one, contrasting doctors and contractors, I think he does poorly. Full disclosure: I've had really crappy luck with doctors (it's not just luck). Doctors aren't used to getting "not to exceed" demands, things like that. On the other hand my father was a psychiatrist, a specialist, and that gives me insight into the "practice" of medicine; and I've worked for a number of biotechs and I have some insight into the evolution of medical practice. Combined, I have a pretty good sense of when the doctors are "practicing" versus forming a hypothesis (ask for one!).

During one of my burnouts I took a "vacation" working (what started as part time) for a high-end flooring contractor. Although the owner and I had different backgrounds and beliefs we had mutual respect for each other (and we had great conversations). But what the public calls (and in public we called) an "estimate" we called internally an "interview"; and we wanted to take the temperature of the "pain in the ass" factor: Does the prospect truly understand the work? Does the prospect have irrelevant concerns? (I'm doing a poor job here, although I'm pretty sure successful contractors will understand what I'm talking about.) Our bids could vary as much as 300% (upwards) from our baseline model / estimate for the job... before we said "no" outright or came up with good excuse for them to fire us before receiving our bid.

There were some rather "zen" aspects of the process (my father had a zen question: how do you feel? I have a zen question: what do you measure?), such as an insistence that all special instructions had to fit, legibly handwritten, in about 1/3 of an 8x11 piece of paper. (We did $10000 floors on a one page contract, not including non-negotiable required boilerplate; why can't we do that in IT? Can we? Yes, yes I say we can.)

But distilling this down: some contractors would rather deal with the masssages and fish tank cleaning (at 3x the $$$) than do floors... whereas for us flooring was a religious calling or something. You'll find this both in doctors and in contractors; and you'll also find people out there who expect to pay that 300% markup to have the contractor walk their dog.

TIL: Snitchbench!

That can mean a lot of different things, and imply various adjacent activities which may or may not meet your definition of "contributing".

I've submitted PRs to projects I use (dnspython, scapy). One of the cybersecurity companies I worked for managed various ruses to keep me from supplying fixes to upstreams; the most feckless bullshit reason they came up with was "opsec".

While working for Farsight I reviewed and provided feedback to several open source projects regarding their integrations with e.g. DNSDB.

Not everything has to be a PR, or targeted at the project's self-declared consituency. For instance I wrote a protobuffer dissector for scapy (https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg) because scapy was a handy "living off the land" kind of way for customers and prospects to taste Farsight's tunnelled SIE products without compiling a bunch of C libraries. (You can declare your own protobuffer data types, use https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg/blob/master/tahoma_nmsg... as an example.) I don't distribute scapy, so there's no compelling reason for me to use the same license. (You're welcome.)

In fact, I re-used the protobuffer dissector for the Dnstap half of the ShoDoHFlo DNS + netflow correlator (https://github.com/m3047/shodohflo). I started down that road because Vixie got his panties twisted up and his hair on fire about DoH, and once I looked at it it seemed that there was something in there that I'd personally find useful. A couple years later I decided I wanted e.g. "dig -x" more than a GUI, and after several iterations I came up with Rear View RPZ (https://github.com/m3047/rear_view_rpz). I find it useful, and I think it's a pretty cool hack. (Works with EtherApe!)

ShoDoHFlo stuffs data into Redis. I found myself utilizing that data for other purposes and got tired of installing a Redis client and dealing with the security issues. So I implemented a DNS proxy for Redis (https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns).

I still haven't "found my tribe"; or maybe I have, and most of them don't contribute to open source. Nobody submits PRs, and nobody I know opens issues; instead they send me emails. :-/

15% - 25% of exposed ICS are honeypots. Some juicy graphics farther down.

I don't have a college degree. I made a deal with the head of the college math department that he'd sign me in to (senior level) Numerical Analysis (this was the early 1980s) if I taught myself calculus first; which I did. He had misgivings about this self-guided selection of study, and summed it up thus:

    How do you know what's important?

Now of course ML is all the rage, but that question has stuck with me. I still ask myself that question, and I don't always know the answer.

> And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS.

Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB).

Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.

A chunk of the Post Alley article is spent on the observation that a single stevedoring company controls operations at all terminals in Seattle, but not in Tacoma; yet they're both part of the same port alliance.

Fix it, so somebody doesn't have to die like you.

Hey. I brought up ranitidine because it is specifically associated with nitrosamines, and nitrosamines cause colon cancer. No redirect: colon cancer. You take issue with prilosec being admitted to this debate, then that would be because ion pump moderators cause stomach cancer. My bad: stomach cancer irrelevant to you.

You can't see ranitidine when it farts in your face: nitrosamines cause colon cancer. Why is that not relevant? Why is that not potentially more relevant than foo foo microbes? (By the way, I eat sour cream or yogurt when I eat meat or take e.g. glucosamine. YMMV.)

Squeeze this lemon till the juice come out: https://www.verywellhealth.com/does-omeprazole-cause-cancer-...

ddg:prilosec cancer

Buy some. Read the packaging. Fuck Amazon.

It is acknowledged that nitrosamines cause cancer. It is acknowledged that ranitidine breaks down on the shelf to nitrosamines: this wasn't discovered by the FDA or another government agency, it was discovered by a mail-order, compounding pharmacy which also tests ingredients. Their discovery led to ranitidine being recalled.

As for prilosec: the cancer risk is acknowledged in the packaging.

How many people took Zantac (ranitidine) the highly spammed H2 blocker? https://www.nfcr.org/blog/3-common-heartburn-drugs-are-assoc...

Doctors don't ask about this. People still take Prilosec, and it's acknowledged that it causes cancer. You get what you give: confirmation bias.

Edit: The essential problem is that ranitidine isn't shelf-stable. This could explain some problems with other theraputics which we won't name to avoid downvoting / politics.

It's not the cooking, it's leaving them tightly wrapped in the foil (anaerobic) and not refrigerated; and then not reheating them hot enough to destroy the toxin. The toxin is destroyed at less than 100C, but not the bug.

> There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City.

I'm not sure what this means. I think we could drop New York City in one of the Great Lakes with little problem... or drop Moscow in Lake Baikal if you prefer.

TIL: MacOS ships with YARA.

It was a few years ago, but potatoes baked in foil were the leading cause of food-borne botulism that year. I can't find a ranked list for a recent year, but it's still a recurring cause.