I don’t, but if I did I would!
964 karma · joined December 12, 2010
Every day I'd create a new mm-dd-yyyy folder for images to go to, and the Remote web site had a calendar on it. You could go to the site, click on the night you were there, see all the images captured by all people that night, and save your images if you felt like it.
Disinfo had a cozy relationship with Razorfish, perhaps the biggest of the new breed of digital transformation consulting companies that emerged in the 90's. Razorfish was pretty insane back then — wildly smart and creative people working at the absolute forefront of technology, much of which now seems quaint and taken for granted.
As Razorfish rose and went public, it acquired a bunch of companies, one of which was Disinfo. I ended up becoming Director of Technology for RSUB, Razorfish's media division. Razorfish also acquired another company called Electrokinetics, which was all about hardware, and with whom we shared an office. I started hanging around the hardware guys, because, well, I loved hardware, and they were doing neat things like letting you SMS a soda machine to get a Coke. (This is 1999 — this was the stuff of technology demos of the future, not the real world).
When the Dotcom boom turned into the bust, one of the founders of Electrokinetics left to start Remote. I stayed in touch with them, heard about the project, started talking to them about it, one thing led to another, and I started working there!
Arcane knowledge: I was 21 at the time and had dropped out of computer science to work at a startup, so some of this was just being green, but some of it was also an utter lack of documentation. I was using Perl to write this server, because at the time everything was Perl. I had to read, write, and route data to over a hundred serial devices (our Cocktail Consoles) in a non-blocking fashion using DigiKey serial-to-IP converters. In effect, I was writing the basics of a networking stack (read packet, figure out where it was supposed to be sent, transform it if necessary, send it somewhere else) just over serial.
It wasn't really rocket science, it was just completely undocumented. And also solved by, well, IP networking. But we had to use serial, I was left with basically no books, terrible man pages, and random mentions of stuff in Usenet posts. Much of Linux's serial/tty subsystem was written very early on in the development of the kernel, made rock-solid, and promptly forgotten. What little documentation I could find was sparse and in relation to C functions or syscalls. Perl would then have a wrapper around it, and the wrapper wasn't well-documented nor was it exactly like the underlying call, so there was just a lot of trial and error as I figured out how to properly get the server to wait in a non-blocking way to get input from all of the different serial lines, figure out what to do with them, and write back to them, all in realtime.
Privacy: there was discussion, actually. We had a huge sign when you entered the bar that said something like, "There are hundreds of cameras in here and you agree that you have no expectation of privacy by entering." The whole point was to be a little voyeuristic, so it was very consciously not a private place.
Technical wishes: This is great question, I had to think about it for a bit. Amazingly, I don't think we had a lot of things we weren't able to do. We were able to take screen grabs and email them to people, so taking that a step further I suppose it would have been nice to be able to capture entire video streams instead of just still images, but the whole place had this Jetsons retro-future vibe to it, so some of the limitations were in line with the ethos of the place.
We used black and white cameras because they were both cheaper and also had much better sensitivity to low-light conditions (this has changed somewhat — but not entirely — in 20+ years) and black and white tube TVs because they were cheap. (This part was actually really dangerous — tube TVs hold enormous charges after they’ve been switched off, enough to kill someone, and we had the guts exposed on the insides of the Cocktail Consoles. Had to be very careful). We used public telephone handsets for the audio because of their durability, and video game buttons and joysticks so you could try very hard, and generally fail, to damage them.
The TV's, cameras, and telephone audio were all connected over an analog CCTV system. The camera was video source and the handset's microphone was the audio source for a given channel. The TV could be tuned to any channel, and was thus the video output device, and the handset's speaker was tied to the same channel. Thus, if you tuned to any camera, you would see and hear whatever was going on at that console, but not the other way around, so it was rather voyeuristic. If TV A was tuned to camera B, and TV B was tuned to camera A, that established a bi-directional link, which meant you could see and converse with the other person.
The serial data from all the microcontrollers were sent over serial-to-CAT5 converters, so the entire place was wired for Ethernet, but it was plain old serial over the wire. We then had these serial cards in a Dell server on the other end, which presented as roughly 100 serial ports on the server.
This was where I had to do a lot of learning. I was a good IP programmer, but I had to reach back into the depths of the kernel and learn all about TTYs and switch() and lots of other stuff that even in 2000 was sort of forgotten. It took me forever to find any good documentation on how to handle that many serial ports in a non-blocking way.
I kept asking Leo to just put a cheap Intel box in each machine and do it all over regular Ethernet, but he (rightly) kept insisting on this low-cost, rock-solid approach. Today the calculus would undoubtedly be different — you would do everything over IP — but back then Leo had a level of foresight I still admire.
What I love about this article is it makes us question the thing we all think we can't question: the validity of the diagnosis itself.
What if the whole thing is wrong? What if it is this "easy" thing clinicians invented because they just got frustrated with how insanely certain patients acted when their underlying neuroses became so severe that they progressed into something closer to psychosis? What if focusing on a BPD diagnosis masks underlying conditions that are much easier to recognize and treat? What if it is just underlying disorders advanced to the Nth degree, that all somehow converge on a similar behavior set (much like psychosis), despite a differing underlying cause, and that focusing on that similar behavior set rather than on those underlying disorders is what causes BPD to be so untreatable?
A BPD diagnosis is often hopeless. There are no good drugs for it, and talk therapy works poorly. Almost all the comments here on HN from people who have someone with BPD in their life reflect this reality, and how terrible BPD is.
This article actually gives me hope for my sister. It gives me a new perspective on how we have been trying to help her, and why it might not be working.
But then wait. Zoom out. The former system did too. The new companies disrupted the absurd, customer-hostile, worker-hostile, cartel-like monopolies those legacy industries had evolved into. Did you ever try getting a taxi in any US city besides Manhattan — not even the rest of NYC — before Uber? It was expensive, frustrating, and completely lacking in integrity.
I remember calling taxis to go the airport in SF before Uber existed and nearly missing my flight on multiple occasions because the government-granted taxi monopoly I ordered from the day before just never showed up at 5am, and oh by the way the company is closed at 5am, so wouldn't answer the phone, but would still try to charge you and tell you you missed your taxi when it showed up and hour late while you were cussing them out the entire drive to the airport in your own car so you could pay the airport parking monopoly absurd rates so you didn't miss your flight. Yep, I want that system back.
Taxis were absolutely terrible before Uber, and they only benefitted taxi companies, the banks that financed them, and then maybe in some cases taxi drivers. Frankly, fuck those old taxi companies. Good riddens.
This is the nature of disruption. Entrepreneurs have a negative experience with an entrenched industry, have a lightbulb moment, raise some money (or not — that path actually exists, though it isn't often discussed here), disrupt the often terrible old industry and create a new market, dominate the new market, and then often stop innovating and focus on keeping out competitors and protecting their rents. Then the cycle repeats.
The disruption cycle existed before Silicon Valley VCs got involved. It is happening right now to Silicon Valley-fueled (and -fueler) Google and (Silicon Valley-fueled) AI LLM chatbots. Google once seemed unstoppable, and suddenly people, including apparently Google, think it's vulnerable. It happened with the iPhone and Nokia and Blackberry! Yet no one will stand up for the poor candy bar phone designers, or soon the poor AdWords salespeople, because something much newer and ostensibly better has come along.
It's literally a tale as old as time, though like any historic cycle it is on increasingly shorter timelines. Protectionist, rent-seeking, and in some cases full-on colluding legacy industries merely try to keep their grip on the market through their own forms of financial and political engineering rather than seeking to innovate on their own.
So the quaint pastoral notion of the innocent taxi companies being obliterated before terrible Uber came along is just flat out wrong. They knew that they were rent-seeking, they knew they could innovate, and they just didn't fix it. Even after Uber came out, for many years they sought — are still seeking? — to defend themselves rather than create a better customer and worker experience.
As for, "if we’re going to regulate let's fucking regulate," that is actually what gets us the entrenched industries described above. Which "we" might collectively agree we want in some cases. We just need to be aware of what the second-order and beyond consequences of that regulation are likely to be. If we regulate in response to this, it is might result in the mega banks taking over smaller ones, continuing the consolidation and obliterating more local banks like SVB.
Or perhaps what you are saying is let's establish regulations where we place the depositors' rights above the rights of the banks? Where we separate investment banking from "consumer" banking again? I agree. And also, good luck with that! It also has second-order and beyond consequences which also could suck. Careful hat you wish for.
Again, the difference here is that the cat is already out of the bag and AI technology is widely distributed and integrated into everything, including the iPhone I am writing this on. Non-proliferation has already failed.
There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away.
We know how that went.
Like nuclear technology, AI technology development is in part an arms race. One huge difference is that AI's technological underpinnings are already far more widely available and understood than any nuclear technology ever was. Its myriad forms — neural nets, deepfakes, predictive spell check, Adobe Photoshop object selection filters, spam filters, deep learning, machine learning, large language models, etc — already permeate much of technology and life. Where does one draw the line?
Like nuclear technology, if any entity voluntarily decides to "voluntarily shut AI down," the other governments/rogue states/corporations/NGO's/financial firms/universities/etc in the world will merrily continue doing so, leaving the voluntary Luddite in the same dust as every other voluntary Luddite. Or even worse, such an entity (say, the US or Chinese governments) would in all likelihood not actually stop developing AI themselves, just ban others from having it, which would create another insane governmental "war" and enforcement regime, like the War on Drugs or War on Terrorism. Again, we know how both of those went.
One of the reasons OpenAI as founded was specifically because of this. To paraphrase @sama, AGI should belong to everyone, not to any one corporation or government. https://www.yahoo.com/now/openai-founder-sam-altman-says-221...
At the end of the day, the author may be right. Being right is also irrelevant. AI development will continue to hurtle forward. The real question is what do we do with it?
Amazon nuked my account. I've been an Amazon customer since the beginning, almost 30 years, and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with them. For this $30 chargeback, they yanked back all of my Kindle books, Amazon Prime movie purchases, etc.
I got shifted from the normally incredibly helpful and friendly Amazon Customer Support to one hosted in the Upside-Down and manned by an army of demogorgons. They were essentially debt collectors, and had the attitude to match. Zero understanding or empathy. Incredibly aggressive, unpleasant, and unhelpful. I ended up reversing the chargeback, which of course took two weeks, and it worked itself out in the end.
But wow, customer LTV the size of mine could have been blown up for such a small thing. Seems like someone isn't doing the math inside Amazon.
This depends on what will happen after they run out of money.
Someone very close to me has an untreated dual diagnosis (mentally ill + substance abuse disorder). She is otherwise young and intelligent, and with treatment she could at least theoretically have a full life. However she refuses all attempts at help, has been unemployed for over a year, is paranoid and isolated and alone from and abusive to friends and family, is burning through her savings, and will soon get to the point where she will have to foreclose on her house.
At that point she will literally be an unemployed, homeless, mentally ill drug addict.
This is a major problem in our individualistic society with no easy answer. As my coach says, people don’t change when they see the light, only when they feel the heat. She may need to crash and burn, and she may pick herself back up. But the odds on that happening for someone in her position are not good.
And meanwhile we all have to watch someone we love slowly descend into ruin.
Back pain is fascinating. Rarely, there is an immediate and obvious cause and obvious treatment that will work, wham bam, lickety split. Far more often, there isn't.
Intense pain starts in your spine. So you go see a doctor. Doctor says, "Here is some Vicodin, take this and rest up." Fixed!
Nope. It helps for a while, but you still have pain. This happens to the vast majority of people with back pain. It's the normal doctor first step.
So you go see a back surgeon. How do surgeons fix things? With surgery. So the surgeon does an MRI, finds a herniation (which is, after all, a source of pain!), and performs surgery and cleans out the herniation. Fixed!
(Mostly) wrong. A small — something like 30% — percentage of people find relief. The remaining people continue to have pain. They also now have a lengthy recovery, ~$10,000 less dollars, and a growing hopelessness. (These aren't fake examples, feel free to look them up or ask a doctor friend.)
These options seems to be attractive because they fit the standard Western model of disease, and also of care. Our (Western) minds tend to like this model and expect that it works. Diagnose obvious thing, do seemingly normal surgery or just take this pill, problem solved. Except not.
Had the back pain person asked an orthopedist, the orthopedist might have prescribed conservative care. Chiropractic, physical therapy, Pilates, yoga, strength training, massage, ice, heat, anti-inflammatories, etc. A surprisingly larger number of people find relief from that.
However, this approach is more annoying. It takes time and effort. It admits that maybe we don't know the exact cause, but maybe here are some things that work for a lot of people. With enough effort and time, they might work, slowly.
Had they seen a somatic or functional practitioner, the practitioner might have started looking at what else is going on with the person. What kind of psychological trauma might they have in their past? What is their desk setup? How stressful is their job? What is their diet like? What is the connection between the patient's mind and their body, and how does that relate to pain? They would then prescribe a course of treatment that might be modifications to lifestyle, healing trauma, etc.
Depression is very similar to back pain. It is complex, and is a mind-body problem. You may have an immediately obvious cause and thus an immediately obvious solution. And even then, that first solution has a fairly good chance of not working.
Moreover, you can predict with a fairly high degree of accuracy the solution you are going to be prescribed based on who you ask. Ask a general doctor or a psychiatrist, either get a pill or a referral to a talk therapist. Ask a talk therapist, get a lot of talk sessions. Ask an Eastern medicine practitioner, get some herbs, a change in diet, and acupuncture. Ask a shaman, get ayahuasca. Etc.
Depression happens for a whole bunch of reasons. What works for one person almost certainly won't work for the immediate next one, at least entirely. It often has to be addressed by looking at the individual as a whole and unique person, and using a multi-pronged mind-body approach.
If you have tried most of the normal stuff, then it's time for some not normal stuff. You have to be your own advocate in this, and keep track of what has worked and what hasn't, and move on when you have exhausted your options. I know that can be hard in the midst of severe depression, but at the end of the day it is really the only option. If what you are doing isn't working, don't just keep doing it. Find another competent professional, do your research, have your conversations, take a leap of faith if necessary, and try something new.
Again, I really hope you find healing, OP. Whatever it is that atheists do instead of praying, I'm doing that for you.
He holds that such theory is useful to know in general, but that real-world negotiations are carried out by emotional, irrational humans. As a result, these rational theories often break down in the face of hubris, anger, fear, love, shame, etc, and as such, relying solely on these theories will not get you the results you want. Thus, you should "never split the difference."
Instead, he then goes on to suggest a whole variety of ways one can achieve better negotiation results, starting with the most obvious: really, truly listening to the needs of the other. The book is fascinating. Highly recommended.
Or, more broadly:
- There is "what happened," and there is "the meaning you assign to what happened," and crucially, _they are not the same thing._
This one lesson underlies virtually every mindfulness and personal development practice in the world.
Contrast this with her “normal world” books that take place in the “regular, clock-time” world, AKA Chronos.
A Wrinkle in Time probably shaped my view of the world more than any other book growing up. Kairos has a permanent place in my heart as a result.