robcohen

I disagree, I’ve never found a library hackerspace that I liked. I think the problem is in liability. A real hackerspace has insane liability issues, and city govs are about the most risk averse groups there is.

Unfortunately I think hackerspace on gov property are doomed to never be cool.

Have you thought about joining the National Guard in a cyber or intel capacity to get the clearance? Outside boot camp, tech school, and deployments you'd be able to work in the private sector simultaneously.

Wow, very cool thank you for sharing!

My understanding of PSD2 is that it requires banking transactions to be "machine-readable" whatever that means. So there's an actual legal requirement for making data accessible outside of the browser.

This is the precise option I was thinking might be possible. Is it even reasonable for an individual developer to use their own API keys for something like this? I assume because you suggested it, it is. Any limitations that are impractical for personal use?

This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD try to find every single export option for every bank, but I think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not having a PSD2 equivalent in our laws.

So the question is, would it make sense to have a Plaid plugin for this? Obviously because they are a 3rd party, it negates some of the benefits, but I simply cannot use this system manually because I have so many accounts. Maybe one workaround is to pull from Tiller (which uses plaid), then export a csv/excel.

Any chance there's a good plan in place to get automated data imports working, even if we need a 3rd party to do it?

Do you have the same opinion of headless CMS systems like Strapi?

In my experience, it’s used as a recruiting tool. High quality talent is usually attracted to orgs with a transparent culture, and well-written blog posts show that the culture is healthy to external talent.

Except they don’t end up feeling the effects. What happens is they start offering rent control or voucher programs to help lower income families. This gets presented as “equitable”, when all it really does is push wages down for a specific class of people. These same people get “stuck” in affordable housing because they won the housing lottery and can no longer afford to move out.

I think you mean Vyatta

Those are all very valid points you raise. I’ve also faced the recoverability problem when something goes awry. I’ve also noticed their ISP line has difficulty being reachable via API when they lose internet connectivity, even if you are local to the network.

That said, is there anything better? Mikrotik, while more configurable, is so much worse and feels straight out of the 90s design-wise.

Beyond those options I’m not aware of anything remotely better.

Why’s that? I actually like the api system for Ubiquiti gear.

As an alternative, I've been watching VyOS with great interest and it seems like they are finally going to release their controller and LocalUI interface this year, which is exciting. It seems to have a similar architecture as a Ubiquiti controller.

https://blog.vyos.io/

I believe login.gov was made by 18F, a highly specialized group of hackers. Yes they technically are out of GSA but their individual backgrounds are no joke. Check out their GitHub https://github.com/18F

What about ricin?

With all the price cuts I doubt it

If you do consulting, you can find conferences relevant to your field and tack on some time on either side of the conference.

This is 100% legal. It also reduces the costs of the trip massively.

So I’d look for interesting conferences and build my plan off of that.

This is impressive and cool, but I have to wonder what I would do with my own children if I ever have them.

I’d want them to want to do college as early as possible, because frankly I found middle and high school to be a wildly massive waste of time and effort. That said, college has a tendency to focus on busy work and less on learning and retaining information. It’s a useful heuristic for determining ability to get work done, but it’s pretty inefficient for learning.

The biggest risk here is focusing on getting brass rings that are social signals instead of true accomplishments. I’d want my own kids to learn the value of working, and I’d much rather they have a job from an early age instead of a degree.

Honestly the best bet is to just read the best books for a given subject. You can figure out which books are used in curriculums by checking syllabi. Seems reasonable that if they are using the books at Harvard/Yale/MIT/Caltech/Stanford that they are probably decent.

I personally like to read a few books on the same subject in a row. It might be helpful to use wolfram alpha, SAGE, or chatgpt to explain concepts or help answer questions. Also buy a solutions manual and use it to check your answers.

As someone who did a math degree at a decent institution, I can assure you learning on your own (assuming you have the discipline) is a lot less stress than taking a class and you’ll likely learn more.

If you’re really motivated, hire a TA in the subject you are studying (online meets are fine). If you need to, just walk into the math department at a local university and ask where you can find tutors for a specific class. Just tell them you’re planning to enroll but you can’t right now.

Or check out a multitude of mathematics communities on discord or slack and ask around.

I feel the same way. It seems like it doesn’t even try to solve most of the hardest problems for decentralization. I too find it weird, but it is fun to play with.

With zero knowledge proofs, no it won’t be trivial. Because it will be binary as opposed to identifier based.

You could make the argument that we really need better methods and technology for determining the health impact of what we put into our environment. The problem as I see it (as a total layman) is that the health sciences are not good at determining the effects of almost anything in the future. The best we can do is wide-scale studies that try to control for different variables (and largely fail, because the set of variables is incredibly large).

I have a feeling we aren’t going to solve this problem anytime soon, as the simulations required appear to be so large they are beyond our reach. I am optimistic that we can massively increase the data collected as time goes on, and that will increase our accuracy of studies of things that occurred in the past.

I reserve “hard” for skills/knowledge that a person who is average can succeed doing/knowing with significant motivation. Very few things are actually hard in the sense that it requires intelligence or motivation way beyond that. Iron man races are hard. Getting a CFA is hard. Becoming a software architect is hard. Electricity is simply not hard. Anyone can learn it. We should democratize these skills so we’re all more capable people.

This is the reason. I used to screen recruits for clearances in the Marine Corps. The limits they pick for drug use are 100% based off what will affect recruiting numbers, and zero percent based on any kind of peer reviewed research. It’s massively disappointing.

To be fair they are trying to solve for edge cases along a long tail. Which is pretty hard, so it’s not surprising they’re using made up heuristics.

Seems like quite the claim. I could conceivably see the argument against federal taxes, but state taxes? There’s no right to be free from taxes enshrined in the bill of rights.

This is so correct it's absolutely ridiculous. I learn new skills as a hobby. I have a degree in construction. There is no way for me to learn to be an electrician that is authorized to do anything unless I drop everything else I'm doing for a minimum of 4 years.

This is clearly ridiculous. Electricity isn't hard. This is precisely the sort of thing that standardized tests, both knowledge and practical, can effectively fix.

No one wants to fix it though.

That's only first layer transactions. Second layer transactions are orders of magnitude cheaper. Think of layer 1 as your checking account and layer 2 as your credit card. You don't use your checking account often.

I mean, I'm not sure what screening could have prevented this. The Office of Personnel Management screens all military clearances. You basically write your history down, put down people who knew you at various times, and they interview those people and ask if you're a trustworthy person.

What magical screening process would you like them to do?

Seems non-obvious to me. The world currency is the dollar presently. We protect the trade routes around the world. Remove that protection, those trade routes will no longer be in our favor. Whoever controls them will set up tariffs to massively hurt the US and benefit themselves.

Put another way, how do you think the US would fare long term if China and Russia controlled all international trade?

It’s supposed to show relative power consumption. Which it does. What would you like to compare it to?