samhw

Really? I read that your comment is wrong.

Harms like: the aforementioned energy usage equivalent to Eastern Europe, scams wiping out billions on the regular (e.g. the absurd Luna pyramid scheme which collapsed the other week), facilitating vast drug dealing and consumption at huge detriment to poor countries and many users, etc.

You could do something like "you need to be physically holding the card with your hand", which would complete some circuit. I can't think of many cases where that wouldn't work, except perhaps people who don't take their cards out of their wallets(?).

> With Hits, its easy for one page to harvest a high Hub score. All that is needed is to outlink to known good pages (authority). Providing outlinks is trivial. Once so harvested, one can direct that flow to a designated page to give it a high Authority score.

Are you saying that you think HITS doesn't recursively score the quality of references by their own scores? That's not true. It does exactly what PageRank does in that respect: a page's score depends on the score of those which reference it, which in turn depends on... etc.

The 'hub' vs 'authority' distinction is interesting but not really relevant here: we're considering a page's 'authority' score, which depends on the 'hub' score of those who outlink to it, and at that point we're just doing PageRank [again, except performance-wise and arguably freshness-wise].

Like I said: the only non-trivial differences between them are implementation / performance-related, not semantic.

> Why not ? Formalize the strategy spaces of both the players and its a very valid game in the Game Theory sense. For the ranker you have to consider some functional space of functions over a graph.

Yes, again: possible to frame it as a formally valid problem if you really want to; still not an interesting one. We're only talking about this because you want to maintain that your earlier statement was true.

"You have to consider some functional space of functions over a graph" gives no detail (besides that, yes, you can model something–maybe documents, maybe people, who knows?–as a graph) and sounds like something written by a person with a gun to their head.

Or maybe I'm wrong and there's a fascinating problem which you just don't want to divulge to me.

> If you check my original comment I gave a simple scheme to attack HITS rank. Sybil attack is a little harder for Pagerank.

OK, but how is it harder for PageRank? I can't really see any differences in the semantics of the two algorithms, so I'm not sure what kind of added vulnerability one or the other could have.

> One could pose this as an adversarial game.

Yeah, I appreciate that, that's what I was referring to as "the idea that people will try to game it". It's not really the kind of 'game' that would be considered in game theory, though, because it doesn't have any interesting or emergent properties - the designer's response will just be "oh yeah we should stop people gaming our algorithm".

> The HITS algorithm has one drawback that it is super easy to game it. PageRank is not entirely resistant, but its a little more robust.

> Create a harvester page that points to lots and lots of popular, high traffic pages on the internet. By virtue of doing this it can accumulate a lot of Hubs score which it can redirect as an Authority score to an intended page.

I'm not sure how HITS is any more "easy to game" than PageRank? As far as I understand it, the differences are almost entirely limited to performance characteristics, not semantics. The example you give doesn't seem to be specific to HITS (as opposed to PageRank) in any way.

(I'm also not sure how "game theory" is relevant here, unless by "game theory" you just mean "the idea that people will try to game it".)

I think there are two separate threads running through this. One is his academic criticism of their work through the academic publishing process. I hope no one would describe that as 'harassment', irrespective of how much his academic output focused on challenging their work. The other is his extremely poor and possibly slightly autistic Slack behaviour, fixating on his disapproval of their work and repeatedly bringing it up in even the most marginally related contexts. That part I would agree rises, or at least arguably rises, to the level of harassment.

It also has a weird emphasis on their personal lives - particularly their gender:

> Satrajit Chatterjee, a more senior researcher at Google, used the cover of scientific debate to undermine the women personally, the employees claim. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss company matters. Multiple complaints about Chatterjee’s behavior toward the women were made to Google’s personnel department, and he received a written warning, some employees said, but he continued to criticize the women’s results.

I half expect it to carry on: "The male researchman directed his critical male gaze at the delicate ladylike handwritten-in-flowery-pink-biro output of the female women researcheresses.."

I mean, I know I'm out of step with the zeitgeist in finding this irrelevant and patronising, but come on. Female researchers deserve to be treated not as fragile novelties but as regular professionals. Implying that a male researcher launched some kind of inappropriate sexed attack by criticising their work is thoroughly bizarre to me.

Ah, I see. Well diagnosed, by the way - I did indeed think you were being ironic, and was going along with the joke, as opposed to being antagonistic in the knowledge you were being sincere.

To respond in sincere mode: while I don’t think it’s terribly important whether black people are rendered correctly by some Zoom feature, nevertheless including a reasonable number of black people in one’s training data sounds like it shouldn’t require any extra effort, and so I think it’s a reasonable enough point to make.

Nah, it's "how many Black, Indigenous, People of Colour do you have who wear glasses and have facial scars from having fallen from a great height while screaming?". If you can't find enough preëxisting BIPOCWWGAHFSFHFFAGHWS people, I suppose you're limited to finding other BIPOC people, giving them glasses, and throwing them from a great height. (Manufacturing them the other way around might be too offensive.)

Hmm, how many bits are you allowing for the 'number'? Also, you need to identify which user it belongs to, as well as - in our case - which device and which sensor on that device. Also, is that ordinary NVRAM? How do you protect against bit flips? Google's well-known paper[0] found a 0.22% average incidence of uncorrectable errors per DIMM - that's corruption of more bits than ECC can fix (and I'm not sure that your pricing is even for ECC RAM). Your tolerance of errors may differ, but you'd probably want to replicate the data at least once. Disk seems a good choice, for the added benefit that you can actually survive a power cut without going bust (i.e. redundancy against total loss, as well as handling the 'freak errors' in data correctness that become the norm when you're dealing with vast amounts of hardware). I'm a fan of the kind of minimalism that you're advocating, don't get me wrong, but it's from pushing that limit that I've learned what the hard limits are.

[0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Yeah, that's true, actually. As best I recall, I just meant that that is what people use JWT for regardless, and I wanted to convey that the only part doing the useful work there is the 'asymmetric crypto' part. I didn't want to get into the territory of providing alternative suggestions, only breaking down what is useful about JWTs when used for that purpose.

As for old and outdated data, I should think that's easily solved by having a 'created' and 'modified' stamp in the encrypted data, much like you have on an inode.

Ah, sorry, that was what I was referring to when I said "Presumably you weren't using it to sign the tokens, if they were surprised the client could access them?". I classed that as too obvious for it to be what you meant.

I mean, I'd be rather surprised too. What were you using JWTs for, if not asymmetric crypto? Presumably you weren't using it to sign the tokens, if they were surprised the client could access them? And I can't see many contexts where you would use it with a shared secret, where just sending JSON over HTTPS wouldn't suffice. (I'm assuming 'frontend' here denotes a client on the other side of the trust boundary.)

Asymmetric cryptography solves problems of statelessness: i.e. encrypt your sensitive|read-only data with your public key, decrypt it with your private key, beep boop, you can now use your client as a database. JWTs are a whole other unnecessary lasagne of complexity – not good complexity but random complexity, like the human appendix – which invites bugs and adds nothing above the former in most implementations. (Hell, my current company generates JWTs and then uses them as plain old 'random' keys to look up the session data in a database. It's hilarious but also awful.)

> write code as simply as possible is tautology

What? That has nothing whatsoever to do with tautology. It's just a statement you agree with. If everyone else agreed with it, it might at most be a truism or an uninteresting statement, but evidently they do not. (They might claim to, but reality shows they optimise for other things - in my experience the simplest work, which does not always mean the simplest code, especially when you're accustomed to the mystic rituals of the Javanese tribes.)

I assume they mean "relative to [my idea of how much a company will make when serving that amount of traffic]" - which does depend on the industry they are in, not just in terms of how profitable it is but also its 'user load coefficient', so to speak.

(The first job I had was at a 10-person startup in a coworking space, barely making enough revenue to break even, and still consuming a vast, vast amount of data, because the product involved constant streams of sensor data from a vast number of tiny cheap devices. People tend to forget that not every single business is a CRUD web/mobile app whose average user accounts for $20/month revenue against at most a few hundred HTTP requests and a couple megabytes of disk.)

Ah, thank you - I had this thread open in a tab all day, and I'm a compulsive procrastinator (not just some amateur crastinator), hence the intermittent participation! It reads as quite pompous now that I read it back, but hey, I think that of all my comments, so I'm very happy if it was any use to you. Wishing you all the best, and that you find an opportunity to put your skills to better, worthier use. Here's to artists, chefs, and saints :)

Eh, I think a Master's in English is good (a fortiori) proof that they know how to string a sentence together. I am still absolutely mystified at how they wrote that flatulent nonsense. And I mean truly, genuinely mystified, not 'mystified' as in 'clearly suspecting X or Y but not wanting to say'. It's now 100% beyond doubt, in my mind, that they are capable of writing far better than that, indeed very well by any standard, even within some given register[0]. I also don't at all buy their explanation of 'malicious compliance', considering their hurt, piqued responses to the criticism in this thread. Every possibility here makes very little sense to me.

[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.

> someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out.

> I didn’t seek this out.

Oh, come on.

> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.

Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.

In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.

Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!

* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok

> I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding.

I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:

I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.

In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.

> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them

This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.

I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.

My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.

> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify

Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.

I suspect, as with other writing I've seen before, that (a) they have no real thoughts about this topic (indeed it strikes me as very difficult for anyone to form a genuine thought about), and (b) therefore they are mechanically churning out 'content' (euch), emulating whatever examples they have seen. That's what explains so many in the comments feeling that it was produced by GPT-3.

And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.

The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.

It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.

I can't see anything here that's not solved by the simple algorithm "If someone is performing badly, help them. If they still perform badly, fire them." I don't think you need to know about their personal life. Just provide help to whoever is underperforming.

I think you're illustrating that person's point. I'm a liberal, with-the-times person in a liberal, with-the-times city, and I cringe at the thought of ever uttering the words "invalidate someone's lived experience". Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I don't think it's a bad rule of writing to speak in simple, clear, plain words, not glutinous agglomerations of abstract verbiage which evoke nothing.

(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)

Yeah, I can't stand that about the US. The best supermarket experience of my life was in Croatia, in Zagreb. I asked a woman working there whether they had ice, and she just said "No." (punctuation hers), spun around, and marched off to the next thing. No "Let me see if I can find them in the warehouse, or else freeze them myself while you awkwardly wait", no "Can I help you find something else? What about some water and a freezer?", just "Nope, no ice, question answered, I'm out". I could have bought a house there, right there and then.

I think it's probably not a good idea to read comments about your writing on the internet. They aren't sending them 'to you' - you've sought out this discussion - so it's on you if you choose to read people's opinions.

If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.

Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.

I don't think it's a genuine spam comment, because it doesn't actually mention any identifiable 'opportunity'. I assume it's someone trying to make a point, though God knows what that point could be.

I think this is quite a good definition. After all, it's a key principle of toxicology - courtesy of Paracelsus - that the dose makes the poison. (Any woman who's had Botox can attest to this.) It certainly seems to be used that way in this article, in being applied to 'positivity'.

Yeah, I don't want to be cruel, in case the author is reading this, but it really is uniquely egregious writing (no toxic positivity here!). The broken-up sentences you mention are. Awkward and mostly grammatically inco. Rrect as a result. They seem weirdly unaware of the incredibly basic writer's injunction to vary your sentence length. There's no rhythm or cadence to it. You can literally feel the author grimly trudging toward the target word count.

It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.

I was joking, with that particular sentence. My point was that there is someone managing the server irrespective, and that there's not a particularly clear metaphysical distinction between 'create my database in this way' and 'instruct someone else to create my database in this way'. Not in the computing world, where everything's already under 17 layers of abstraction.