Marketers using all of their skills to try to sell the idea that they’re a good guy doing something people (who aren’t ad buyers) want.

Sad part is they are probably able to fool some people.

I wanted to learn more and found this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/damon-baehrel-the-most-exclusive-restaurant-in-america

Sounds like the ten year wait list might be made up and who knows where he gets his meats, but the whole thing just sounds fascinating. From his website, the current price is $550 USD a head, though it’s subject to change several times per week.

He sounds like one of those guys that has a whole bunch of little projects going on at any time and over the years accumulated enough results from those to host some volume of dinner parties. And possibly exaggerates or lies about some of them (though hard to say if he treats his cooking similarly to how he treats his legend/myth).

Though I wouldn’t suggest bringing up open source software around him. Unless it’s to bitch about people doing things for free when you want to charge lots of money for it.

Yeah, but how was that food?

I just tried a fine dining restaurant for the first time this past weekend.

I was just curious after watching a bunch of cooking competitions on Netflix about how good that kind of food could be so decided to find a Michelin star restaurant and give it a try.

While the portions were small, the food was on another level. Even the “worst” of it was only that because it wasn’t amazing, but still really good.

The food was so good that when I got home and snacked that night, it was hard to enjoy any of my usual favorite snacks because it all felt so basic after that.

It was fancy in other regards, too. Like when my buddy went to the bathroom, someone came over and folded his cloth napkin rather than leave it bunched up on the table.

Plus, even though the portions were tiny and we joked about whether we’d need to stop for fast-food afterwards, by the end of the 9 or so courses, I felt completely satisfied. Even the snacking I mentioned was more due to the munchies than actual hunger.

It was expensive though. Two taster menu plus two drinks each came to about 500 CAD plus tip. And it was one of the cheaper options. There was a two Michelin star sushi place that advertised seats starting at 800 and I’m not even sure that includes any food, though I think it gets the “chef cooks what he wants” menu, which tbf would probably be way better than what I’d want anyways.

This place only needed to be booked like a month in advance, so the place you’re talking about sounds like it’s on another level itself. Though I’m curious how much that other level translates to better food.

How do you sell an indie game studio? Doesn’t sound very independent even before the sale to me.

I think that, due to the nature of chaos and the butterfly effect, any time travel at all would change the future. Unless it was just closing a time loop that was already present in the current past (which would mean any attempt to alter history would fail because that attempt is already a part of history), or if it’s possible to create new branches in time.

So these rules are either unnecessary because any time travel automatically causes changes that, it’s not possible to change the past from the past, or it’s not possible to go back to our past, thus nothing you do will affect our present.

Yeah, I think there is a lot of potential for code analysis. There’s a limited cross section of ways malware can do interesting things, but many permutations of ways to do that.

So look for the interesting things, like:

• accessing other programs’ address spaces
• reading/writing files
• deleting/moving files
• sending/receiving network traffic
• os system calls and console commands
• interacting with hardware
• spawning new processes
• displaying things on the screen
• accessing timing information

Obviously there’s legitimate uses for each of these, so that’s just the first step.

Next, analyze the data that is being used for that:

• what’s the source?
• what’s the destination?
• what kind of transformations are being applied to the data?

Then you can watch out for things like:

• is it systematically going through directories and doing some operation to all files? (Maybe ransomware, data scrubbing, or just maliciously deleting stuff?)
• is it grabbing data from somewhere and sending it somewhere else on the internet? (Stealing data?)
• is it using timing information to build data? (Timing attacks to figure out kernel data that should be hidden?)
• is it changing OS settings/setup?

Then generate a report of everything it is doing and see if it aligns with what the code is supposed to do. Or you could even build some kind of permissions system around that with more sophistication than the basic “can this app access files? How about the internet?”

Computer programs can be complex, but are ultimately made up of a series of simple operations and it’s possible to build an interpreter that can do those operations and then follow everything through to see exactly what is included in the massive amount of data it sends over the network so that you can tell your file sharing program is also for some reason sending /etc/passwords to a random address or listening for something to access a sequence of closed ports and then will do x, y, z, if that ever happens. Back doors could be obvious with the right analysis tools, especially if it’s being built from source code (though I believe it’s still possible with binaries, just maybe a bit harder).

They are phrasing it in a way that makes plausible deniability harder!

That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).

If it hasn’t happened already, it wouldn’t surprise me if useful instrumentation space is reallocated to advertisement space at some point. Though hopefully the consumer rage in response would end whatever company tries that first.

Yeah, realizing I was an idiot implies I’m a bit less of one than I was before I realized.

I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.

Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there’s many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.

Now I want to see a full-size keyboard with a special place to mount a phone and a shoulder strap. Maybe some wheels so it could double as a skateboard and you’ll be an 80s/90s image of a hacker.

Touch screen should have maintenance/status display and diagnostics and settings for things you’d take care of while the vehicle isn’t moving. Like seat/mirror positioning presets, ride height, towing mode, etc.

I use my four way hazard lights when there’s heavy braking on the freeway to make sure people behind me are paying attention. It’s a button on my dash and pretty easy to toggle.

Though is that something that touch screen cars really put into the touch screen!?

Yeah I hate it when information is hidden in the name of minimalism. I’d rather have a plane cockpit UI than a bicycle UI, even if it means I feel like an idiot at various points when I discover new things I could have been doing the whole time.

Yeah IMO drug charges should be ones that need to be added on to other real crimes that directly affect others. Like theft or assault. And even outside of charges, why care if an otherwise good worker randomly tests positive for something?

That might bias the results towards gaming cafes and people building test machines. Cases where an account is used but a single snapshot doesn’t necessarily reflect what they normally use or that would capture the same machine multiple times.

Thanks for the detail!

And I agree that maybe they should be using something else. Though one risk with using something that few others are using is that it can also be used for targeting and tracking. Like if someone knows the bodyguards use shortwave communicators and that there’s an event at some location, they could have drones set up to just target those frequencies when they see them.

It’ll always be an arms race, at least if the players realize they are in an arms race and don’t just willingly carry tracking devices.

Infinite monkeys would produce everything in the time that it would take to type it out as fast as anyone can type, infinite times. There would also be infinite variations of slower versions, including an infinite number of versions where everything but the final period is written, but it never gets added (same with every other permutation of missing characters and extra ones added).

There would be infinite monkeys that only type one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems, and infinite monkeys that type some number greater than that, and even infinite monkeys that type out plays Shakespeare wanted to write but never got around to, plus infinite fan fictions about one or more of his plays.

Like infinite variations of plays where Juliette kills Hamlet, Ceasar puts on a miraculous defense and then divides Europe into the modern countries it’s made up of today, Romeo falls in love with King Lear, and Transformers save the Thundercats from the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles who were brainwashed to think they were ancient normal samurai lizards. Some variations having all of that in the same play.

That’s the thing about infinity. If there’s any chance of something happening at all, it happens infinite times.

Even meta variants would all happen. Like if there’s any chance a group of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters could form a computer, there would be infinite variations of that computer in that infinite field of monkeys, including infinite ones that are trying to stimulate infinite monkeys making up a computer to verify that those monkeys make up a valid computer worth building and don’t have some bug where the temperature gets too high and melts some of the monkeys or the food delivery system isn’t fast enough to keep up and breaks down because monkeys get too tired to keep up with necessary timings.

BUT, even though all of these would exist in that infinite sea of monkeys, there would be far more monkeys just doing monkey things. So many more that you could spend your whole lifetime jumping to random locations within that sea of monkeys and never see any of the random organization popping out, despite an infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their whole existence to making sure you, specifically, can find them (they might be too busy fighting off the infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their lives to prevent you from ever finding non-noise in the sea of monkeys).