Viewing profile — eemax

> The Illusion of Security > Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a f…

> It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational o…

> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberal…

We pin all of our npm dependencies and upgrade them via dependabot. Dependabot links to the GitHub or GitLab release for each dependency bump, and I typically skim / scan every sin…

Cool post! I don't have a ton of experience using Stripe, but shouldn't you at least be handling some sort of payment_failed webhook? It looks like you call _createSubscription and…

The library described in this blog post looks kind of interesting as an implementation of a Maybe monad in python, but the example case is pretty silly. It re-implements a 4 line f…

A gold standard is terrible monetary policy, even worse than the status quo. Good monetary policy would be the fed doing NGDP level targeting a la Scott Sumner: https://www.mercatu…

Well, to some degree, people probably do want to live in big, new houses. There's also probably some "real" underlying demand for an education, outside of people needing it (or bel…

Well, it does actually solve the problem in the sense that it actually causes houses to be built and students to go to college. Probably this indicates the real problem is more abo…

Yes, this is probably effective propaganda, and moreover, propaganda for a just cause. Nonetheless it is not evidence for climate change, and moreover it is not even necessarily an…

Individual animals in the wild die cruel, slow, painful deaths all the time, regardless of whether their species as a whole is thriving or not. So while this video might evoke a st…

Isn't it much more likely that Tether is keeping some or most of its reserves in bitcoin, rather than USD, as they claim? Most people get Tethers from trading on bitcoin exchanges,…

No, not really. It makes it useful for criminals, and a small number of people who might have good reasons to buy things, but that doesn't mean it should have a market cap of billi…

Because it seems like an obvious bubble, with little / no real value? Bitcoin was / is a pretty cool technological innovation. But the main use-case seems to be buying illegal thin…

I should clarify that I am in the U.S... seems like most of these sites are unavailable here.

Related to this, does anyone know of a way to bet against bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general), without buying cryptocurrencies themselves? There are lots of more-or-less sketc…

Nice. In general, I think cryptocurrency and blockchains are pretty over-hyped, but they are a good example of a non-trivial but still simple application to show off a programming …

The comparisons in this article are mostly against the high-end Intel core line, but these CPUs support server / enterprise type features like ECC memory, lots of PCI-E lanes, and …

I've never heard of Capture the Flag. Can someone a bit more familiar describe what the format is exactly, or what type of questions / challenges there are? Any examples from last …

Neat. Just browsing through the source, is there a reason that: calculateBlockHash (Block i p t b _) = concatMap hashString [show i, p, show t, b] is not calculateBlockHash (Block …

Here's a response about why complexity theory may not constrain AI that much: https://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI It is something "AI alarmists" think about.

What happens if you give the human player a handicap? I wonder if the games are really as close as the commentators say, or if it's just a quirk of the MCST algorithm.

The same entity should not be responsible for both education and certification/credentialing. It creates a serious conflict-of-interest, and a better system would be to separate th…

Doesn't that possibility just make it easier to put the sheriff on the bottom though? I think the harder to judge possibility is if RH and crew were locked up rightfully for commit…

Eh, it seems to me the sheriff horribly abused his position of power. Either LJ and RH were imprisoned rightfully, in which case perhaps they shouldn't be just be released, or else…