71–80 of 103 posts
Belief in spirituality, the supernatural, a higher power all can and do exist independently of any particular religion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why haven't Spectre et al been used as vectors to jailbreak old hardware yet? I get the impression they're not that practical of vectors and we freaked out and hobbled our cpu performance with patches for nothing.
Out of curiosity, what I would be jailbreaking? My x86-64 motherboard that I can boot any OS I want onto?
I'm reminded of the "I can't send email to anyone over 100 miles away" story. There is, of course, a perfectly rational explanation... but that doesn't change the spooky arbitrariness of it.. EDIT: Not sure why I forgot to link this, out of one of my all-time favorite presentations. I give you: The Mechanical Transmogrification of Diodes into Capacitors! https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
I've mentioned before how loud an argument we got into with a guy who aspired to being a hacker, and yet didn't understand that the magnetic domains on a HDD were essentially analog. Even after we asked him why, if hard drives were truly binary, that secure disk erase tools were so complex and slow he still insisted that everything was binary, soup to nuts. Even the simplest things are a fiction. Or maybe I should sa…
Well, the argument was bad though: whether hard drives are analog is orthogonal to why "secure disk erase tools are so complex and slow".
I see what you meant ("if they were digital you could just tell them to flip to zero and that would be easy and fast").
Sure, but there are many other reasons why secure disk erase tools could be complex and slow even in an imagined all-digital disk (and of course the imaginary digital substrate operations could just be a slow tech, the way RAM is slower than Lx caches, etc.). And while for delete you just need to change some directory entries to mark as none, for "secure erase" you'd also want to "reset" every bit, so at least similar time to the work you do when you write a file of same size.
My sister is very into crystals, actually works at a shop financed by some billionaire's daughter. Every now and then she likes to remind me of that most of our screens are made out of quartz, and highlights the associated qualities of the crystal. I can't recall them but I always find it interesting, something about assigning beliefs and extra qualities onto your everyday objects. Some people believe in a white god…
The entire Internet runs on crystals.
Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything…
I'm reminded of the "I can't send email to anyone over 100 miles away" story. There is, of course, a perfectly rational explanation... but that doesn't change the spooky arbitrariness of it.. EDIT: Not sure why I forgot to link this, out of one of my all-time favorite presentations. I give you: The Mechanical Transmogrification of Diodes into Capacitors! https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
I've mentioned before how loud an argument we got into with a guy who aspired to being a hacker, and yet didn't understand that the magnetic domains on a HDD were essentially analog. Even after we asked him why, if hard drives were truly binary, that secure disk erase tools were so complex and slow he still insisted that everything was binary, soup to nuts. Even the simplest things are a fiction. Or maybe I should sa…
It's security theater. All you have to do is write 0s to the entire HDD.
Relevant philosophical discussion: Koestler (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine This work has informed quite a bit of art and literature ever since, from the manga/anime series Ghost in the Shell to a fair bit of William Gibson's work (see 'semiotic ghosts' of futures that might-have-been in The Gernsback Continuum). As far as religious belief in modern civilization, Frank Herbert in Dune (A…
> who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual interdimensional communication from the architect of this virtual reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in? Russel's Teapot. Also, Occam's Razor.
(Also, Russell's Teapot is not at all a fair comparison. A vast, incomprehensible, inconceivably simple unitary consciousness as the fundamental substrate of reality is much closer to most religious conceptions of God than is a teapot in orbit.)
(...and, of course, a single entity which underlies reality is ultimately simple. Push it pantheist and you reduce the number of entities to one - no other worldview can reduce the number of entities further.)
> You’d be surprised at just how many people believe in the supernatural. I wouldn't - the majority believes in an invisible sky friend.
And out of those who don't, a bunch believe in an invisible simulation programmer
Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything…
Little did they know, that those early computers were actually powered by garlic odors[0]! Like calculators that can be powered by light - the "magic" that we call solar power. So, of course, the user's implementatin of garlic cloves clearly "fixed the glitch". Happy pre-Halloween! [0] No, of course garlic isn't an energy source. ...At least, not one that we (yet) know how to harness. ;-)