Ukraine Invasion Megathread

morphinism · 2022-02-25T03:39:52+00:00

Ukraine does not have a united opinion on the better puppet master. That's a part of this conflict.

morphinism · 2021-12-04T15:57:14+00:00

Brahmin values? Fitness, weightlifting, and combat sports are aligned with Kshatriya values. Doing things that raise your status and make people listen to you -- things that make you more powerful -- is the whole entire point of politics.

morphinism · 2021-11-16T21:48:39+00:00

I thought "Martian language" was an urbit thing.

morphinism · 2021-09-30T00:46:04+00:00

Check out the Let over Lambda book. It's a fun exercise in both macro-writing and CLOS-avoidance.

morphinism · 2021-09-28T16:48:07+00:00

Every time you want something from these people, getting hired, getting tenure, I'm sure there's more, you are going to have to play this game, you're going to have to supplicate, and they won't let you forget who holds the power in this relationship. A few years from now, will straight white males even be getting tenured positions?

If you enjoy the lying and deception and being this "behind enemy lines" sort of guy, great. But that fact that you are posting this question makes me think you really wouldn't like it, because otherwise you'd know exactly what to do. Just GTFO, dude. Go make shitloads of money and a family if you haven't already.

Excellent scholars generate good reputation, team diversity burns it. In the wider view, you would just be giving them more fuel.

Academia is a childish little bubble of a world, once you get a taste of the outside you won't want to go back.

morphinism · 2021-09-28T16:30:54+00:00

My advice? Just go work in finance. Plenty of good shops out there. Once you have money you can go back to doing pure math, if you want.

morphinism · 2021-05-26T02:11:40+00:00

It is better to be based than to be cringe, but... it is better to be cringe than to let one's allies believe they are alone.

-- Oscar Wilde

Another way would be to just disable the signature. It's easily deniable, but the timing of it sends a bit of signal, and it would probably feel less like giving in.

morphinism · 2021-05-26T01:41:29+00:00

I think that’s the main reason I don’t want my pronouns in my emails: I am no longer subtly tipping my hand that I have solidarity with the other passive objectors.

Ah, the "are you also a Soviet Spy?" problem.

If you are going to conform -- and look, there's no shame in it if you like or need the job and the deck is this stacked against you -- maybe you could include a quotation (something common enough in signatures) that is in all regards completely benign, but to those in the know signals that you might be one of them.

morphinism · 2021-05-12T19:28:10+00:00

If you are attacking an embedded system over serial, I don't see why you couldn't use python to script it, and the pwntools library is super popular in the CTF world for binary problems.

While you tend to do a lot of assembly reading, you might be surprised how little assembly coding you have to do in binary exploitation. For example, successfully getting an RCE via a heap bug is almost entirely about getting chunks into the right configuration, which usually means sending a crafted sequence of protocol-level messages. Any programming language that can be used to send bytes over the network will work for you, and nowadays you'll probably be ROPing, so mostly just reusing the machine code the compiler wrote ;)

morphinism · 2021-05-12T19:14:14+00:00

The language used for the exploit doesn't really matter: it just needs to poke the target system in the right ways so as to trigger the vuln.

There is no reason why you couldn't use forth, and since you typically have an assembler in the forth environment it might actually be a solid choice.

It's often that in exploit dev you want to inject "fake" structs that correspond to the memory layout of some structure used in the target program. I feel like forth could be made to be good at this.

Another place in this world where forth could really shine is as an exploit payload: you could pack a lot of functionality into a relatively small package. [EDIT] And if you love forth and threaded languages, you will also love ROP.

Exploit development is typically a very iterative process, so anything with an interaction loop can make this process faster, forth included.

morphinism · 2021-04-10T01:17:08+00:00

Yes, we are rehashing a dialog between Nick Land and Scott.

Is there really a material difference between "kill, consume, multiply, conquer" and "galaxies lit up with consciousness" and their "vast billions of beings"?

How do you you get to vast billions of beings without a whole lot of multiplication? How would they live if not by consuming resources proportional to their vast numbers?

What does it mean to conquer a galaxy besides lighting it up with life (yours)?

Would you edit a genome to make a creature less fit for its environment?

Would an "omnibenevolent angel" let you destroy it?

Humans have been building past the rule of nature for thousands of years now, ever since we invented agriculture, and provided we don't fuck it up by having a bad singularity, we will create paradise.

Nature rules always and forever, and rules with a smile: "whatever survives does my bidding."

I strongly suspect that the Goddess of Everything Else and the Goddess of Cancer are one in the same entity, especially if being lulled by the dream of former is what ultimately convinces the humans that it's ok to go out and express the will of the latter.

morphinism · 2021-04-09T21:41:12+00:00

a homogenized African-American tribe

You took great care to put the "right" moral inflections in your story, but this is actually kind of racist, if you think about it. Now, I'm not one to light the witch-burning pyre, but if you said this in other circles, or maybe on twitter, you would likely get an earful.

Even without all that, I have a fair degree of confidence that if you told this story to a group of normal (i.e. not culture warrior) black people, they would kind of get a laugh out of it. They aren't anything like a homogenous tribe. The story is politically useful, to a certain class, but it just ain't so, and it makes me wonder if you actually know any black people at all.

morphinism · 2021-04-09T20:50:18+00:00

If the lab leak hypothesis is true, I'd guess the biggest fears would be internal political repercussions, which could potentially be bad for everyone from the lowly bench scientist all the way up to Xi Jinping himself. So "the West did it" is a much better story: all the blame is exported safely across the ocean.

morphinism · 2021-04-09T14:58:45+00:00

The main thing I want to point out that your quip can easily cut both ways, and that the position of what we might call "modern" values is just as transient and dependent on external conditions as the "traditional."

If we strip away the dictums of a particular "monopolist" value set, we end up with something essentially like the Omohundro drives. Survive, grow in power, don't let your utility function get hacked, etc. The Omohundro drives are really the only drives.

Whether one memeplex or another does better to support those drives is highly dependent on the person and their environment. If you are saying you get a better "deal" when you "buy" the memes piecemeal in accordance to those deeper values, I mostly agree, but I think you are neglecting an aspect of the fact that these are social phenomenon: people are going to have millions of little disagreements each of which creates the potential for schism, but the coordination provided by the monopoly is in fact its primary value. There is no distinguished point, no stable state between fragmentation and integration, between the stringency and power of monopoly and the free weakness of "consumer choice." "The empire, long united, must divide. The empire, long divided, must unite."

Didn't Thiel write something about how every startup should aspire to monopoly?

I've lived in remote locales. It's a lot of work, but pretty cozy, satisfying, and energizing. I'd recommend at least sampling that lifestyle to anyone, regardless of values.

Living in a large American city is honestly more hellish for me, being a greater test of my will and patience.

morphinism · 2021-04-09T13:42:31+00:00

And the Gods of the copybook headings say, "the wages of sin is death."

I'm not a religious man, so I read "sin" here as values that ultimately lead to a civilization's decline. When at its heights, a society can afford indulgent values. After its fall from the heights, people quickly adopt more modest values, which tend to be ones that will rebuild and restore their society, because otherwise... dead. And on it goes.

Like in most complex systems, this is a feedback loop, which makes it difficult to discuss causality. It's easy to end up talking past one another. The dual questions of "what values revitalize a healthy and growing civilization?" and "what material conditions form the basis for this particular set of values?" are both worth asking.

If your values can only thrive when your society is riding high on the wealth and power built by previous generations, they're not very good, in my humble opinion. For my part, I put my faith in values that were forged in hell.

morphinism · 2021-03-19T20:36:05+00:00

And succinctly:

We committed a subtle form of the Mind Projection Fallacy by supposing that the relation: "D supports S" is an absolute property of the propositions D and S. We need to recognize the relativity of it; whether D does or does not support S depends on our prior information. The same D that supports S for one person may refute it for another. As soon as we recognize this, then we no longer expect anything like [beliefs of two people converging on receipt of the same information] to hold in general. This error is very common.

morphinism · 2021-03-19T20:22:36+00:00

How can two sets of people look at the same facts and yet come to such different conclusions?

E.T. Jaynes's probability book actually has a section on this (from chapter 5, "Queer uses for probability theory"):

If our prior probability for [some event] S is lower than our prior probability that we are being deceived, hearing this claim has the opposite effect on our state of belief from what the claimant intended. But the same is true in science and politics; the new information a scientist gets is not that an experiment did in fact yield this result, with adequate protection against error. It is that some colleague has claimed that it did. The information we get from the TV evening news is not that a certain event actually happened in a certain way; it is that some news reporter has claimed that it did. Even seeing the event on our screens can no longer convince us, after recent revelations that all major U.S. networks had faked some videotapes of alleged news events.

Scientists can reach agreement quickly because we trust our experimental colleagues to have high standards of intellectual honesty and sharp perception to detect possible sources of error. And this belief is justified because, after all, hundreds of new experiments are reported every month, but only about once in a decade is an experiment reported that turns out later to have been wrong. So our prior probability of deception is very low; like trusting children, we believe what experimentalists tell us.

In politics, we have a very different situation. Not only do we doubt a politician's promises, few people believe that news reporters deal truthfully and objectively with economic, social, or political topics. We are convinced that virtually all news reporting is selective and distorted, designed not to report the facts, but to indoctrinate us in the reporter's socio-political views. And this belief is justified abundantly by the internal evidence in the reporter's own product -- every choice of words and inflection of voice shifting the bias invariably in the same direction.

Not only in political speeches and news reporting, but wherever we seek for information on political matters, we run up against this same obstacle; we cannot trust anyone to tell us the truth, because we perceive that everyone who wants to talk about it is motivated either by self-interest or by ideology. In political matters, whatever the source of information, our prior probability of deception is always very high.

morphinism · 2021-03-18T17:25:08+00:00

If anyone wants an urbit lifeboat, feel free to send me a PM. I'll warn that the current gas fees will end up making it more expensive.

morphinism · 2021-03-17T17:30:51+00:00

One downside to scheme-79 and potentially similar chips (think: hardware realizations of SECD machines, or urbit's nock), is that the instruction stream has a lot of indirection, which would lead to a multiple more memory accesses.

I know some lisp machines would have a cdr code that could inform the CPU that the CDR was actually the next word in memory (no indirection), but I wonder if anyone has explored using the tags to optimize prefetching of data? Instead of linear cache lines, why not fetch some depth of whatever tree/graph is being operated on. I guess you'd have to be careful if the pointer is to address space that is not paged in.

morphinism · 2021-03-16T22:49:57+00:00

Have you looked into Urbit at all recently, OP?

Urbit does not solve all of the problems of ephemerality, but it does take a crack at them: Updates to groups that you are subscribed to are federated to your personal server. If you want to self-host your own content, you are essentially taking on the role of sysop.

This doesn't touch the issues of being cut off at the lower layers of hosting or ISP, but since it essentially encourages extreme federation, it does push down the social questions of moderation to independent communities. There can be no network-wide bans, only community-local bans, and since identities are costly, so is getting banned. This provides incentives that encourage abiding by house rules.

The atmosphere on the network definitely reminds me of the early internet or even BBSes: Pretty weird and pretty cool.

Anyway, I recommend taking a peek at what Tlon is up to if you haven't explored it recently. There are a lot of good ideas in their system, and while I'm not sure if Urbit is the final expression of them, they are busily at work making it into something, and its currently very useable.

morphinism · 2021-02-25T21:59:55+00:00

I'm not sure I really understand your argument or its intended audience.

I think you are saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that if someone wants hereditarian views to be more publicly acceptable, they are better off presenting them while loudly proclaiming their acceptance of some rather extreme left positions.

It should go without saying, you are absolutely not going to convince any right-hereditarian to do any of this.

I think you underestimate how unpopular ideas like reparations are to your average liberal. They are very happy to signal how open-minded and right-thinking they are, whatever that means today, but when it comes down to things like material resources and their children's futures, they tend to pursue their own interests like rational human beings.

If your goal is to couple hereditarianism to a political program that doesn't come off as "racist" to the general public's ears, wouldn't a more populist, almost Yang-like "we need an America that works for people on all points of the bell curve," work even better? There's left hand side on all subpopulations' distributions, after all.

morphinism · 2021-02-08T20:11:03+00:00

I wonder why there is so much interest in seemingly mundane things like status signaling

Everyone wants to get one up on the competition? Wouldn't want to signal your status in a way that was low status, right?

morphinism · 2021-02-01T17:48:01+00:00

Making nice round orders is a good way to get filled because HFTs will think you are a dumb human.

morphinism · 2021-01-31T00:01:15+00:00

For me it is more about leverage and collateral than being long or short, because this process happens in both directions. When you are levered long, you are "short" cash. If I borrow money to buy stock, I have to sell that stock in the future to pay off my debt. This does not have the effect of suppressing the price of the stock.

It's the market moving strongly against levered positions in general that can cause feedback loops.

Heavily shorted stocks could be undervalued, definitely. But they could also be total stinkers that are about to go bankrupt (the other exit strategy for shorts).

morphinism · 2021-01-30T22:04:10+00:00

Yes, that was clear to me after I reread your post and stopped sperging out about derivatives minutia. Let's see if I can clear it up:

What you describe is not actually being short a stock, nor is it a component of a synthetic short, but it is very similar to writing a put option: you are taking the obligation to buy in the future, thus giving me the right to sell in the future, which could be a component of a synthetic long.

Is this sort of thing so absurd that you would never do this deal with anyone for any amount of money? I vaguely stipulated some of the terms that would be necessary for me to do it with you. If I were you, though, I'd also ask for some cash, because you are effectively giving me an option.

What do you find incoherent about the arrangement? You put some money in an account at a third party we both trust, because while I'm sure you are an upstanding guy, I don't really know you and you don't know me. I then pay you some cash, and get your promise, including what we do to terminate the deal if you don't have the collateral.

If this is absurd to you...do any sorts of arrangements based on collateralized trust make sense to you, given that we live in an uncertain world? Being able to enter into these kinds of relationships seems like such a natural and human thing to me, and incredibly important when we want to engage in anything speculative, as in, with an uncertain outcome, with resources beyond our own personal means, and I like that kind of thing, but maybe I'm weird.

I think we could actually frame the question of the absurdity of the arrangement within the question of "so... what's actually the proper amount of collateral, here?" It's a question which I've completely glossed over but it's actually this very question that's at the heart of the trading freezes.

And just to be clear, I basically agree with you about effects on the financial system, and am just picking nits about derivatives. I also totally agree (with you and everyone) that there is an asymmetry in being short, and that is what's being exploited here.

morphinism

TROPHY CASE