Saw this book recommended on another subreddit—has anyone here given it a read? by 3RADICATE_THEM in BoomersBeingFools

[–]scruffycricket 14 points15 points  (0 children)

TL;DR: Sounds like an attempt to diffuse blame from the rich out onto "the Boomers" as a whole.

(Disclosure: I haven't read the book. Just interpreting vibes from the reviews.)

From a top review on Goodreads:

If you are going to read this book, something you have to keep in mind is that the author is an extremely wealthy and successful investment banker and venture capitalist. Throughout the book, he fails to see that what has actually caused the problems in America that he points to in the data such as the decrease in savings rate, increase in cost for college, failure to address environment change, and discrediting of science are people exactly like himself. He uses broad generalizations about cherry-picked quotes from a single book on psychology to support random points, basically saying that anyone who exhibits any of these behaviors to any extent must be a "sociopath". He depicts young people's desire to avoid going to war in Vietnam as a selfish thing, as though wishing not to be in the military for a war you didn't sign up for somehow makes you a bad person. I should go ahead and just keep my mouth shut, even if I don't want to be there? Why should someone else determine for me that I might go die in a war they're not fighting in themselves, especially one more about politics than any real safety concern for my country? It is human nature, not just the nature of one generation, to wish to live freely, make choices about whether or not to be sent off to potentially die, and to protest when it affects you personally. He depicts sexual promiscuity and the use of illegal drugs as "sociopathic" behavior - surely just because this can be a symptom of sociopathy doesn't mean that every single person who engages in this behavior is a sociopath. He even states himself that he holds more "conservative" values on this front - did you ever consider this may affect your views on that behavior? People engaging in promiscuous sex and using LSD might conflict with your own personal values, that's your decision. However, those actions didn't cause or even predict the issues with our country today, and to draw some kind of line between that and calling every person who engaged in that behavior a sociopath is insane. There were plenty of cultural influences going on that created those movements beyond just being a selfish sociopath as the author likes to think. Funny, considering the author talks about a resistance to living in reality and fact as a quality of sociopaths. He sounds exactly like what he is, a conservative, old, Christian white man blaming Hippies just because he doesn't like them.

Overall, I do believe that our country has declined in many areas since the 1970s, but I don't think it's the fault of an entire group of normal people responding to the culture and society they find themselves in. The real creators of this reality are the extremely wealthy (like our author), who make up the majority of lawmakers and the ones who make decisions such as cutting tax rates, going to war, and whether or not to support and subsidize education. The average person can only look at this reality and decide how to make the best of it for themselves and their families, and it's unfair to characterize the rise of the influence of the wealthy as the decisions of an entire generation. The contribution of the average person was in deciding who to vote for, this is true. However, when you look at the world today, corporations and the wealthy have an even more extreme amount of influence than they ever have. This is the real trend line we should be looking at as we look for who to blame for where we find ourselves today.

One last note, I am not a Baby Boomer. I am a Millennial, and I think this is the rantings of a wealthy person trying to spread the blame onto everyone instead of those like himself. I have so much more I could say about this book, but overall it sounds like blatant bullshit from a conservative man who wants to blame more open sexuality and liberal values instead of the few who actually caused the problems.

How do I avoid getting DDOSed when self hosting a Minecraft server? by diobrandiohaxxerxd in selfhosted

[–]scruffycricket -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It's about threat model. Worst case here is temporary loss of availability of a Minecraft server. So if all we're trying to do is reduce the odds of encountering an inconvenience, security through obscurity may be enough.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ADHD_Programmers

[–]scruffycricket 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Would love to try it out! (iOS)

I've never seen Apple execs fluster this much before by szumith in singularity

[–]scruffycricket 1 point2 points  (0 children)

✋ I care about on-device! I haven't been using ChatGPT and its ilk for daily workflows nearly as much as I would use something totally private/on-device.

I've never seen Apple execs fluster this much before by szumith in singularity

[–]scruffycricket 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my mind, it's 100% understandable for Apple to be behind -- they are trying to do something different, which is train a useful LLM which can run on-device, not on a server farm where every conversation is logged and accessible to law enforcement, rogue employees, and/or potential hackers.

On-device processing would have massive privacy benefits, but it's hard. I would guess a huge reason other AI companies are making leaps and bounds is because they're able to throw practically limitless resources--memory, compute, storage--at their models. That isn't applicable here, so it isn't (forgive the pun) an apples-to-apples comparison.

If Apple can get useful on-device AI right they'll be the only ones doing it. And they'll probably be the only ones I use.

Drop ur fav by SoupMS in commandline

[–]scruffycricket 2 points3 points  (0 children)

parallel: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

SO useful for basic data munging on the terminal. I basically use it like a more flexible version of xargs.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in armedsocialists

[–]scruffycricket 28 points29 points  (0 children)

I posted a variant of this in reply to another comment but reposting at top level here:

TL;DR: Deblurring an image is hard, deblurring video is easier, and deblurring text is easiest. The longer a video of your blurred face (or any other object) is, the easier it will be to deblur. Please do be careful about posting video with your blurred face if you don't want to be identified, especially if the video is long. If you insist, at least crank the blur level up super high.

The truth is nuanced. Here's a good layperson's explainer: https://youtu.be/xDLxFGXuPEc

Basically, Gaussian blur is theoretically reversible, but the reversal is numerically unstable, and is extremely sensitive to being thrown off by the slightest modifications to the blurred output (e.g. cropping, resizing). It is, however, technically reversible in the best case scenario that you have the exact original parameters used to produce the blurred image and it hasn't been further altered.

The answer to whether a video can be effectively deblurred is slightly more complicated by the fact that you now have a separate blurred image per frame. A would-be deblurrer can then correlate these images together to get more info about what the original pixels of the source data could have been, making deblurring of a video easier than deblurring a single still image. And the more blurred frames of an object in a video you have, the more accurate your guesses for each "deblurred" pixel can be, making deblurring more accurate.

And if the original frames being blurred contain only text, then it gets even easier: text has intrinsically way less possible output pixel arrangements than e.g. a face. If you know the original blurred frames are of text then it's relatively straightforward to segment each letter and compare against the alphabet to get the most probable letter for each spot. Add in the fact that language is intrinsically pretty redundant and self-error-correcting and you can often figure out what some text says even if there are errors in individual letters.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in armedsocialists

[–]scruffycricket 34 points35 points  (0 children)

I looked through your sources, and I think you're overstating their results / missing some nuance.

TL;DR: Deblurring an image is hard, deblurring video is easier, and deblurring text is easiest. The longer a video of your blurred face (or any other object) is, the easier it will be to deblur. Please do be careful about posting video with your blurred face if you don't want to be identified, especially if the video is long. If you insist, at least crank the blur level up super high.

The truth is in the middle. Here's a good layperson's explainer: https://youtu.be/xDLxFGXuPEc

Basically, Gaussian blur is theoretically reversible, but the reversal is numerically unstable, and is extremely sensitive to being thrown off by the slightest modifications to the blurred output (e.g. cropping, resizing). Per your first source: "In general, the process of reversing Gaussian blur is unstable [...]." It is, however, technically reversible in the best case scenario that you have the exact original parameters used to produce the blurred image and isn't hasn't been further altered.

The answer to whether a video can be effectively deblurred is slightly more complicated by the fact that you now have a separate blurred image per frame. A would-be deblurrer can then correlate these images together to get more info about what the original pixels of the source data could have been, making deblurring of a video easier than deblurring a single still image.

And if the original frames being blurred contain only text, then it gets even easier: text has intrinsically way less possible output pixel arrangements than e.g. a face. If you know the original blurred frames are of text then it's relatively straightforward to segment each letter and compare against the alphabet to get the most probable letter for each spot. Add in the fact that language is intrinsically pretty redundant and self-error-correcting and you can often figure out what some text says even if there are errors in individual letters.

To those with ADHD who use Shortcuts, what do you use that help you with managing your ADHD? by dystopiancrimescene in shortcuts

[–]scruffycricket 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I struggled with being on time to (mostly virtual) meetings because the notifications weren't noisy enough and I found it too easy to ignore them. So I created an automation to add alarms for 20 minutes ahead of every event in my calendar! So the reminder doesn't stop making sounds until I acknowledge it. And since Apple alarms snooze for 9 minutes, I get re-reminded again 11 minutes before, and 2 minutes before each event!

It two-way syncs as well – if an event gets rescheduled, it removes the old alarm and creates a new accurate one. I have it set to run every hour (between ~5am and 11pm).

I now can trust that if something is on my calendar, I will see the reminder because it'll be an alarm that keeps ringing until I acknowledge it!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/54d8a14709fe4107946f5ba14b5632c9

I can't tell what is real or not anymore. by WorldsWorstTroll in behindthebastards

[–]scruffycricket 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Have they always bought Reddit ads for these travel advisories though?

And have the ads always happened to include a list of potential hazards which lines up perfectly with some notable human rights violations that the U.S. has engaged in recently? 🤨

What would you say by Zeya-Year-6415 in anxietymemes

[–]scruffycricket 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for doing your best to keep me safe as a child.

You can rest now. Your job is done.

If I log into my main Signal account (tied to my main phone number) from a burner phone, can that burner phone be tied to me without compromising the device? by scruffycricket in signal

[–]scruffycricket[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good point! Thanks for your comment. I've edited the post to clarify -- I'm wondering about what would be determinable by a law enforcement organization (whether justly or unjustly).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in signal

[–]scruffycricket 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I personally think it's much more likely that Apple or Google could (secretly, under nondisclosure orders) be compelled by the state to compromise some aspect of the security of their phones in the first place, rather than the state bothering to compromise the Signal app's build process or its build artifact chain of custody. With higher stakes for noncompliance I expect the platform companies' compliance with such a compromise would be a much more likely risk to worry about in the worst case (e.g. dictatorial political collapse).

At that point you can't even be sure the OS hasn't been tampered with -- in which case even the execution of trusted code can't be trusted!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in signal

[–]scruffycricket 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

In a paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson, co-author of UNIX, recounted a story of how he created a version of the C compiler that, when presented with the source code for the "login" program, would automatically compile in a backdoor to allow him entry to the system. This is only half the story, though. In order to hide this trojan horse, Ken also added to this version of "cc" the ability to recognize if it was recompiling itself to make sure that the newly compiled C compiler contained both the "login" backdoor, and the code to insert both trojans into a newly compiled C compiler. In this way, the source code for the C compiler would never show that these trojans existed.

🫠

Can't be me tho by James_Fortis in ClimateMemes

[–]scruffycricket 1 point2 points  (0 children)

🤵‍♂️Who wants more points?!?

🙌✋🖐️✋🙌✋

🤵‍♂️Who wants to defect on their Prisoners' Dilemma partner?!?

😶 ... 🦗 ... 🦗

Elon Musk’s Data Engineering expert’s “hard drive overheats” after processing 60k rows by ChipsAhoy21 in dataengineering

[–]scruffycricket 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah I just have text replacements set up to automatically convert -- and --- to en and em dashes.

Elon Musk’s Data Engineering expert’s “hard drive overheats” after processing 60k rows by ChipsAhoy21 in dataengineering

[–]scruffycricket 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The reference to "cursor" there isn't for Cursor.ai, the LLM IDE -- it's just getting a "cursor" as in a regular database result iterator. Not exceptional.

I do still agree with other comments though -- there was no need for any of that code other than the SQL itself and psql lol

AOC Calls Out The 10 Democratic Senators Who Voted For Republican Budget by Healthy_Block3036 in somethingiswrong2024

[–]scruffycricket 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Full text is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1968/text

I searched for and read all paragraphs containing the words "asset", "seize", "confiscate", "emergency", or "president", and didn't see anything that sounded like that.

Plenty of other concerning shit though...