My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
This is why I built tangerine feed for remote roles. It turns out there are tons of remote roles and you can get an edge by applying first. It has unfortunately come down to a numbers game with low odds.
I've had the 'chance' to work with some deeply manipulative persons in the past, the kind who goes to your desk and say 'Hey, I noticed you started to speak to X again, and your performance seems to suffer as a result", where X is a friendly colleague that opposed some plan of that person. It is incredibly difficult to keep those people in check as all that behaviour is off the record and impossible to prove. When people complain it's a 'you said, he said' situation where the manipulator inevitably wins. Wether those persons are positive or negative for the company is not all that clear, but they create an incredibly unpleasant work environment.
We're building Volition [1] to organize the world's mechanical components for MechEs, roboticists, mfg. techs, and beyond. Imagine McMaster-like UI quality, but ultimately across every good OEM / distributor.
I previously built Plethora (automated CNC machining) and am happy to help all hardware / manufacturing startup folks. Please feel free to reach out.
I know someone who did this as well. Has mulberry trees, started a garden, and that house has a lot of sqft. He even rents it out to others at a pretty low cost.
They are definitely still a thing, the entity that handles this is the Detroit Land Bank. https://buildingdetroit.org/
This reminds me of a buddhist story that goes something like this: (tried to look it up but couldn't find it, chatgpt also didn't know)
There is this man and his brother is a monk. So he tells this monk "if you please the king, you don't have to live on rice and water anymore", where the monk replies: "if you learn to live on rice and water, you don't need to please the king".
You can use One Weird Trick with generator functions to make your code "generic" over synchronicity. I use this technique to avoid needing to implement both sync and async versions of some functions in my quickjs-emscripten library.
The great part about this technique as a library author is that unlike choosing to use a Promise return type, this technique is invisible in my public API. I can write a function like `export function coolAlgorithm(getData: (request: I) => O | Promise<O>): R | Promise<R>`, and we get automatic performance improvement if the caller's `getData` function happens to return synchronously, without mystery generator stuff showing up in the function signature.
The program itself was written in an existing intermediate language called URCL, which was then compiled to CHUNGUS2 assembly. CHUNGUS2 is the processor made with Minecraft's redstone mechanics. The processor was emulated for development, but the demo is running on MCHPRS, a Minecraft server that uses Wasmtime's Cranelift to JIT the redstone operations, which are represented as a weighted directed graph. Before MCHPRS, optimizing redstone performance using compiler techniques was not thought to be possible. With MCHPRS the demo takes 9 hours to run, it would take decades using Minecraft.
As for CHUNGUS2 itself, it's a proper RISC processor, it has a 4-stage instruction pipeline, 64 byte 8-way associative data cache, even branch prediction.
I don't think I agree anymore; most of what I'd get done with Ansible now I'd do with a container, and if all you need to get done on the host is networking and a reasonable Docker setup, Terraform is good enough to get that done. I'm a lot less likely to ever use Ansible now.
But, I mean, the answer to the question above is easy. :)
Hardly. There's 7 continents (~3 bits of entropy), but dozens/hundreds of camera models this technique (6-8 bits). And it's hardly the only media forensic technique out there. There's ways of extracting the time of day without metadata, manipulation software chain, the lens used (sometimes down to make and model), and tons more. Before you know it, you've put a big dent in the ~33 bits needed to pinpoint a specific person.
Ideas number 3 and 4 together sound to me like the foundations of a generalised "intent economy": a buyer expresses what they want, and the platform dynamically builds the graph of agents required to fulfill that intent, including quotes, bidding, idea/pitch refinement etc. as necessary. Maybe you just want a burger. Maybe you want a gift for Mother's Day but you have no idea what. Maybe you want a new house designed and built.
I don't think I actually _want_ this (I view Uber-for-everthing as kinda dystopian) but I'm amazed that nobody has made a serious attempt to build this. Uber has one part of the puzzle in their driver-customer connection and order fulfillment platform. Facebook has another in its social graph. Amazon has another in its marketplace and Mechanical Turk. And a thousand other companies have one highly specialised subset of this, like finding and scheduling a couple of tradespeople required to do a job on your home.
I must be missing something that makes it a lot harder than it seems, or that means there's a lot less value there than it looks like on the surface, because why else have none of these huge players decided to go for it?
https://webvm.io is our public demo of CheerpX, an x86 virtualization technology made with WebAssembly.
At Leaning Technologies we have been using WebAssembly pretty much from day 1 as part of our C++ and Java compilers. CheerpX is our latest product, and we think it really pushes the boundaries of what is possible in the modern browser.
As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more:
- if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could easily flag you to your government. If you use wifi at a common point you're likely to be flagged and there isn't an easy way other than keeping on the move. But moving often is another anomalous event, and it's very difficult to do even for Drug Lords ( El Chapo ) or Terrorists that it behooves to do. This puts you in a sort of Zugzwang, to borrow a chess term.
- there's always leakage, for instance, in the way you talk with people in the real world. At some point you send enough communication for sophisticated frequency analysis.
- and there are other patterns of usage that could be used to identify you, like searches or even keyboard frequency on anonymized accounts can be de-anonymized by very specific markers ( ML works! ).
- off ramps for crypto aren't very good. If you're in e.g. Brazil, haha, yeah, good luck spending bitcoin or any other crypto and going unnoticed. Mixers and tumblers will eventually leak and you'll be caught.
- you're very vulnerable to social engineering by people you do business with. one slip where you stop communicating in a transactional mode of communication and that's a weak link in your armor.
In the end, the FBI only has to be right once, and you have to be right every time.
I haven't used them myself (I live in Europe) but in the US there are companies that will build passive houses and ship them to you in parts. https://www.phoenixhaus.com/ comes to mind.
I took a similar approach to building a new house on a field in Ireland - my house was built in Latvia and assembled in a week or so by a local crew.
My biggest complaint with all these super useful sites is that I can never remember them when I need them. Replace this in YouTube to bypass country restrictions, replace that in arxiv to view in browser, etc.
I wish somebody could make an extension or repository system to store all these, and prompt you sometimes when on the sites.
My parents were murdered 16 years ago. I spent 10 years before I could adequately deal with this. CBT was incredibly beneficial once I found the right person, but it took a long time to find them.
The previous chapters of your life cannot be closed. They can only be learnt from.
Remember that life is short and you can waste a lot of it in a bad state.
Talk to friends, do memorable things, try to be a good person.
Do whatever works for you, and ignore negativity. Sport, learning, activism, religion? Whatever works.
Golden rule is don't harm yourself, and don't harm others.
I'm in the UK and know this team. Happy to talk over email if any questions. It's undoubtedly a fantastic visa and arguably the best in Europe if a passport asap is your goal. I'd venture nearly any regular reader here can probably meet the criteria and it's definitely meant to not need a lawyer to apply!
Without fully reading the article, if you want to go somewhere really far out then Awasi Patagonia and White Desert are worth checking out. Antarctic Logistics offers some crazy multi-month expeditions too.
Amankora in Bhutan is very cool, but also very different.
Africa obviously has tons of options too, but everybody goes there.
It really depends on what you are looking for. There are lots of expensive ways to climb a mountain if you want something more extreme (but still controlled).
My suggestions are kind of all over the place because I don’t really know what exactly you’re looking for. I could list hundreds of options.
There are simple exercises to improve deconcentrations skills:
1) [Vision] Look at some point (try to avoid thinking about the point itself), then think about what you observe at top left corner, then (moving slowly, after 15-30 seconds) at top edge, top right corner, etc. When 360˚ are finished, start again but think about several parts of viewport at the same time. Then just try to relax and think about the WHOLE picture. It takes some time to achieve good results, but if you do this training several days you will see changes in your attention level – it's like you see nothing and everything at the same time and once something special (like mushroom or what you're looking for) arrives in your viewport – in this state of mind, you find it VERY fast, even if it's semi-hidden and is located on very periphery.
2) [Sounds] The same: relax and try to distinguish only one noise that is happening around you (like bird singing or smth). Then, after some time spent, proceed to the next noice (cars or wind or anything else). Then next and next. After several minutes you will wonder how many different sounds is around. Then try to relax more and combine all of them.
3) ["Internals", your body]. Try to concentrate only on one part of your body -- say, fingers on your left leg. Then on the right one. The upper, part of leg. Step by step, spending a dozen of seconds or so on one small part of your body, proceed upper. Dont forget to concentrate on inner body part, organs. Once all parts are done, relax more and observe entire body.
4) ["Externals", space]. Concentrate on what you have in front of you. Then behind you. On the left, on the right. Upper and lower. Imaging the building (or park or field or smth) where are you now. There is no need to see it, just imagine. Just reflect in your mind how it looks, feels. Then a block where your house is located (forest or county or smth), then your town/distrinct/city, then state/country and then - the Earth. Step by step imagine object with bigger volume. And don't stop -- Solar system and then Galaxy. Then relax and try to combine feeling ALL the objects surrounding you.
5) [Super-deconcentration] So, when you did all 4 exercises many times, spent many days practicing it – combine them. You have 4 dimensions: vision, sounds, your body and space around it (somebody would add smelling as well) – so you can do deconcentration in ALL of them achieving very special state of mind and body. It's interesting.
And this very thing helps you achieve better results in freediving. Or searching objects in wide areas.
That's what I've learned from Natalia Molchanova during her training courses.
The interesting part of it: once you achieve good results doing such techniques (first of all, #1 & #2 combined), you will be able to drive not slower as usually, but with better ability to notice any dangerous object.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.