okay so clearly you don't know what you're talking about because they do use existing standards/DNS as the primary way to validate domain ownership. It's free to not say anything and read the comments first before going off about something!
>okay so clearly you don't know what you're talking about because they do use existing standards/DNS as the primary way to validate domain ownership.
I'm not going to speak for the commenter you're replying to, but I don't think anyone here is talking about the standards-compliant, DNS-based domain verification system. I think we're all talking about the non-standards-compliant, /xrpc/-path verification.
With any kind of authentication when you have an insecure method it does not mather whether you also have a more secure method - your authentication is only as good as the weakest alternative.
The slightest bit of research before commenting would reveal that Nick Land is a prominent neo-reactionary with awful views on race and genetics. He’s not embraced by white nationalists for the cyberpunk aesthetic.
And then a slight bit more research would demonstrate that he wrote some fascinating left-leaning stuff before he jumped off that particular cliff, and that that's the stuff Scott thought was interesting.
> And then a slight bit more research would demonstrate that he wrote some fascinating left-leaning stuff before he jumped off that particular cliff, and that that's the stuff Scott thought was interesting.
And then, after a little more thought, you'd realize SSC's blog roll entry would direct the reader to the more recent neoreactionary stuff, not the "fascinating left-leaning stuff."
It's definitely a bad look to have present-day Nick Land on your blogroll. If you think some of his older stuff was interesting, it's a better idea to link to that directly rather than his home page.
The main problem is that someone isn't a client until you're taking their money.
People ask me to take their money to help them solve their website problems, which are actually their business problems, which are actually their life problems. They do this when they find out I'm a coder, that automatically confers upon me a magical ability to fix their lives. This typically happens in the context of a bar conversation. I tell them, "no, I generally don't moonlight unless there's at least $5K involved, but, hey, as long as we're here, tell me what's going on and I'll see if I can help you."
So we unwind their problems a little bit. Inevitably there's a lot of emotion stored up and I'll encourage them to release it with some 'tough love', letting them know that without either a good bit of capital or a lot more willingness to figure hard things out on their own on their part, they're not going to achieve their goals, and they need to acquire one or the other if they want to find success.
Tears start flowing, catharsis happens, no, I still won't take your money. Accounting headache, you see. Tell you what, if you can do X, Y, and Z, to get this monkey off your back and learn something truly useful, then give me a call in a month and you can buy me a few beers and we'll talk next steps.
I call this 'community outreach'. Happens roughly twice a month, ever since I started taking my laptop to the bar. Someone in a bad situation can always count on my Houston air traffic controller delivery of the hard truths of trying to make money on the Internet. Thought about building a business around it, maybe if I find the right partner...
I was under the impression the majority of /r/ADHDer's are PI or combined type. I recall hearing that most people with ADHD fall in one of those categories.
The slide deck provides no support for ~adamnemecek's claim that the Palantir CEO himself proposed the plan. And the CEO's unequivocal statements afterwards suggest that if there wasn't a bright-line inside Palantir against offensive operations before 2011, there has been since.
But also, the branding of the presentation does not reliably indicate the origin of the specifically offensive bullet points (most notably the "Potential Proactive Tactics" slide), nor whether the contents ever progressed past trial-balloon status.
In particular, coverage by Greenwald [1] (working from more email thread context for which I can't find a current online source) identifies HB Gary principal Aaron Barr as the verbatim source of some of the most-aggressive anti-Greenwald language.
So I can see that someone at Palantir was coordinating with the other entities and leading the document-prep. But they also cut-and-pasted material from the potential contract partners, including vague proposals outside Palantir's focus, that may never have been approved or presented.
I'd ascribe those bullets to Palantir itself if that deck was in fact ever presented to a client. We don't know if that's the case. If instead that text just bounced around as a discussion draft (including their more-aggro partners), but went nowhere, and was eventually categorically disavowed... then it's a stretch to say that the company or its leadership actually advocated those steps.
Have you read the entire Salon article you linked to?
"So apparently, if Palantir’s new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old engineer went off on his own and — without any supervision or direction — participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of the nation’s deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber), potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very lucrative. I’ll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is, but I will note that several facts undermine it: ..."
"The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice."
You're right, I should have been more specific in the title. Although I do think the description gives a better idea of the kind of startup I was looking for.
This is the kind of thing which could very easily turn into a flame war, and is much further off-topic. I'm not interested in that kind of argument right now, so all I will say in this thread is this:
My personal experience with Less Wrong-style rationalism, to simplify the situation aggressively, is that it has a core of good, useful tools (Bayesian reasoning, strict positivism, utilitarianism) that I have no problem with. However, when pushed too far, those tools tend to break down—but the rationalist answer to that breakdown is all too often to embrace the model and discount the reality. This general refusal to regard their core tools with suspicion results in beliefs which are paradoxically irrational: when faced with e.g., utilitarianism condoning torture to prevent mild discomfort, the rationalist response is not, "Perhaps human experience does not map straightforwardly to integers—we should re-examine our tools," but rather, "As our mathematical tools are of course correct, we must believe in this conclusion." This belief in math-over-matter is a major part (though not the only factor) in my skepticism towards the kind of rationalism promoted by Less Wrong.
And yet no one has really made an convincing argument of why the conclusions of utilitarianism contradict the axioms of utilitarianism.
And no one seems to offer the rather simple solution that utility is non-linear (so dust in ones eye is really a quite small fraction as bad as a century of torture), and people who mock Eliezer's utilitarianism hypocritically do so on sweatshops built&recycled computers, clothes, and food.
The strongest argument against rationalist utilitarianism seems to be that people don't like the cognitive dissonance it imposes on hypocrites.
The linearity of utility is irrelevant to the dust specks or torture problem because you can always increase the number of people to receive dust specks so the utility of torturing a single individual for 50 years is higher.
And calling people hypocrites because things like involuntary organ donation gives them "cognitive dissonance" is absurd. Also regarding hypocrisy, note that Yudkowski works for an organization whose goal is to protect humanity from Skynet, while people in Africa are starving. (I'm not personally attacking him, he can work on whatever he likes, and I think governments of wealthy nations have both the resources and responsibility to alleviate starvation, and individual efforts are mostly pissing in the wind. But parent poster brought up sweatshops &c. so I went there.)
The really funny part of HPMOR is that, while it was intended to demonstrate rationalism, what I got out of it was that rationalism doesn't actually work.
I'm unwilling to post spoilers, which makes this unfairly undiscussable, but the meaning of the original prophecy did not--could not--come down to rationalism and could not for reasons that were repeated a few times through the fic. I can't tell if this was intentional on Yudkowsky's part, and I don't really care, since it really changes nothing about everything else.
For the record, though, when I disparage utilitarianism, I promise it isn't just "Eliezer's".
>And yet no one has really made an convincing argument of why the conclusions of utilitarianism contradict the axioms of utilitarianism.
No, they've said "this is a reductio ad absurdum, perhaps reality is a bit more complicated than that." You don't get to assert your assumption - that simplistic utilitarianism works as advertised - as evidence.
Consider, for instance, minmaxing as an alternative. (Like real-life AI work tends to.) What answer does that give?
Thanks for explaining your views. My intent was not to spark a flame war, I've heard quite a few critiques of less wrong but most of the authors expressed their disagreement without explaining what they disagreed with (perhaps it was obvious to them).
> An engineer is defined as a practitioner of engineering, not a person with an engineering degree.
It goes further than that actually. The term 'engineer' is often legally-protected, and often a degree is a pre-requisite, but isn't the only one. This becomes important when e.g. you're building bridges.
Engineering is a profession for which you need appropriate credentials, just like in any other profession (e.g. scientist). Without credentials, you are not an engineer.
Unless you are talking about 'engineer' in the same way some people talk about 'architect' as in software architect.
