I've experienced something similar and I believe D3 is not to blame.
I took 5k iu oil softgels and got a unique and indescribable BAD feeling. It crept up very gradually over the course of a month and a half and I had a hard time realizing what was happening. It took me over a month to recover after I stopped.
Another time I've taken 2k iu dry D3 and had zero side-effects.
A couple of years after that D3 mishap, I tried some omega-3 and after a two weeks I realized that that unique bad feeling was making a comeback.
Again, another time I tried a different brand of omega-3 I had no side-effects.
I have a bunch of food sensitivities. So I believe that was a reaction to some contaminants in the oil.
> 25 an hour - the bottom decile wage for software engineering
You should be aware that most software engineers in the world live outside of US. Most of them make less than that. But that's just nitpicking.
The problem with your logic is that you suggest to feed the beast that will devour you whole. Youtube is involved in multiple planetary-scale propaganda campaigns.
There is a flood of fake SSDs currently, mostly big brands. I've recently purchased counterfeit 1TB. It passes all the tests, performance is ok, it works... except it gets episodes where ioping would be anything between 0.7 ms and 15 seconds, that is under zero load. And these are quality fakes from a physical appearance perspective. The only way I could tell mine was fake is that the official Kingston firmware update tool would not recognize this drive.
Probably chinese sellers on all those sites. I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon or from more traditional retail channels.
There’s definitely a problem with my grandma or some less-technically educated person buying “alphabet soup” fakes, BUT Amazon does commingle inventory. This means that lots of people can end up with fakes sold by 3rd parties when buying from a reputable brand.
There were even stories of those crazy coupon people reselling on Amazon, and some cases of returned retail products ending up as “new” on Amazon. Which gets problematic with certain things like consumables (the WSJ did an article on toothpastes iirc).
> alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon
Does this actually make a difference? I remember the issue was that Amazon would bin devices together regardless if they're from some random third-party or direct sale, so you could have fakes mixed in with genuine and it was basically a lucky dip.
Is this not still the case?
Ultimately, I'd be weary of buying things like this from Amazon and as you suggest go to a more traditional retail channel instead.
Amazon only comingles inventory among FBA sellers, and gives each an option to opt-out from it if they want to. They never comingle 'sold by amazon.com' items. In cases where I've bought amazon.com items and not from FBA sellers I never received bad products, and I've easily bought dozens of SD cards, flash drives, SSDs, etc.
> I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon
AMEN to that !
And the most annoying thing is that those of us who know to avoid FBA is that Amazon have removed the "sold by Amazon" search filter tick-box.
So whilst in the past you could tick a box and be presented with a list of products which are direct-sold rather than FBA, you cannot do that anymore.
According to some Reddit posts, you can still do it if you hack the URL and add an "emi=$obscure_value" GET-param. But I'm guessing sooner or later Amazon will kill this work-around too.
Sold by amazon means "taken out of a box containing fakes and maybe real products". If that's your gamble, may as well buy the fake directly at lower cost.
It doesn't strike me as being a big claim, I recently bought some RAM for a NUC a few weeks ago on Amazon only to determine that it was likely counterfeit. It came in an official box with all packaging intact.
That's interesting. I have a Samsung 990 pro bought on Amazon and have the random lags. I've only noticed it in the terminal, so I figured something else may be the culprit. Never went to 15 secondes, but it can be around 1s.
The Samsung Magician app on Windows reports it as "genuine" and it was able to apply two firmware updates. The only thing it complains about is that I should be using PCIE 4 instead of 3, but I can't do anything about that.
I have been able to fix these random lags by doing multiple full disk reads. The first one will take very long, because it will trigger these lags. Subsequent ones will be much better.
The leading theory I have read is that maintenance/refreshing on the ssd is not done preventative/correctly by the firmware and you need to trigger it by accessing the data.
If you dig at the vendor data stored on the drive firmware, fakes are easy to spot. Model numbers, vendor ID, and serial numbers will be zero’d out or not conforming to manufacturer spec.
I purchased a bunch of fake kingston SD cards in China that worked well enough for the price, but crapped out within a year of mild use. I didn’t lose data. It was as if one day they worked. Then one day they were fried.
> I love how Kit has evolved over the years to find out the best way of making scammers go crazy is to treat them basically the same way Comcast treats their customers.
First, you're striping agency from those workers blaming abstract society instead. There is no such thing as "collective guilt". Those particular workers are free to leave such an unsafe industry at any moment, probably even more free than, say, smokers who choose death from respiratory complications. I have exactly zero empathy for either. True that sometimes workers are not exactly free to leave the job and coerced into insane working conditions, e.g. the curse of russian monotowns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwzP-zr0S0c . That is definitely not the case for california though.
Second, your interpretation of the book is not right. Works of Pelevin, just as many other great writers, are not exactly fiction, but a compilation of a real life contemporary trends distorted by weird observation angle and grotesque style. The core theme of Omon Ra is very basic: government brainwashes people to be literal disposable cogs. AFAIR the book does not reference "society" in any way. I've read the book over 20 years ago though. One great thing about Pelevin is that he definitely had access to people of highest power at some point (early 00's at least) and translated their completely crazy worldviews into his books.
But who is going to make the dangers known to potential and currently employed workers? Companies can sieve through people until they find someone desperate enough or oblivious to the danger and they could not even be aware they're throwing their lives away.
In my experience shrinkflated products already use inferior ingredients, so it's a very useful signal that should be boosted, not eliminated. So putting a warning is a good thing, but shaming is not.
To develop the idea further, most grocery shopping should move online, so I could trivially filter out products with shrinkflated packaging, containing palm oil, nestle brands, etc.
Attackers can still outsource the PoWs. The sybil is the assumption that 1 PoW == one PC. But you can force this assumption with provisioning keys at least.
Proof-of-work uses resources like memory, CPU, hard drive space, and so on for their challenges which just means that the person with the most resources has a disproportionate impact within the system. A botnet owner has more total resources than anyone else so any PoW challenges that a server issues can be easily outsourced to the system.
Overall, they will have more leverage from these resources than the number of systems they have access to. But you could at least restrict this to the number of systems with provisioning keys. The idea behind memory bound hash functions is that you're trying to make it hard to paralyze the challenge to a farm. But many systems in the farm are still going to have multiple cores and gigabytes of RAM (so they can be used to leverage multiple challenges simultaneously.) The underlying problem to solve here is an identity problem: allowing an individual machine to act as a single identity which various proof-of-work schemes have tried to achieve.
The ideal solution would also limit connections made by the same actors but that is probably not something you can achieve with something like TOR. This is a sybil problem, by the way.
You're trying to solve a straightforward engineering problem with an unfit solution to an ill-defined problem. The solution of sybil problem would not solve the case of coordinated attack by multiple nefarious agents. You can also call this meat botnet owned by master-coordinator. The solution would distinguish this from a normal botnet but in the end your service down in the very same manner and clients gave up most of their privacy for nothing.
Imagine instead the following trivial scheme: instead of burning resources the client would pay to be served in reverse order of payment value. Let's say client is willing to pay 1 cent to be served in the next 10 seconds. The attacker would have to pay more as he have to occupy the whole head of this queue all the time to be successful. Let's say server can process 100 rps - now he's making over a dollar per second, which he can use to scale his serving capacity.
Introducing the requirement to spend money to use the service would drastically reduce its value. It wouldn't be Tor anymore. Payments would make it easier to link identities and filter access to it. It would also mean not everyone could afford to pay for the service.
>and clients gave up most of their privacy for nothing.
Also not really sure how giving up privacy comes into this? Depending on how the scheme is implemented you can still preserve all the same privacy of using Tor with provisioning keys. E.g. you might use enclaves and keep verification hidden inside enclaves (so hosts cannot see the challenge protocol) or use zero-knowledge proofs to hide everything.
There may even be simpler algorithms since the certificate chain would be using something like RSA SHA256 (which have some neat math tricks to modify them more compared to other algorithms.)
It's a shame that Torproject has decided to reinvent its own wheel, lagging 10 years behind the crypto crowd, instead of integrating with existing coin(s).
You understood nothing and gave your opinion. Congratulations, tell us more about how offtopic you are?
This proof of work doesn't mean crypto currency, it doesn't mean coins, it doesn't mean buying or selling tokens. It means proof of work. More exactly, having to put your computer at work in order to solve an equation. If you do that, the server lets you in. If you don't, you can't enter.
This is the original proof of work. It's also proof of work when you solve a captcha, it's just a different proof of work, a human, mental one. Here, it's a computer one, meaning in order to access a website a thousand times, you would have to run the proof of work a thousand times, so a thousand times more ressource.
I really wished you gave the article a read, before saying Torproject is a shame. Maybe you are?
You can start educating yourself on cryptocurrencies with the monero case: monero payments were used instead of captcha on an internet forum about 10 years ago.
I agree with you in principle. Wasting energy like what this and hashcash do is unfortunate but that's what happens when you have an irrational hate towards a technology rather than how it is used.
That said, modeling it after a general cryptocurrency is probably a bad idea since it rising prices may prevent legitimate clients from being able to connect to onion services due to the challenge being too expensive (either in terms of computation or accusation). I think a much practical approach is to have each visitor contribute to a partial solution that can then be combined to derive funds (much like how mining pools work). That way, clients will be completely isolated from cryptocurrency and sites can actually benefit from the work rather than just throwing it away. It's a win-win situation.
I hope the next generation learns from our senseless technology-burnings.
>modeling it after a general cryptocurrency is probably a bad idea
Not modelling after but integrating of an existing one. Because this saves massive amount of engineering effort.
>rising prices may prevent legitimate clients from being able to connect to onion services due to the challenge being too expensive
Obviously, the price for legitimate clients would be much cheaper, as their requests shall be placed in the middle of priority queue (clients can wait a few seconds) while the attacker have to occupy the very top of this queue all the time. Also note that the bigger the DDoS in this scheme - the bigger profits server could make, which he could spend on expanding capacity.
>each visitor contribute to a partial solution that can then be combined to derive funds
This scheme predates monero, which was about 10 years ago.
>the next generation learns from our senseless technology-burnings.
Not if they would reinvent the wheel each time instead of adapting of existing tech to current needs.
I think it's pretty great that Tor hasn't tied itself to crypto that deeply given how the vast majority of crypto users don't actually give a shit about privacy, only the appearance of it.
Integrating with a coin would defeat the propose, since getting coins for PoW would make the ddos financially rewarding. Allowing the attacker to outcompete normal user who just want to access the site.
>AI hacked nothing. We've been doing it to ourselves for ages. This is just another way of doing it
except much more effective.
Humanity barely managed to get over (if so) previous mind-viruses like bible and communism. Partially because of massive discussion around these topics. With current LLMs (not future superhuman AGI) it's possible to spoon-fed a personally tailored mind-virus to each internet user. And there would be no discussion just because every instance is so original. (In practice it's often enough to just rename all the keywords, as proven by numerous psycho/business-cource gurus.)
If the story is too personal, you can't share it and influence others. In your analogy, is a virus that can't spread.
A pop song can feel deeply personal to many people, precisely because it's vague and not specific. The composer doesn't need to know the listener at the individual level. It needs to know an audience.
The combination of grooming a specific audience and then targetting it broadly is much more likely to work than individual propaganda pieces, and much more effective because the affected are inclined to influence others within the audience. It's already being done in a massive scale.
Yes, there are concerns about the targetting individuals with AI. Whistleblowers, activists and so on are in serious risk. These are likely to have some antibodies though, and that is not what the article is talking about.
The best defence in my opinion is better education, skepticism and proper critical thinking. Exactly the same stuff that prevents people from being targeted by the old stuff.
I took 5k iu oil softgels and got a unique and indescribable BAD feeling. It crept up very gradually over the course of a month and a half and I had a hard time realizing what was happening. It took me over a month to recover after I stopped.
Another time I've taken 2k iu dry D3 and had zero side-effects.
A couple of years after that D3 mishap, I tried some omega-3 and after a two weeks I realized that that unique bad feeling was making a comeback.
Again, another time I tried a different brand of omega-3 I had no side-effects.
I have a bunch of food sensitivities. So I believe that was a reaction to some contaminants in the oil.