Learning to learn efficiently is an incredibly useful skill that is required for survival in the self-taught path. Deciding what to learn next while making progress in your project in order to strategically unlock better decision-making at the right time before investing in the wrong path will compound over time and lead to increasingly improving skills like technical design, architecture, and project planning. The only major downside to this path in my experience is the increased probability of impostor syndrome which can be detrimental specially during the early years of your career and when you are trying to grow into the next level.
My definition: Entropy is a measure of the accumulation of non-reversible energy transfers.
Side note: All reversible energy transfers involve an increase in potential energy. All non-reversible energy transfers involve a decrease in potential energy.
That definition doesn't work well because you can have changes in entropy even if no energy is transferred, e.g. by exchanging some other conserved quantity.
The side note is wrong in letter and spirit; turning potential energy into heat is one way for something to be irreversible, but neither of those statements is true.
For example, consider an iron ball being thrown sideways. It hits a pile of sand and stops. The iron ball is not affected structurally, but its kinetic energy is transferred (almost entirely) to heat energy. If the ball is thrown slightly upwards, potential energy increases but the process is still irreversible.
Also, the changes of potential energy in corresponding parts of two Carnot cycles are directionally the same, even if one is ideal (reversible) and one is not (irreversible).
This is almost bringing me to tears today. I am happy he's finally going to be free but I am still in deep sadness because this is not the world we are supposed to living in. With all of our knowledge and technology we are still doing horrible things as a civilization and we have lost control of our leadership. This scares me a lot because it is a growing problem and every day it seems like humanity is losing more and more of itself to evil and greedy powers that be. Assange did a great thing by exposing corrupt and criminal behavior at the highest levels and got such a inhumane treatment from the most powerful organizations on earth. He should not have been punished, he should have been protected and praised and his case should be a matter of study on every school on earth.
This is beautifully articulated. I myself thought for a long time that if the day ever came that Assange walks free, I'd cry, but instead I feel a strange emptiness inside. The world isn't the one I'd imagined for this day.
Very understandable. There is an emptiness because it should have never come to this.
The last line of Chapter 31 Tao Te Ching sayings it right.
"Fine weapons are instruments of misfortune; all creatures fear them. In peace we favor creation; at war we favor destruction. Weapons are tools of misfortune, not the tools of the wise. The sage uses them only as the very last, with calm restraint. Victory is no cause for rejoicing; victory comes from killing.
If you enjoy killing, you can never be fulfilled. When victorious, celebrate as if at a funeral."
Indeed. Though it is still inspiring that there are people like Assange who are willing to face personal hardship in the name of democratic values such as press freedom and government accountability / transparency.
None of the US leaders whose crimes were exposed by Assange have faced any consequences whatsoever, and many of them remain influential, lauded figures in American society.
Well, might it be that Assange did never receive something comparable to the US cables? You do remember he used to run a platform to publish whistleblower files, right?
I still remember the day they arrested him and how awful it felt. He is an incredibly strong person to withstand that level of isolation and see the light of day.
Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.
- we're better off because there is less human suffering "per capita" for lack of a better word.
- we're worse off because technology has allowed us all to instantly see and learn about every human (and animal) atrocity anywhere in the world.
I'm sure if I keyed up a gore site right now I could find the latest mexican cartel atrocity, or a necklacing in Africa, or someone somewhere else being cruelly hurt. But in the 1950s you had to pay for a paper which was excessively rate-limited and narrow in scope.
In "Better Angels" he chooses "healthy, wealthy and wise" as his three benchmarks. We live longer (and suffer less violence). We have more wealth. We are smarter. That's what "better off" means. You can argue that's not what "better off" means, but you'd be arguing that we should strive for shorter lives, more poverty, and increased stupidity.
What does wise mean here? Because it seems to be the same as intelligent, which is not how I would describe wisdom at all. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing, and while our age is definitely "smart" it seems to have a complete and total lack of wisdom about pretty much everything.
To simply dismiss Pinker as a moron either means you haven't at all read any of his books, or you yourself have a rather moronic definition of stupidity. You can disagree about many details in "Better angels of our nature" and debate future trends in interesting ways, but it's definitely not the work of a stupid individual. All the contrary, it's well thought out and highly robust in its arguments.
Also, "everything is relative" is an idiot's way of saying something something meaningless while trying to make it seem incisive. Yes, many things are relative to others, but there are also objective measurements and visible differences between material aspects of the world, past and present especially. Feel free to live with the violence and material resources of a 16th century peasant, with no access to modern amenities for a few months and see how you rethink "better off" when considering most of mdoern life (even for a majority of poor people)
Probably he is indeed a moron, or perhaps the shrewd academic.
The peasant who used to get one square meal in 3 days now gets one square meal a day. So objectively we are better off. ( And the HN idiot will gloss over the stats to point out how fortunate we are to have software jobs)
How is that different than my dad saying the cliche "Back in the day we had it much worse?" It's just a book to make the same conservative point. Since when did any child of a parent hearing that ("Back in the day, we didn't have food / shelter / etc.") respond in agreement? Talking about how much worse things were back then is beside the point, because it is the wrong category of comparison to make. It just shows the person - a parent, a teacher, Prof. Pinker - saying it is out of touch and doesn't understand the actual complaint in todays' context. It's just paternalism expressed with more words.
In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.
The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing or doctoring videos.
The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.
Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.
Not to mention the usually cited helicopter video is highly edited and anything but impartial, with an American Bradley fighting vehicle under ambush a block away as can be heard in the audio. And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s themselves, would be pointing what obviously looks like an RPG from a distance at troops in a firefight- not to mention bringing women and in children with him in the minivan.
If this highly edited footage was the worst that could be found in such a large dump of documents- I’m highly underwhelmed.
Evidence of war crimes? Hardly. A chance to see how ugly these conflicts are and another reason why Americsn troops perhaps should never have been there in the first place? Yep, absolutely.
But my hunch is that the entire event is a Rohrschack test where most people will take away from it the same perceptions that they walked in with.
It wasn't the worst that was found but it did show a war crime. It wasn't the only one by any stretch.
It showed a cover up of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan which had been caused by American Troops.
It showed significant horrific human rights violations against innocent and untried inmates at Guantanamo Bay. (As if just the existance of that wasn't enough.)
It showed illegal spying by the NSA on governments around the world.
I don't think it materially changed anyones perception, maybe gave fuel to the fire and reminded people it was still going on
"Torture At Abu Ghraib" was published in 2004, Collatoral Murder not until 2010. Were there still fence-sitters at that point? I honestly can't recall the prevailing attitude of the time, besides Assange being an enemy of democracy who deserved to be brought in and shot. I think the reaction was most telling, the continued bloodlust for traitors who are doing little more than advertising the US's incompetence and aimlessness in that war. If collateral damage didn't make me any less patriotic, seeing our politicians harass an australian for treason (???) certainly did
2004 was only a year after the war started, so yes many wouldn't have been swayed of their patriotic view. It was still too soon to know definitively it hadn't been worthwhile going to war. By 2010 it was extremely clear the Iraq war was a mistake and wikileaks only added to that.
Saying the above, the reason to release wasn't to sway patriotism, it was to get the truth out. For that reason it was the right decision even if it ended up with a portion of society disliking Assange for his so called 'treason' (which of course it wasn't as he isn't an American).
Anyone that has blind patriotism without any doubts, to the US military, after Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib can't be helped.
The "edited" version's edited. The unedited version, released by WL at the same time, isn't.
The entire war was a crime and killed 150K+ innocents. If the release of video of a fraction of those deaths puts attention on that; excellent journalism.
Did you really watch the helicopter video and think 'wow the US military is definitely in the right!'. I was young when the video was released, and it was a huge step in my journey to becoming critical of imperial powers.
Embarrassing the US is worth being jailed for years or being extradited to a country where you don't reside and are not a citizen and being tried for sedition in said country?
> The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.
in my experience people who condemn wikileaks for this almost universally praise wikileaks for other releases (just so longs as the other releases happened to paint their political opponents in a bad light).
Even if everything you say is true (and FWIW I think you're exaggerating a lot), so what? None of that makes them not journalism or not free speech. They're clearly not a spy agency. They published important facts and that's something we should be grateful for; that they did so for their own purposes, and may have chosen not to publish other important facts, does nothing to diminish that.
I share the general disappointment but to steelman a positive outlook: People in power have always done horrible things and orgs like wikileaks and some from the media counterbalance this. While this was a tragedy, if not for such a strong light being shined on Assange, he surely would've disappeared. At least he is getting freedom now, at least he exposed many important things with his organization and at least he inspired many people to do similar things.
It's true I've never really felt worse about the future. Maybe because I was blissfully ignorant, or maybe because things are actually worse. I try (and struggle) to stay positive because it is so easy to be cynical and detractive and I think that ultimately makes things worse for the world AND my own mental health.
> How can you be pure toward him when he is fine getting informants and others killed, and asking for and telling how to go about getting classified info. Are the facts in dispute?
No they are not in dispute, they are simply not facts.
From [1]:
The head of the IRTF, Brigadier General Robert Carr, testified under questioning at Chelsea Manning's sentencing hearing that the task force had found no examples of anyone who had lost their life due to WikiLeaks' publication of the documents.
I'm unsure where the purity claim comes from. Parent said people should praise him for his actions. Nowhere it's stated ALL his actions, or that he is pure in any way, shape or form.
Nobody is perfect and he's no different, all that they're expressing is that making the hard moral choice to expose bad behavior should be applauded instead of punished.
I know the vast majority of us (including me) would not have the courage to risk personal retaliation to expose bad behavior. We all love to think we would, but we all witness corruption everywhere and never say a word for a plethora of reasons.
If they were claiming "purity" as you imply, I'd agree. But that's not what was written, and it seems a lot of people have the same flawed interpretation. Yes, he's flawed, but that doesn't make what he has done any less brave.
I don't understand why Assange should be treated more harshly for putting people's theoretical lives at risk than the people who were actually murdering civilians and committing war crimes?
Revealing war crimes easily qualified for declassification of government documents. It’s a straightforward of course the end justified the means situation
And the other 99.999% of documents that didn't allege any war crimes?
I'm glad the darker side of the US operations came to light, but it would have been better if the leaks went straight to an actual news organization that had enough ethical standards to ensure names of informants and activists at risk were properly redacted.
Even ignoring all the public changes to the tech industry, wouldn't we need another whistleblower to even be able to tell that there hadn't been any internal change to what they considered acceptable behaviour?
The US testified in court that his disclosures didn't get anyone killed, this is misinformation stemming from early propaganda against him by the political establishment that was humiliated by WikiLeaks' publications
“Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
The US’s testimony makes it barely better given the quote (I’ll take your word for the testimony) and leaves me equally puzzled regarding his admiration.
I had never seen this purported quote before. And I found it extremely dubious that he said such a thing. Seeing as you didn't provide a source I went looking for one. I found first a recent NYT piece [1] with the purported quote. Here's the first paragraph of that piece :
> Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his speech at the conference, in which he listed Israel alongside Iran and China as part of a “rogue’s gallery of states” and compared the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp
I think it's pretty obvious from that opening that it's a hit piece on Assange. Anyway, that piece links to an earlier Guardian piece [2] for the source of the quote. That Guardian column is another, and even more obvious, hit piece on Assange. Here's its first paragraph :
> You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
Vomit. But finally in the Guardian piece we find the source of the purported quote. It's from David Leigh and Luke Harding's "history" of WikiLeaks. I think most people who have closely followed the Wikleaks story will understand how unreliable and compromised both David Leigh and Luke Harding are to serve as 'witnesses' or sources for any reporting on Wikileaks and Assange. But they've served their masters very well as yellow journalists engaged in a state backed smear campaign against Assange.
Is a non-US citizen culpable for publishing US secrets?
In sincere good-faith: is there even a US law about publishing the names of undercover informants? Isn't that what Dick Chaney and the New York Times did?
There is no dilemma! We need a harsh societal reminder that you are not responsible for the actions of other people. It’s a moral fallacy to say that JA would be responsible for getting informants killed (if any were actually killed—they weren’t) by exercising fundamental inalienable freedoms. If somebody kills an informant, that is on them. This mindset of culpability for consequences of exposing evil is literally how evil festers and wins. Don’t fall victim to evil’s rhetorical agenda.
I agree and would add that one of the goals for technical design or architecture work is to choose the architecture that minimizes the friction between best practices. For example if you architecture makes cohesion decrease readability too much then perhaps there is a better architecture. I see this tradeoff pop up from time to time at my work for example when we deal with features that support multiple "flavors" of the same data model, then we have either a bunch of functions for each providing extensibility or a messy root function that provides cohesion. At the end both best practices can be supported by using an interface (or similar construct depending on the language) in which cohesion is provided by logic that only cares about the interface and extensibility is provided by having the right interface (offload details to the specific implementations)
I wonder if laser tattoo removal adds to or decreases the potential risk. On one hand it gets rid of the ink but on the other hand it does so by releasing it into the system for a short period.
I think panpsychism might be explained as an observation of prevalence of goal-oriented behavior [1]. In a nutshell, as M. Levine said (paraphrasing) "evolution doesn't create solutions but rather it creates problem solving machines", so it is natural (to me) that we can expect evolutionary systems that are old enough (biological lineages, and star systems) to accumulate behaviors that we now see as "goal-oriented" where the goal is perceived by us as a problem to be solved or a set of problems to be solved, in a particular way that is related and explained by the evolutionary trajectory of the system being studied but might not be "justified" outside of this particular historical frame.
Oh I wish companies like Framework or System76 launched a reproducible manufacturing process where you code your hardware similarly to how Nix/Guix manages builds. Disaster recovery would be much easier. Perhaps Super Micro Computer can do this already but they target data centers. One can only dream.
This is great. Does anyone know any framework for simulating crystals or 3d lattices in general? I am trying to find something but I am not very familiar with this space.
it depends on if you’re looking for an accurate calculation of atoms and the number of atoms. if you’re just interested in how a lattice of spheres interact, force field software might be your best bet. if you’re interested in electronic properties of real materials you will need higher levels of theory such as DFT or beyond
The subject I am studying is not atoms but perhaps it is similar so I think I can start with force field software and see if it works for my use case. Thanks!
As a former biologist and self-taught programmer your comment and the paper you shared made my day (thank you). I often use biological and evolutionary analogies to prioritize best practices in my head, this one goes is at the top now.
The older you get the more responsibilities and also regrets you have. With more responsibilities and the feeling of not being able to manage them you feel as soon as the THC goes away, it is hard not to get anxious as you age, and it also adds more regrets which directly add to the anxiety and feeling of self-defeat and lack self-control. At least that was in my experience and the reason why I dropped it completely soon after turning 30.
