Nathaniel Eliot

Mad props (and $100 in merch sales) to Rich Burlew, for proving (again) that even simply illustrated web-comics can tell awesome stories. I can't embed the strip that inspires this, because without back-story it lacks the weight it hit me with. I can't even title this post correctly, because it would be a spoiler for those who are following it.

But by the time I figured out where Rich was going, I was shouting along. That he managed to do that and end on a nail-biting cliffhanger which promises much future awesome is why I'm (yet again) buying expensive t-shirts online.

Overcoming Bias is a masterwork philosophical thesis, cleverly disguised as a blog about rationality and cognitive bias. I've waited to pimp Eliezer Yudkowsky's work because with the heavy groundwork he was laying, I had the feeling he was building toward something strong. "Which parts of my brain are 'me'?" does not disappoint:

This post is filed under "morality" because the question "Which parts of my brain are 'me'?" is a moral question - it's not predicted so much as chosen. You can't perform a test on neural tissue to find whether it's in or out. You have to accept or reject any particular part, based on what you think humans in general, and yourself particularly, ought to be.

Read the whole thing, and follow some of the hyper-links. And read the comments, which contain such gems as:

I'm depressed about the coming end of the human race. Got a solution for that? :-)
Posted by: MichaelG | October 22, 2008 at 03:07 PM

Yeah, shut up and save the world.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | October 22, 2008 at 03:18 PM

Which is funnier because he means it, and already he's written several good arguments for it. Seriously: this should be required reading for the entire human race.

---

Edit:tanniynim (that wishy-washy moderate) wants credit for having linked this before I did.

Amazon EC2 + UltraMonkey + MySQL Cluster + OpenLDAP + Gluster + AppArmor + fastcgi + OpenVPN + Varnish + OpenNMS + Capistrano = Clustered Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP/Perl/Python

Or, in lay-men's terms: websites that never crash, even if the entire planet visits them at once.

Now, to make it all work . . .

In Debian Security Advisory 1571 (New openssl packages fix predictable random number generator), the Debian Security Team disclosed a vulnerability in the openssl package that makes many cryptographic keys that are used for authentication (e.g. through SSH) or signing (e.g. web server certificates) potentially vulnerable.

End User Summary

The scope of the problem includes:

• weak keys for both clients and servers (see section "Identifying Weak Keys below")
• all key types that were generated using openssl (this includes RSA and DSA keys)
• compromise of other keys or passwords that were transmitted over an encrypted link that was set up using weak keys. Note that this last point means that passwords transmitted over ssh to a server with a weak dsa server key could be compromised too.

Read more here . . .

It's probably telling that my most famous close relative is listed with sexual orientation as "matter of dispute", and that my musical tastes have odd correlations with those of teenage Japanese girls. I'm just not sure what it's telling, and with results like that I'm mildly concerned who it's telling.

I've also just been hit by the LJ salmon chatbot, which is probably the closest thing to art that griefers have yet accomplished. Yay, internet: bringing the weird, yet again.

"I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It is a severe prescription."
-- Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm, by Gary Wolf

One of the things I try to avoid in my professional life is bias. The computer world is crawling with people for whom Perl is better than PHP, or Lisp better than C++, or Linux is better than Windows. Holy wars are spawned because two people decide that their tool preferences are the whole of a value judgment, and then run into one another in conversation. This blocks out lateral thinking, one of the most valuable tools in this industry; with such a profusion of tools, it's well worth your time to see if there's a more appropriate one, before you start work.

However, I've also decided that for my own personal purposes, open source is the way to go. Work with no replication cost should be essentially free: this is the long-term consequence of plugging that zero into wholly capitalist equations, lest I be accused of the commie leanings I'm guilty of. Much to the lament of businessmen who would like it to be a license to print money, software is actually a service industry, not a product industry. Getting one payment for every thousand users is fine, if you've got an install base of millions; conversely, getting a thousand up front payments isn't so great, if five hundred of them feel gypped and never come back. The brightest OS companies already know this, and make bank each year on custom setups and service contracts. Using only open source seems to be just keeping ahead of the pack; the market's got to go that way, anyway.

The thing that drew me to computers was how easily I could tell I was right: testing a theory took relatively little time, and had results that weren't open to interpretation. That simple success button is still a large weapon in my arsenal against existential dread. Unfortunately, many of the more important questions (like "what's the right way do software in a capitalist system") have no such simple answers; truly testing the theory I espouse above will take most of a lifetime.

Until recently, a convincing counter argument was that open source projects were stuck in the UI ghetto, unable to appeal to the non-geeky because they were made by and for hackers. So its nice to see the occasional indication that's no longer true, such as a glowing review from a fashionable dame of her new Linux laptop. Although I would caution her (and you all): syntactic sugar isn't meant to be eaten . . .

I'd love to enter the NetFlix Prize competition. It addresses a programming problem I've noodled at a bit over the years: learning personal preferences from ratings, well enough to recommend new things and notice trends.

And I'd like to think that extensive table-top game tinkering has blessed me with home-grown understanding of statistics and probability to let me outperform the college teams participating. The hours spent staring at Wikipedia statistics articles with a furrowed brow, however, make that appear longer odds than the state lottery; if I'm a savant, I'm also so idiot as to be unable to translate it to current terms. More likely, I'm demonstrating that dangerous kind of ignorance which doesn't know itself; given that, the value of writing code to test my idea drops off precipitously.

Oh well. As bad habits go, getting over my head in profitless math problems is far from the worst . . .

(Special bonus comic: Science vs. Norse Mythology. The debate continues.)

Its either a lame hippie hairband, or the material focus for the most powerful abjuration ever.

Probably both.
-- Xykon, Order of the Stick #532

I'm uncertain on Steven Brust's Firefly fanfic, My Own Kind of Freedom. The internal monologues break some of the enjoyment of Firefly: they lose the subtle interactions which showed (without telling) each character's inner conflicts, and turn foreshadowing into punch-telegraphy by revealing too much, too soon. However, the dialog and plotting are on par with the show, and contain little gems:

He got up, went back to the bucket, and continued cleaning the wall. River found another sponge and knelt down to help him.

"Art," she said as they wiped it away.

Simon looked at her.

"It's the second person present singular form of the verb 'to be,'" she said.

"I knew that," he told her.

Plus, its nice to see established writers aren't above fanfic or Creative Commons licensed works.

flamingnerd writes:

I asked her, "do you have any negative self talk?" She burst into laughter and said, "Do I ever fart?!" And I got it. EVERYONE has negative self talk. And some people are more flatulent in that regard than others. And it's ok. It's normal, not some great tragedy.

She went on to tell me of a talk given by a young Buddhist priest. "When you beat yourself with a stick just beat yourself with a stick and don't beat yourself for beating yourself."

Thanks to nationelectric for sharing the good reminder.

Your LiveJournal is in Russian hands now; back up, because you never know what those sneaky Russkies could be up to. Some options:

• LiveJournal Backup / Search Utility is a .NET application; I couldn't get it to work correctly (read: ran out of interest) with Mono, but it should do just fine for Windows. todfox recommends LJ Archive, which is built much the same way (i.e. - effectively Windows only).
• ljdump is a fairly simple Python program that dumps your posts and comments into XML files. Like Python, it runs most anywhere; it's a command line utility, so there's a bit more of a learning curve.
• Wordpress LJ Import and LJ Crossposter lets you sync your LJ to your WordPress installation. In theory, anyway; I've not tested either yet.

This public service message message brought to you by paranoid hackers, the Red Scare, and the number 23. The Council of Nathan disavows all complicity for this action: we can't be asked to vet everything peons write in our name, after all.

"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on the top."
- Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

A couple things I saw, as seen through the lenses of others. Thanks to annamaul93 and mrfang for the pictures.

Good to see my brother still knows how to shock and dismay authority figures:

Shakespeare shock? Show for Higley kids halted

Doug Carroll
The Gilbert Republic
Oct. 2, 2007 11:45 AM

The decision to halt a performance of a Shakespearean-themed play Monday by the Higley Unified School District has been praised by students and parents, according to the district.

A New York-based touring company, Windwood Theatricals, used poor taste in presenting The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), the district said, and the show was stopped after about 40 minutes at the Higley Center for the Performing Arts. About 700 students in the sixth through 12th grades were in attendance as part of a voluntary field trip.

Tara Kissane, the district's director of visual and performing arts, decided to stop the show because of “verbal and body language that was considered inappropriate,” according to district spokeswoman Sara Bresnahan.