- the way the wood looks and feels.
- it has been fairly tough. I managed to stain it with an overnight pen leak, but it's mostly easy to clean, and stands up to minor impacts from computers and cups. Also, no water marks so far.
I dislike:
- the curved front, which looked cute in the pictures but makes it a PITA to fit a keyboard tray. That was a mistake. I wish I'd gone for the straight edged desk.
Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.
I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.
Mostly just invented things, patented them, then brokered the deal, often donating the patents to the Open Patent Foundation in the process so that nobody could monopolize the idea in the medium term. For example, he patented the idea of using uploaded gastropod neural nets to run a nanotech factory on an asteroid, then hired the uploaded gastropods themselves as part of the deal (they wanted to “swim away” from the noisy and dangerous and inexplicable humans).
As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding.
A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea.
Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off?
I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.
I've seen him comment on it a few times over the years, though I wouldn't take my vague memories on them as canonical: He's mainly pissed off that many avid fans of some of his books and Accelerando in particular show a few patterns of thinking: 1) They miss his intent to show future for humanity that was much more of a "Warning! Do Not Enter!" than as any sort of advocacy/enthusiasm for it 2) Really pissed off that a subset of the that are ultra ultra wealthy either miss the signpost or dont care and seem to take it & other hard-takeoff singularity stories as potential maps & guidebooks on the path 3) He's annoyed (maybe not the right word) that a significant portion of people that cheer on the idea of a singularity do so in part for the hope of something like immortality, biological or uploads, specifically in a way that reinvents quite a bit of the trappings and mythos and other cultural baggage embodied in a lot of western Christianity, most notably a lot of the TESCREAL hodge podge of groups.
Again, all of this is my own dodgy recollections and paraphrases.
> With no need to build, does he spend time on design then?
He's a cyborg: "the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses." Why he is special? Who knows. Maybe he has a talent of interfacing with the nets through the crude hardware of the era. Maybe it's connections you mention.
Several times I have heard you express your frustration that real life was copying your books too closely. I can understand that since your books always seem to be rather cautionary if not outright horror.
But I always wondered if you’ve ever considered writing something more aspirational? Something that would make you happy to have people copying.
Tragically unexamined, also, is that the push for surveillance of late is almost certainly a reaction to the reverse-surveillance consumer networked tech - and, specifically, connected camera-enabled smartphones and the networks/software needed to instantly share what's being recorded - enabled, flipping the asymmetry of the then-extant surveillance state in the early-mid 2010s. A lot of powerful people really, really hated that Rodney King and its attendant embarrassment to law enforcement was becoming a monthly occurrence. Humiliation is what moves power, after all.
[I have lived in the UK. I do not live in the UK. I am not British]
well, I guess you can always try moving there. It's my suspicion that more people move from China to the UK than the other way around. Why is that? Maybe they haven't heard the news about it being a terrible place.
I get it though. As other posters have said, various British police forces seem to get ahead of themselves and then have to climb back off their hill when confronted with skeptical press [remind me, do you get much skeptical press in China?] and although I do not greatly care for the marchers who carry pictures of ultralights (because yeah! Kill civilians!!) I don't think the people who are nearby and telling us that bombing civilians is wrong (hint: bombing civilians is wrong) should be penalized for doing so. The courts and the electorate will have their say, and (slowly) grind any disagreeing gov't into a policy change. As it should be.
That said, while I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement, I can't because, well, because it's stupid. It's a stupid thing to say. You should reflect more before you type.
I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember:
I wrote something to do cluster analysis of the previous day’s search queries. It turned out that the most frequent search was something like “naked picture of $soapOperaShowActor”. Actual search query data might shake your ideas of the goodness of people.
Much of AJ’s content was based on editorial staff (often young journalistic folk) researching what they thought might be the highest quality answer. One day I passed the desk of a colleague who was watching porn. What now? It turns out that they wanted to be able to answer the question “best porn of $kink” for a large variety of kinks. Which meant that they also had to have a policy of how to direct queries for CP. To something less harmful obvs.
As a corollary of the above, the editors needed a way to search for candidate results. What did they use for this? Google of course!
Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.
Anyway I got laid off in the great wave of 2001, was out of work for a while, did some truly awful work on supermarket planogram s/w and eventually got a gig doing IP routing. Ever since then I’ve been patronising grad hires by telling them how useful it is to have a bad job in your past. It makes it much easier to cope with occasional bad days at an otherwise good place. “Sure, my code crashes on a double exception when the reverse bcopy chokes on an unwired chunk of address space in the ARP lookup interrupt path, but at least I’m not trying to optimise the positioning of cornflakes to take advantage is this month’s promo pricing”. Good god, there was a time when I had a subscription to The Grocer magazine. Watch out kids. This could happen to you! (I also got to spend a day following a guy around the London Underground as he refilled chocolate vending machines. But I won’t talk more about that unless you buy me a beer).
It's been a while but I also worked there at the same time. I was in the original group who set up the UK operations around the turn of the millennium.
And you recommended the Introduction to Algorithms book to me...
>Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.
"estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%." [0]
You do most of humanity a disservice by lumping them in with that cohort that may or may not identify themselves as evil (I have no idea) but are certainly capable of deliberately and with calculation behaving in ways that most of us would label with the "E" word.
I think I understand why this is true for plain IP forwarding. There isn’t much to break the cache and the lookups are few and fast.
What’s the cheapest (new) computer that can drive a 1Gb port with NAT? With a busy encrypted (wireguard?) connection?
[I don’t think qos has a lot of use in the domestic environment; sure, someone here does it but I think it’s much less mainstream than the features I already mentioned. ]
Such a device could drive my home. But in a couple of years I suspect I’ll want 2Gb or 10.
In the past I’ve tended to use a device until its crappy power supply failed. So I guess I’m hoping for a >5 year life span/upgrade capacity.
For all I know the answer to my question is one of those passively cooled four port n100 bricks from AliExpress. Anecdata happily accepted.
Wireguard adds nothing unless you'd want to terminate it on the router. In which case it adds so very little it's unnoticeable.
About any n100 will do. Question is in their reliability which mostly comes down to power regulation components quality. Not performance.
One of my installs runs on a repurposed old android phone. Which has about 100 times CPU capacity of the router I write this through, and that one being cheap tplink shit still terminates wireguard at link speed which is 100Mbps. You don't need fancy gear for routing. And you don't usually need gigabit uplink because speed is limited way upstream.
But if you want "the right gear and damn the price" go get a Microtik. They are very good.
> What’s the cheapest (new) computer that can drive a 1Gb port with NAT?
What's the cheapest new computer you can find? That will work. If you have PPPoE, you need to be a bit more careful; depending on your OS and NICs, it's possible for inbound traffic to only use one core; low power laptop cpu may not have enough throughput from a single cpu, but my information is a little dated.
I did 1G NAT on a dual core haswell [1] for a long time.
I can drive 2+ Gbps vrfs, nats, ipsec, complex firewall rules and several routing tables through an Atom C3558. This is just using stock linux kernel networking. There are other services running on that box too.
Depending on details, it can go higher (e.g. without the ipsec being handled on the atom box, and using the 10G ports built into the chip, offload becomes helpful for TCP and UDP flows).
This is traffic in one 10G port and out the other, in this case.
Multiport flows were not tested since they were out of spec for the use case.
This is not a one off - this is a product I built and has been tested in many deployment scenarios. (I can't provide more details due to employment reasons, and I won't name the employer)
I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.
First, the US constitution as it currently stands admits modifications. Amendments are version bumps. My understanding is that they’re harder to come by these days.
Second, the constitution may be written but the interpretation is always changing. In particular, the interpretation of laws around restriction of free speech have lots of history of being interpreted in ways that may or may not be congruent with the intentions of the original authors, who’re dead, so we’ll never know the truth of it. It’s only been 107 years since the US Supreme Court decided that anti-draft speech in time of war COULD BE ILLEGAL. Apparently that was partially overturned in 1969.
Thirdly [naming, caching and out by one bugs!] it is far from clear that a written constitution will lead to a durable republic. It’s only been ~250 years. Too soon to tell.
> Second, the constitution may be written but the interpretation is always changing
It’s okay if the change is because you think the new interpretation is closer to what the constitution originally meant.
It’s democratically illegitimate to change the interpretation otherwise. A written constitution is already an impingement on democracy. But how can it be that whoever is doing the interpreting is allowed to restrict democratically adopted laws in ways the constitution didn’t originally intend to restrict them?
There is no right to vote in the constitution as written and interpreted in the 1700s. There is also no guarantee of freedom of speech. The first amendment was considered a rule that only applied federally.
What's democratically illegitimate is everything you wrote in this thread.
If your state government threw you in jail for what you just wrote that would be perfectly aligned with your "original understanding" interpretation of the U.S constitution.
I like:
- the way the wood looks and feels. - it has been fairly tough. I managed to stain it with an overnight pen leak, but it's mostly easy to clean, and stands up to minor impacts from computers and cups. Also, no water marks so far.
I dislike:
- the curved front, which looked cute in the pictures but makes it a PITA to fit a keyboard tray. That was a mistake. I wish I'd gone for the straight edged desk.
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