On that particular day I was going through a bunch of different books, trying to work out what my plan was going to be for the next little while. Of those ones, I wound up finishing A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and the Sensation and Perception one. I also knocked out a pretty good chunk of the one titled just Memory. The rest got bumped down the stack a bit.
I kinda getting back to the place now where I want to revisit The Organization of Behavior. That's the seminal work by Hebb that introduced Hebbian Learning and I'm on this big quest now to revisit a lot of old school approaches to learning & neural networks (in something at least approximating chronological order, although I won't be super strict about it) and code up implementations of each. So basically, some sort of Hebbian Learning system, a "McCulloch & Pitts Neuron", a Perceptron with the Perceptron Convergence Algorithm, Selfridge's Pandemonium Architecture, and so on, gradually working my way up to the current SOTA.
I'm about to finish up the Minsky & Papert Perceptrons book, and once I finish that I will probably read Volume 2 of the Parallel Distributed Processing series, then go back to Hebb.
FWIW, that Memory book was pretty fascinating. The general subject of human memory is, both simply taken for its own sake, and taken as inspiration for approaches to AI. I'm slightly more interested in AI than human memory qua human memory, but in either case it's fascinating material.
I'm not really here to defend OR condemn Mitnick. I was just always fascinated with his story, from the first time I read that Hafner & Markoff book Cyberpunk back in the early 1990's. Anyway, one of the notable aspects of his story was the way he was held for a rather long time without even so much as a bail hearing... something many people believed (and still believe) was blatantly unconstitutional. That was, as I recall, the motivation for a fair amount of the "Free Kevin" rabble-rousing, even among people who acknowledged that he had broken the law and deserved some sort of punishment.
By the time I bought that particular laptop and put that sticker on it, (about 3 years ago now, I guess) Kevin had long since been out of jail, had gone legal and was running his own security consulting company. I put one of those one mostly out of nostalgia and as a conversation starter. Perhaps surprisingly, I've had a modest number of people approach me when I was out in public and ask "Who's Kevin?" or say "Kevin Mitnick, right? Yeah, I remember that guy... I was at DEFCON this one year and ... <conversation ensues>".
If the various purported health benefits of coffee turn out to be true, then I'm pretty sure I am effectively immortal at this point. Prick me, and I bleed coffee.
And if not? Well, at least I wasn't forced to experience the living hell of a life without coffee.
FWIW, the HN Guidelines[1] expressly ask that we not do that.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I don't accept the idea that there is any universally applicable, objective answer to this question. I believe the answer varies for every individual and that each individual's answer is equally valid.
It is to deliver the maximum amount of utility to other people.
I find "utility" in this sentence to be under-specified. I like the general sentiment but it's too hand-wavy for me, to accept as "the" general principle of "what's the most important thing in life" even if it were possible to have such a general principle.
"be good and help everyone especially when they need it",
I think this is an excellent motto to live but, but I would stop short, again, of calling it "the" most important thing in life in a universal sense.
I do, as a point of fact, value helping others. Just to illustrate, I went to the local grocery store and picked up a case of cans of Campbell's Chunky Soup earlier this week and took to the local food pantry to help out with people who are struggling to get meals. Later I plan to go buy a few blankets and take over to donate for people who are homeless and need at least some way to keep warm as winter approaches. I do this kind of stuff because I like helping others. Same reason I spent a decade or so as a volunteer firefighter. I enjoy public service. But at the end of it all, I still would not necessarily agree that "deliver[ing] the maximum amount of utility to other people" is the most important thing in life. I'd just rank it pretty highly as "one of the important things".
It varies from year to year, month to month, and even week to week. But for quite some time now I've been really focused on doing a lot of "deep dive" backgrounding on various AI topics. During this period I've read probably 30'ish books (it's been 2+ years now).
For the most part, I carve out time to study very specifically. I'd say a normal week is reading/studying for 3-5 hours on Friday evening after work, then putting in 8 or 9 hours on Saturday, and then probably 3-4 hours on Sunday (during football season) and maybe 6-7 hours on Sunday (non football season). Then maybe another aggregate total of 3-5 hours throughout the rest of the work-week. And then mix in maybe another hour or two a week for reading fiction (that's more sporadic though, so don't take this bit too literally).
Totaling it all up, that's something like 20-30'ish hours as week. Keep in mind, most of this stuff is textbooks which are pretty dense and don't read real fast. I used to read a lot of novels, but I've largely fallen off on the fiction reading lately since I've been so research focused. I think I've read maybe 4 novels this year and am working on the 5th now (Book One of the "Bobiverse" series).
I feel that it's important to build the habit of reading books to improve my cognitive skills. Are there any tips for me please?
Hard to say. I've been an avid reader for basically my entire life, so it comes very naturally to me. The one thing I will observe though, is that over the past 5+ years I've noticed that I find it harder and harder to stay focused on one thing when it comes to video content. I can't watch a movie or tv show without constantly stopping to check Twitter, Facebook, HN, email, news.google.com, etc. But when I sit down with a book, I can just "lock in" and read for hours at a time mostly uninterrupted. My experience may not generalize, but if you try to make yourself read a bit, you may find that reading (paper books) might help you have similar periods of focus? That is, assuming such a thing is important to you.
In either case, read if you enjoy it and derive value from it. But don't read just because you feel like other people are telling you ought to read. "To thine own self be true" and all that jazz...
First time I was ever on a flight that landed at Midway, I was pretty freaked out by the visuals as we were descending. It's like ... "we're going to land on a house... we're going to Land On A House... we're going to LAND ON A HOUSE!! ... OMG, there's a runway <phew>".
From what I can remember, while there was some public awareness of "computer crime" by 1988 (War Games helped with that), it wasn't exactly a "big deal" to most people yet. My subjective recollection is that things took a marked turn around 1990, with the advent of "Operation Sundevil"[1], the raid on Steve Jackson Games, etc.
And by the mid to late 90's (I'd say about 1997) it was finally becoming "received wisdom" to most hacker that "this is real now: getting caught doing this stuff could mean actual jail time, fines, not getting into college, losing jobs, etc." Now I grew up in a rural part of NC and so we probably lagged other parts of the country in terms of information dispersal, so I expect other people view the timeline differently, so YMMV.
Lots of chaos, but just three arrests. Did any of them proceed to full prosecutions? I'm reasonably sure Bruce Esquibel wasn't charged (at least, there's nothing in PACER to say so). I have no idea who "Tony The Trashman" was.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that rtm finds the whole episode embarrassing or whatever and would prefer to avoid the topic. If pg is really his close friend, it makes sense that pg would defer from conversing about it (especially in public) simply out of respect for his friend.
https://fogbeam.com/free-kevin.jpg
reply