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>The stories from that night continue to haunt me today. These conversations are oddly precious and intimate. It's so difficult to find someone that is willin

by jcims 3y ago

>The stories from that night continue to haunt me today. These conversations are oddly precious and intimate. It's so difficult to find someone that is willing to even 'go there' with you let alone someone that is capable of creatively and fearlessly advancing the conversation.

jacquesm 3y ago
Let's just say I'm happy they're my friends and not my enemies :) It's pretty sobering to realize how intellect applied to bad stuff can lead to advancing the 'state of the art' relatively quickly once you drop the usual constraints of ethics and morality. To make a Nazi parallel: someone had to design the gas chambers, someone had to convince themselves that this was all ok and then go home to their wives and kids to be a loving father again. That sort of mental compartmentalization is apparently what humans are capable of and if there is any trait that we have that frightens me then that's the one. Because it allows us to do the most horrible things imaginable because we simply can imagine them. There are almost no restraints on actual execution given the capabilities themselves and it need not be very high tech to be terrible and devastating in effect. Technology acts as a force multiplier though, so once you take a certain concept and optimize it using technology suddenly single unhinged individuals can do much more damage than they could ever do in the past. That's the problem with tools: they are always dual use and once tools become sufficiently powerful to allow a single individual to create something very impressive they likely allow a single individual to destroy something 100, 1000 or a million times larger than that. This asymmetry is limited only by our reach and the power of the tools. You can witness this IRL every day when some hacker wrecks a company or one or more lives on the other side of the world. Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible.
- jcims 3y ago
  My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha. >Technology acts as a force multiplier though It really does, and to a point you made elsewhere infrastructure is effectively a multiplication of technology, so you wind up with ways to compound the asymmetric effect in powerful ways. >Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible. I worked for a bug bounty for a while and this was one of my takeaways. You have young kids with meager resources in challenging environments making meaningful contributions to the security of a Silicon Valley juggernaut.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha. I had to think about that sentence for a bit because as a rule I never start Googling when thinking about stuff like that. If I did I'd be on every watch list available by now. Might be on some of them anyway for some of the chemicals I've ordered over the years.

by jcims 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

Let's just say I'm happy they're my friends and not my enemies :) It's pretty sobering to realize how intellect applied to bad stuff can lead to advancing the 'state of the art' relatively quickly once you drop the usual constraints of ethics and morality. To make a Nazi parallel: someone had to design the gas chambers, someone had to convince themselves that this was all ok and then go home to their wives and kids to be a loving father again. That sort of mental compartmentalization is apparently what humans are capable of and if there is any trait that we have that frightens me then that's the one. Because it allows us to do the most horrible things imaginable because we simply can imagine them. There are almost no restraints on actual execution given the capabilities themselves and it need not be very high tech to be terrible and devastating in effect. Technology acts as a force multiplier though, so once you take a certain concept and optimize it using technology suddenly single unhinged individuals can do much more damage than they could ever do in the past. That's the problem with tools: they are always dual use and once tools become sufficiently powerful to allow a single individual to create something very impressive they likely allow a single individual to destroy something 100, 1000 or a million times larger than that. This asymmetry is limited only by our reach and the power of the tools. You can witness this IRL every day when some hacker wrecks a company or one or more lives on the other side of the world. Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible.

jcims 3y ago
My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha. >Technology acts as a force multiplier though It really does, and to a point you made elsewhere infrastructure is effectively a multiplication of technology, so you wind up with ways to compound the asymmetric effect in powerful ways. >Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible. I worked for a bug bounty for a while and this was one of my takeaways. You have young kids with meager resources in challenging environments making meaningful contributions to the security of a Silicon Valley juggernaut.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha. I had to think about that sentence for a bit because as a rule I never start Googling when thinking about stuff like that. If I did I'd be on every watch list available by now. Might be on some of them anyway for some of the chemicals I've ordered over the years.