tptacek

16 ms·

421.
by tptacek 2mo ago
He didn't publicly call me an NSA shill, so I got off pretty easy. Obviously, I stand by what I said. I think it would be an understatement to suggest support for what Bernstein is arguing is a minority cause among cryptographers.
422.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Matthew Green isn't a journalist, he's a practitioner (and a cryptography professor at Hopkins).
423.
by tptacek 2mo ago
The problem that Matthew Green is calling out subtextually is that democracy is likely to disappoint nerds on this issue: a random voter in the country 10 years from now may very well not share your priors about this issue.
424.
by tptacek 2mo ago
One way to resolve the tension here is to note that CNE and lawful-intercept access to phones depends generally on platform vulnerabilities, not application code vulnerabilities. Low-level platform code churns less, absorbs more fixes under
425.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Just a note that plagiarism wasn't the extent of the alleged misconduct. Large parts of his biography were in question as well. A recovery of his reputation or a long-term future as a public thinker, let alone an academic, was probably
426.
by tptacek 2mo ago
What diversion? You presented a mathematical argument against the college income premium that misconstrued how the median works.
427.
by tptacek 2mo ago
No, I'm saying that you can take someone on either side of a median income statistic and increase their income without changing the median, contrary to your claim that median income statistics prove that lower-income people can't
428.
by tptacek 2mo ago
You can make other arguments about the connection between college and lifetime income, certainly! But they aren't the mathematically closed argument you made early, the one you preceded with "We can make this real simple".
429.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Because it's written in Javascript and there are classes of highly-situational and not-especially-meaningful vulnerabilities that broadly impact the entire ecosystem ("prototype pollution" is the canonical example) that get c
430.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't know how we can continue discussing at this point, since "hereditarian" is not a slur (it's how many in the field would describe themselves). You either follow this research or you don't, either is fine, but
431.
by tptacek 2mo ago
It's not "the upper end of the estimate"; it's no longer the estimate. Meanwhile, hereditarians believe in strong genetic determinism for behavioral attributes. I think you should probably be more familiar with this fiel
432.
by tptacek 2mo ago
If you're not a security person, the unspoken subtext here: the overwhelming majority of these "CVEs" do not matter to the project, and a very large number of them don't matter at all. They're pro-forma findings, li
433.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Even hereditarians don't believe the .85 number anymore. I think you probably want to do some more recent reading. This has come up a bunch on HN and I don't want to rehash dozens of earlier comments, but the search bar will give
434.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Wait, flesh this thought out? Twin studies were the dominant methodology of the 1970s-1990s, until molecular genomics --- and genetic studies with controls for family relations demolished their heritability estimates. You just wrote a sen
435.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'm so confused by what you think the "median" means here. Take the set "1 5 9". "1" goes to college and gets a 60% income improvement; generously, round that up to 2. What's the before/after med
436.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Wait, what? I don't want to get pulled into an argument about college that I'm not invested in, but how is this even arithmetically true? I can bestow a lifetime increase on two people in the bottom half cohort without changing th
437.
by tptacek 2mo ago
We're probably talking past each other then because I read you the other way. Either way: in 2026 there is still a striking college income premium, statistically (it's over 50%). It's presumably much lower than it was before
438.
by tptacek 2mo ago
You're making the mistake I called out but on a grander scale. Virtually everything about the cohorts you're comparing are different! Labor markets, demographics, taxes, unionization, labor force participation, even technology; yo
439.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't think that's quite it. Chartreuse had its big moment more than a decade ago, and the big story since then was the allocation program the supplier did, which made it scarce. It really was hard to get for a little while.
440.
by tptacek 2mo ago
It's very sweet. The thing here is nobody drinks it straight. Do equal parts Chartreuse, gin, Maraschino, and lemon juice (a Last Word); it's hard to hate, and a good introduction to what Chartreuse is about. My next move would be
441.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Malort tastes like what it is: a cleaning solvent. It's a prank Chicagoans play on tourists. The authentic, artistically coherent version of Malort is Novasalus.
442.
by tptacek 2mo ago
For a couple years the headline story about Chartreuse was that it was becoming impossible to get (which is annoying because it's an important ingredient in a bunch of super-popular cocktails, most notably the Last Word), owing to the
443.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Super uncertain causality. "Earnings is most strongly predicted by IQ" suggests mechanistic and innate causality, but SES acts on IQ and on outcomes (as IQ does on SES). Education powerfully influences lifetime earnings, but edu
444.
by tptacek 2mo ago
That's exactly what Anthropic said was going to happen! Their big bet is that models are going to keep getting sharply better, not that they're going to quickly reach a plateau of quality that they can then defend.
445.
by tptacek 2mo ago
This is maybe one of the purest examples of the Bell Curve Meme in software engineering. The things you would do to the system Tailscale operates to eliminate all single points of failure (generally, and in the specific case where, where th
446.
by tptacek 2mo ago
The Raft bugs are the wrong kind of concurrency --- they're distsys bugs, not multithreading bugs. Not a good example, and a little telling that you'd cite it.
447.
by tptacek 2mo ago
It's a good line! It's even sort of useful. It's just not the whole story.
448.
by tptacek 2mo ago
It's a great line, but that's obviously not all it is. You don't get new results in e.g. mathematics by looking carefully at the pixels of a JPEG.
449.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I don't think it makes sense to think of Mastodon as having a central "discover" tab. Mastodon is much closer to the blogosphere than to Twitter.
450.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Everything is doable, I'm just completing the comparison the preceding comment made.

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