19 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2022
    1. Olga Khmil, one of Molfar’s intelligence analysts, says Russia is now using group channels in messaging apps like Telegram to aim its artillery better. Russians pretending to be Ukrainians on these channels feign fear of shelling in order to elicit information about infrastructure that has and has not been hit. On May 24th the sburevealed an even more devious approach to such espionage. The agency said it had discovered that Russian intelligence was using smartphone games to induce unwitting youngsters to snap and upload geotagged photos of critical infrastructure, military and civilian. In exchange, players receive virtual prizes of no value outside the video-game world. And Russia gets to wreck their country.

  2. May 2020
    1. How can we preach spiritual morality without participating in preventive action? Can we stand by and just watch what the Nazis are doing?

  3. Mar 2020
    1. I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force. It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed.

      Technology is never neutral.

  4. Jan 2020
    1. we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable

      This is a brilliant summary of the spchallengeto building society

  5. Dec 2019
    1. It's amusing to imagine the DICE approach applied to war planning in 1941. You'd estimate how formidable Japan and Germany were, calculate the minimum necessary force to defeat them (with a 25-percent margin of error), and produce only that much war materiel. Wouldn't want to produce too many tanks and airplanes and knock a few points off your neoclassical aggregate welfare function by having to raise taxes more than necessary!
    1. The farther back you pull from the immediate experience of one libertarian end-user unconcerned with anything beyond his own immediate experience, the worse it looks

      This describes so much consumer technology

  6. Nov 2019
    1. Brooks’s Law of Prototypes] Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow. Fred Brooks University of North Carolina If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two. Craig Zerouni Computer FX Ltd.

      Hofstader’s Law applied to prototyping

    2. [The Test of Negation] Don’t include a sentence in doc- umentation if its negation is obviously false.

      A prototype of Shannon’s rule for principles

    3. Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs. Brian Kernighan Bell Labs

      Clearly applies to all forms of design

  7. Oct 2019
    1. One of the more substantial critiques of data ownership is that if you treat data as purely a property right, it means that you can sell that right. If we treat privacy as a property right what that means is that we essentially have that right to trade it. And the problem is that it could worsen financial inequities. People with less income might be more willing to trade their important personal data for a small payment, while those who are better off can say, “I don’t need the dividend. I’ll keep my data.” How do you balance that?There’d be less of a sense of desperation in a society where there’s a freedom dividend and everyone’s getting $1,000 per month. But it is the case that certain people’s data is worth more than others’ data. And if you look right now there are many people with different preferences. There are people out there choosing to share the intimate details of their lives with millions of people; some make a living off it. So, if individuals want to share their data or information or even their private lives with other people, then that’s their prerogative.

      Yang here is a perfect example of a fish that doesn't understand water.

    1. Writing is as much a discipline as reading, or exercising. Unlike those activities, it must be done to something: an idea, a story, a code, a musical phrase. A rigorous and detailed exercise of it is like trying to play a musical composition or organize a conversation—a lofty goal for the sumo wrestler.

      The robots are not what they seem.

  8. Sep 2019
    1. Higher-income people may live in conditions that foster the (often correct) perception that they are independent. At the same time, this perception can foster the dubious belief that higher-income people are more talented or special than other people, and so do not require others’ assistance, input, or ideas.

      You don't say.

    1. This quote suggests that it was not intelligence in the traditional sense that differentiated Jobs from other leaders in his industry. Instead, Jobs understood better than his competitors how people felt when using different products, and he leveraged this understanding to design computers and phones that appealed more to customers.

      I think they mean that is enabled him to manage better. This myth of Jobs as product designer is persistent!

    1. From this perspective, democratic institutional arrangements designed to constrain governmental power are unwarrantedly complex and only serve to obstruct to the state’s ability to act on behalf of the people.

      Government (the deep state) is not an agent of the people, but an impediment to dear leader acting on their behalf.

    2. While accepting the democratic emphasis of the primacy of the people, its fascist leanings are suggested by its demand for strong leadership coupled with its explicit rejection of or discomfort with the legal conception of the nation as a polity and its members as citizens, the rights of minorities and the rule of law.

      RWP is populist ("real Americans"), ethnographies-nationalist (white, English-speaking), and authoritarian (Trump)

    1. But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality—we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
    1. Although individuals with a strong need for achievement can be successful lower-level managers, they are usually weeded out before reaching top management positions.

      Might be me.