Author: Maverisk

Despite apparent suppression of the signals for purposes of bread and circuses, there is a thing called Downturn looming.
Which, rightfully noted, calls for prep. Of the serious kind. Yes, one needs to get an umbrella when it doesn’t rain yet, or they’ll be out of stock. Or hugely expensive. Or be found loaned from a banker.

Not only train [motto also of 323sqn but huh, and this doesn’t quite match as could somehow be expected …!]], which is about getting used to dealing with the difficult and unexpected so that no matter what’s thrown at you, you know you’ll manage. That’s about resilience, with another leg in having prepared evasive manoeuvres though mostly about having stashes of money to be able to adapt when that’s called for.
But also ensure robustness in the first place, corrective manoeuvres that teflonise your organisation when something hits, though mostly about having stashes of money to be able to weather the storm when that’s called for.

In general, read the above-linked HBR piece and this book – almost forgotten it seems when now, it becomes relevant again.
And then, act. Be prepared. Long-termism is about to win again.

For now, …:

[Before the French have taken it; … sorry, this being Monteriggioni or hey am I sure?]

Aha! This Friday’s Thought doesn’t give you as much of a problem, as it gives a Revelation:
That’s why the others moved ahead of you …

As is displayed in, yet again, a Farnham Street’s article. That you should read, and then see how you fit in, you misfit </endearing>, as you moved through life.

And now, for something completely the same; a picture…

[Segovia castle; now I’ve done. Sorry, am done. Not theoretically perfect, but it’s here, this post. With this (own, unedited) picture]

Why is this Dutch piece even news, still …? Physical paper ‘data’ leakage, of highly sensitive information intell dare we say. Edited to add, this one (also unreadable to most).

a. No we may not; b/c that is reserved for serious cases not trivia [on a non-trivial scale]
b. Yes we may, but still, why is this newsworthy?
c. Because it isn’t. It’s just flooding. Edited to add, the problem is Huge, as per this Bruce Schneier insight i.e. Truth.

The c. part is the tricky one. On the one hand, dismissing the ‘news’ as being nothing newsworthy, superfluous reporting of trivia. On the other, apparently still necessary.
Necessary that is, to point out that mistakes will always be made. Keep things fresh, even. Otherwise, 1. slacking off will happen, 2. progress will never be made.

I’ll stop now, to not add to the blurb. With:

[Sleep tight; Torun]

Earlier, I mentioned the ‘latest’ developments in physics, being the denial of such a thing as an objective reality ‘out there’. Only your thoughts remain, though they include the whole Universe. This was already summarised in this after the foundation in this, but mostly forgotten as the simple summary was an ouroboros; the original not so much but not fathomable by some simpleton minds, maybe.

Now, new evidence has surfaced – where does it exist? – that actually, that’s right: There is no such thing as objectivity. Thus destroying all that the new physics had achieved so far. Because the end conclusions backtrack to some very deep foundations, that hence also have to be undone, unwound.

Which would be academic, were it not that e.g., quantum crypto based on entanglement based on quantum physics, may also have to be undone as part of the Gödelian ‘nihil sequitur’. If ever there was a summary of the impact of Gödel, there it is in the latter short form.
Same, possibly, with quantum computing. The blizzardly faster it seems to be, the more theoretical problems arise with programming, running, and reading the results of computations with it. Theoretical not in a sense [Sense? What’s that ..?] of ‘only occurring in theory but practically irrelevant’, but of being able to be proven from theory to occur everywhere in practice.

Possibly, the Man will still be proven to be right …

Ah. All semantics. Indeed…

In unrelated news:

[What is space-time anyway? Noordwijk]

A call for comments, on a crazy (?) idea of mine:

If quantum physics is all about probability waves [not ‘particles’] out there, floating in n-dimensional space-time reality (digression(?): the thing we have in our head, not claiming any ‘reality’ like the founder of the idea, Kant, still had – go ahead, dismiss him without any understanding at his level, you physics guru n00b),

why can’t we use the same wave function analogy for a practical purpose like risk management?

Analogy; as you use even ‘waves’ as a metaphor for communications purposes, to get from your brain to someone else’s – how’zat for a miss on maintaining the above inner representation is All (quasi-Buddist style).
Risk management; as there too, in particular re the time dimension, chance and impact functions of certain events are curves, waves, multiplied hence strengthening or cancelling amplitudes wherever. All the event waves running criscross across each other.

And, once a risk actually comes into view (observation), the wave function, ‘risk’, has collapsed into an event.

Just like in reality.
But then, I’m unsure anything can be learnt from this.
But then, you might have a notion of usefulness of such a new approach. Throw in some wavelets here and there, and I’m even happier. You’re invited.

Plus:

[Double slits everywhere, not for experimentation but hopefully for in-out diode functions only; Caen]

You guessed it; another note on ‘cyber’security, rounding up a couple of ideas that floated by recently.

Which was triggered by this Comment. No, no, not a comment on this blog, don’t be stupid to assume that there has ever been one [rounded up].
Which made me think of actual developments in ‘cyber’ altogether [dammit, readstudy the original and see how much more profound the idea was, and how kindergarten the latter-day application to IT is]. And made me want to coin the term Cut The Crap. There’s the TL;DR for you.
And an intermission pic, since regularity is dulling you too much already [see below] and you read that as cDc which is beyond me:

[Yup, St. Lucia remote office view]
Continue reading “CTC for better ‘cyber’sec”

Just a reminder, about some news lately on ‘chains and where this might lead…

First, we had this, already based on first indications of class breaks. After which, this.
And now, serious stuff. Not only technology-wise, but impacting societal discussions and actions. Also, just out, this (ht @meneer).

Now, I’m not afraid of such intermediate [I estimate …] drops in progress or confidence. I’m not quite ready to believe some claims … but still would give some products built on ‘chains, the benefit of the doubt even under duress of the claims of zero-value-so-far as linked in the above.

Which brings me to the point of this: What value in ‘chains? [Not Alice but ‘value’; like this]
What parts of the functionality make the difference, and have no loose ends like the ‘improbable’ claim that the above had – as such claims will prove to be of dev/null value (again) every time; only mathematical-logical proof of non-existence of such loose ends will help. Which will fail, since humans are involved i.e., nothing is secure. Time is not your friend.
Nothing is fool-proof anyway because fools are so ingenious. Yes, I call you ingenious.

The call to actions stands: What elements of blockchain ‘technology’ do solve existing problems, and how can we apply these elements ‘irregardless’ of ‘chains’ drawbacks or in other ways ..?

For your viewing pleasure while typing your extensive answers:

[You don’t even need those to be insecure; Voorburg]

For today’s friday’s thoughts, a not too sobering list of thoughts, to be studied. Though I must admit I haven’t, all completely, but will. So should you!

Hanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything is Out to Get You

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)

The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time

The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything

– and play the bongo!

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

Ten Techniques for Quickly Building Trust With Anyone

16 Leadership Lessons from a Four Star General

How To Think

– for you, how to be Me …

The Work Required to Have an Opinion

Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance

– I know where I am an amateur. Do you?

Richard Feynman: The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something

Arthur Schopenhauer on the Dangers of Clickbait

– could be in the Quotes category of yesteryears

Charlie Munger: 5 Simple Notions that Help Solve Problems

The Munger Two Step

– appropriately, a second one; nomen est

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

A Technique for Producing Ideas

– inspirational to me
and finally the eternal, ultra-modern:

All Models Are Wrong

There seems to be a proliferation of My Mehhh apps being pushed down the throats of Joe Average consumers, for just about every minute interaction you’d want (or not!) with any tiniest-fraction-of-a-service provider out there.
Like, your energy co. wants you to check last month’s usage via their proprietary app, every (sic) webshop where you ordered some stuff you’d order only once per 5-10 years, wants you to install their app for … whatever purpose, every (sic) courier that ever you didn’t do business with (you did business with some vendor that subcontracted that courier, right ..!?), wants you to install also their app for whatever reason – they send you emails with delivery progress at every step anyway! – even the city garbage collection scheduling has its own app – next to the perfectly functional site of old of course … it goes on and on and on as does this sentence yes I know I just love that and don’t care as you can see from this.

But I do care to keep my mobile Mari Kondo clean, not for her advice but living that way already since … youth. As a matter of style and discipline why, when you need a book to change your life, you have other issues than clutter (or not).
So, I do not want your apps! I just want data blips. Sometimes, being pushed to me indeed, not having to spend my full days checking all your apps for updates that I may not care about too much anyway.

Which raised the question: Why?
We already since a long time (some don’t even remember or had any time before…) have browsers … the very Internet sprouted from the effectiveness of these, as multi-purpose access points to company website – yes from the dark ages when the latter were just static, via intermittent (sic) stages where we had ‘portals’ and ‘aggregator sites’ all the way to today, company websites is where much most of the information needs to be available anyway as that info is just static [in a relative way; e.g., privacy statements and self-service pages – the personal content behind it, wasn’t/isn’t in the website but in databases behind those, that doesn’t change with ‘apps’ ..!].
When ‘apps’ are a bin of presentation layer software; I have asked around a lot and have never heard anyone, not even developers, seeing that there’s two kinds of ‘apps’: The one, that takes care of the presentation layer only, and the other, the bloated kind that seems to be popular for (security-very-)stupid reasons, where a bunch of business logic is in the app as well. Off-boarding compute capac needs to your mobile, whereas it saves a penny on the co. infra behind it and on bandwidth, even as the co. can buy such capacity at much much much lower prices than you can and saves on bandwidth by sending meagre data, respectively. Sentence length again, a couple of times yes I know.
Or is it that there are just too many app makers out there that would be out of a job when not every splinter of functionality is to be made and maintained into eternity; with excellent Sales back-up to babbleconvince just any inattentive manager that they, too need an app.

And what about general reliability like in zero-day exploit free contra bugginess of ‘if it complies, ship it’ everywhere…

“There’s an app for that” is long dead, I don’t want you ffing app for that is the new reality.

Now get on with it. And:

[Want to know where this FLlW beauty is? There’s an ‘app’ for that, called Google Search [which used to be synonymous, for a very long time]. It will give you something like “near Baltimore” and set you on a challenge; much more interesting, right?}

Sometimes, an idea crosses one´s mind that one cannot get rid of other than by writing it up – and then sit back and enjoy the world picking it up.
The latter, probability → 1 not so much.

Nevertheless, regarding the ever shifting definition of AI: where AI ≝ anything of human brainpower that’s still just out of reach of machines, like AGI just beyond ∑(ANI) the thought crossed my mind that:

AGI is the sonic boom threshold

that seems to be logically impossible to pass (like the sonic one seemed impossible, physically), but likewise will be found to be not that that much, when those doing it, will have been deaf to those that proclaimed it systemically impossible.

Just that. Which may lead to ASI quickly after, so be alert! (because the world needs more lerts!).
And also, quantum computer programming and use, may go the same way.
And also, on a human-supportive note: this.
And also:

[We’ll be left to admire the past, ~greatness; Domènech i Muntaner at … where was it, off Tarragona in Cataluña. – oh yes here and you bet your a it is as good as or better than it looks ‘on paper’…]