So it's back to the concept of a recipe where the ingredients change, but the recipe sort of stays intact. Change too many ingredients and we have an entirely different dish. I like this analogy because it's less formal and more forgiving. Just make sure to stick to it in an informal manner and not abuse the leniency provided, and you shall be fine. Technically every substance is mood altering (sugar for example), but there are some that have a marked increase on judgement and mood that it is safe to treat them as suspect. When I refer to "recipe" I mean a loose guide to run with in times of crisis.
Seconded. There is a lot of noise on what diet is superior and which one works best. Intuitively a person knows when they've over indulged just as when we pull back when putting our hand in a flame. We just don't do it anymore, and design our lives around not ever having it happen again.
My only problem with this is the victim-hood that happens when this high carb crap clamours for our attention in ADs and the media. Invariably you will get victim-hood and people gorging and gulping their way to negate such imagery. I know I don't look at a McBigMac the same way when I've had one.
The problem with itemizing specific things to avoid or cut down, is they are too specific and end up becoming habits. Instead it is more suitable to form an over-arching doctrine. So instead of "Drink less beer", it should become "Avoid mood changing substances".
The reason for a more general approach is because the moment things are calcified like this, they are very difficult to uproot and change. Think of this as a recipe where the ingredients can be swapped out. The recipe doesn't change, but the ingredients do, and not so drastically that the recipe is destroyed.
Just ran Paul's article through Anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth Considerably changed and mangled beyond all recognition. It even sounds less persuasive in tone.
What I love about Dave's work is that it's very Zen and self similar to nature. The more I observe complex systems, the more I realize they are just like self-organized nature. Complexity begets complexity. Novelty begets novelty. These ideas are not new.
So I should talk in Legal English all day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English which is the reverse of writing as one talks, because the Rule of Law surrounds us always, except for the criminals who flout it repeatedly throughout their day.
When I write, I self censor all the time, and it is no different when I talk. We forgive and forget. We silo only certain words to certain areas of the world. "What happens in Vegas" etc. Language only becomes a problem when it is committed permanently to the footnotes of the web. You can't overlook the law aspect. You also can't so easily withdraw a statement said online.
Some of the work of Distributed.net ( http://www.distributed.net/Main_Page ) is wonderful. Does anyone know if this idea could be more than it is currently, where computers (more than ever) are sitting idly and not contributing their cycles in any meaningful way? Even 5 minutes of raw CPU 100% usage per device could do some serious computation. Theoretically superseding modern supercomputers.
Yes it has turned into The Hacienda at this stage. It has its roots in Temporary Autonomous Zones / Pirate Utopias, but has since seen the attention of the gentrifiers.
I like tools that rather than scan for signatures (which can be polymorphic in nature and bypass AV), they can look for out-of-place behaviour on the OS. The Sysinternals Suite is great for malware hunting: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062
Malware has grown up and is now residing in hardware and can survive entire OS re-installs. I feel sorry for Windows users these days because malware has grown up and it is not as obvious you have malware. In the past there were obvious signs you were infected and the malware made itself known (sort of stupid when you're an attacker really).
Also some of the 'second opinion' tools are interesting too:
It is not a rare case that some startup will have more seed capital than you and a lot more drive. They will probably have an entire team of hungry interns too working for free to push out product revisions. I say let them steal my ideas all they want, because frankly if my idea gains some weight, my job is done and I can go home. No I will not smoke a cigar in a Hawaiian beach house because of it, but that is not the point. If egoism and money gets in the way of idea dissemination we have a real problem.
Wikipedia is full of hidden messages. A common pattern I have observed is the first letter of a sentence being used to string together a message. You can read more about this tactic here https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Subliminal_Messages
Part of the reason ties into centralization. If Twitter was plumbing, i.e it formed the backbone of apps (which it does not, as their API is forever shifting and not 'open' in the truest sense), then sites like this could be tolerated. It would be perfectly okay to have an ecosystem of non-siloed data which originally resided on Twitter's servers, but Twitter exercise ownership for that data, and are using sites like this to make an example of people. A bit sad really
A great talk by Jake Appelbaum that one should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kilAPZ-vGA A very in depth and revealing talk about the current state of the union of 'identity' on the web and the apparent digital doppelgängers we carry around with us. Frankly the notion of a digital doppelgänger is hillarious and identity is not a hard problem when people are effectively schizoid when they surf and flitter between multiple idens all the time.