https://github.com/google/re2 is probably a better matched library by Google since the post focuses on truly regular expressions and a lot of irregexp's design is around making the irregular part not as costly.
This is a really interesting article, thanks for sharing it. Whether the tic-tacs are Chinese, American, or alien, this just seems to add the the evidence that they are real, and the public nature of the patent application seems to fit within the narrative of a managed disclosure.
>> ...the public nature of the patent application seems to fit within the narrative of a managed disclosure.
No. The patent application fits with the narrative that the US patent process is a total joke. This is an attempt to patent science fiction. This patent will be used for everything but the production of a working technology. It will be used by someone to aggrandize themselves and potentially milk "investors". They will wave this "patent" in front of some naive old people, probably in florida, to get them to sign over their life savings.
If anyone on this planet has practical warp drive technology, friction-free motion through air/water, or gravity manipulation tech ... such things are akin to the discovery of fire. In the real world, whether the inventor has a patent or not is absolutely meaningless in the face of what such technology would mean to mankind.
i don't think the US navy typically solicits donations from retirees. it seems to me more likely to be misdirection for rival militaries as others have suggested.
No, but crackpot inventors do. The charlatan tells people that he has invented a magic airplane technology. He the points to the US navy patent as 'proof' that such tech is possible. If his name is on the patent, all the better.
The US navy is a very large organization. I doubt this is a core program. This is some crazy think-tank operating way way outside oversight. Or it is an elaborate joke. Or an attempt to pad a resume before retirement. Or a "patent something or you're out" box ticking.
It does no such thing. It only means someone wants someone else to think they are real. Intelligence is complicated. See all the alien stuff around Roswell that was spun up to cover for the fact we were listening for nuclear weapons tests.
ROFL. Actually click through and read this document: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/nsa-foia-documents-quart.... The title is super misleading. It has the NSA being the subject of the sentence, the entity doing the verb. If you read the document, it's clear that the NSA followed the law in how they sent requests over to the phone companies, and a couple companies made errors in what they sent back. When NSA discovered this, they reported it through the proper channels. This is like, the opposite of nefarious action, guys. A better title would have the phone companies as the subject of the sentence. "Phone companies improperly sent data to the NSA for a second time, documents reveal." Of course, being honest in the title wouldn't misinform and scare people...
While the document clearly states they received information they didn't request it also states they used said information. While it may be added time and labor NSA should be validating the information as a check and balance as this is a unique position for the carrier to be in. NSA trusts whatever they give them. Or... NSA has influence over individual(s) with carrier X to, whoops, accidentally send you everything. To be clear I'm not saying that is what happened, but it's a broken process on both sides of the coin.
The document also states they acknowledged that they have ingested data they shouldn't and don't have a timeline on when, if ever, they'll purge it. Apparently the purge process has begun, but the not having a timeline to remove seems to read "best effort, if we don't get it all oh well". The real response should be: we received tainted data and are required to remove it all for that timeframe and rerequest all of it within N days. If you're Equifax and accidentally send out everyone's SSN to someone requesting their credit history you don't just use an excuse that you don't know how to remove it. You're obliged to remove it all. There doesn't seem to be a process in place for this. Convenient oversight.
The NSA outsourcing its work, be it by contract or by 'request' (given the power differences involved I wouldn't consider it a normal request) does not absolve that there is a a systematic problem with domestic spying going on here.
Taking into consideration how historical evidence has shown just how toothless proper channels are when improper behavior aligns with leadership goals and taking into account that the government has a long history of trying to use technicalities to outsource work that wouldn't be legal if done in house, I think we are beyond any benefit of the doubt.
I do agree we should be sure to inform people correctly. "NSA spying on Americans continues to function in a way that breaks legal limits while giving plausible deniability" does seem a bit better a title.
But the ACLU is a better spokesman than I:
>"These documents provide further evidence that the NSA has consistently been unable to operate the call detail record program within the bounds of the law," the ACLU said in a letter to Congress this week lobbying for an end to the program.
The majority of that document you link to is blacked out. Which part of it exactly are you referring to when you say it's clear that the NSA was in the clear on this?
No, by now we know what they do. Every time classified material is released through outside channels, it looks worse for them. At this time we'd have to be chumps to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I agree with you. But I also see the possibility of a little bit of wink, wink, nod, nod. Someone makes a phone call and says "can you change that where clause a little bit?" Should be serious repercussions whenever data like this is shared improperly, and we should expect nothing less from NSA than we do others.
Not an expert on it, but I don't think so. They are and always have been allowed to collect information on US citizens that are in contact with foreigners. Many consider this a problem, because ultimately every US citizen is in contact with a foreigner at one time or another, but AFAIK the general rule has never changed.
For me and the vast majority of the world population the distinction doesn't matter, because according to US law the NSA is allowed to spy on us as they please. Of course, this practice is illegal were we live, but that's not going to bother them.
Contact with foreign entities when that person is under investigation for illegal activities. The NSA does not investigate your communication just because you call a foreign entity.
Correct me if I am wrong, but is your argument “they aren’t investigating you, they are just collecting all of your call data and other traffic and storing it in case they want to investigate you later”?
They collect it and store it indefinitely, though, which we now know thanks to Edward Snowden.
I think you are moving the goalposts with terms like “looking into”. They are in possession of it and have permanent access to it. For emails and SMS, this involves full content, too.
It even includes US-US communication if the stored communications provider replicates it out of the country, which is so common as to be expected in almost all cases.
Laughs indeed, my initial thoughts when I read the title was that somebody had forgot to do the paperwork correctly and only filled the forms in twice instead of triplicate. I thought against posting that as it's sassy and not NH calabre.
Who knew that was along the lines of what happened.
Take away from this is, an external party from the NSA can make a mistake and the media will still blame the NSA.
But then security has always been one of those area's in which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. Turns out it is also susceptible to being dammed for others mistakes. Mistakes which end up exposing security operations even.
Why do we believe that human beings have a right not to be spied on based on where they were born?
Why do we think mass surveillance is ok as long as it is constrained to the 96%+ of people who aren’t American?
What the NSA does is terrible. You should be scared of them and their actions even when they are operating within the “legal” bounds of section 215. This is never what the author of section 215 intended. This is why the DNI lied under oath to congress to cover up the program.
Personally with spooks - known serial liars I find it best to assume malice in every case - they knew exactly what they were doing and they are trying to use stupid human tricks involving holding authorities to lesser standards.
One doesn't just oopsie into the Statsi's wet dream and it should be regarded with the incredulity of someome claiming they "accidentally" molested an entire elementary school.
You're still allowed to reply to their post quotes from the article that make it clear that they didn't read the article. I've also just done the "I know it's against the rules but did you read the article?" thing in the past. Haven't gotten banned yet.
"Did you even read the article" is a cheap shot that commenters routinely take at each other. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand, so it adds noise, not signal. Since it's a putdown, it provokes others and degrades discussion. If you take out the cheap shot and preserve the correcting information, the comment becomes better in every way.
You can think of it as a special case of this rule: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." But it's a special case worth singling out, because it's so common, and it's bad for HN in two ways: mean and predictable.
Right, but the idea here is that you shouldn't be allowed to comment until you've at least apprised yourself of the subject.
Of course, hiding a button with JavaScript is trivially defeated by your typical HN user, but I want to assume at least to some degree of good faith... this would be more of a "commitment device" than anything.
The news has reported that the NSA gets court orders to install their black box hardware in datacenters and taps fiber cables. What reason is there to believe they've stopped their dragnet operations?
Sounds spiffy. Also, I must find time to learn Julia.
One problem with these 'out of a box' cookbook systems is that you only know approximately what you are doing. If it works, that may be fine, but for statistical systems the outcome depends heavily on the formulation, is strongly influence by random or irrational correlations and is more art than science. If you remove the element of experience that animates the "art", you get nonsense. Big box programming tools can make it hard to know what correlations are being established, and this is true with even simple neural networks. By the time they have many layers and filters in them, all hope is fled. You buy the result or you don't: simple as that.
Although I have never used Julia, this is something that is possible in Ruby, and I think this feature is seriously underrated – i.e. to be able to jump quickly to the definition of external code, modify it and run it. When you work with multiple libraries/repo this is very valuable when debugging, saves a lot of time.
It should also be possible with Node.js I think (node_modules).
Don't get me wrong, I love Ruby, and my code was originally in Ruby, but the 20x speedup and better math libraries in Julia without sacrificing the speed of development too much made the switch for me very easy.
Actually translating Ruby code to Julia was much easier than I thought (the only real difference is the indexing).
The 1 based indexing really sucks in the PTX assembly output of Julia as well, I see a lot of useless increment and decrement operations when I don't expect it.
Social time, no go back to your roommate filled apartment with an one & half hour commute one way to work to be downsized, underpaid, under trained, miss manged, and pension sold off to pay for your boss kids' toys.
Why would anyone in Canada feel isolated or lonely?
> Looks like a viable simpler alternative to WordPress, I will definitely give it a try.
As someone who already tried it, I'd call it more of a Medium alternative. Or, at least, what Medium should have been.
Zero pop-ups, actually clutter-free reading experience, and an opportunity to not just host individual blogs (although that is certainly a feasible use case), but to also bring a community together, run a publication, and give the readers the freedom to consume the content in which ever way they'd like (website, decentralized social networks like Mastodon, RSS reader etc).
Why are they even keeping years of call records? This strikes me as something that should be deleted after the current billing cycle (plus a delay for complaints, say 12 months). This kind of just-in-case or I-don't-want-to-push-the-button retention of data should hopefully be given some disincentives by GDPR but there is still a hell of a lot too much of it going on. Storage is cheap doesn't mean keep everything forever, especially potentially sensitive personal data.
"(Is it possible the future will become a refuge for the rich, who experience life as a sequence of exquisite events and who might not understand the concept of entropy as relief or escape?)"
Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape? This idea seems completely insane to me.
As an aside, people who want to die shouldn't/won't be forced to use longevity enhancing therapies to live longer, but I really think some psychological care should be considered for anyone refusing them.
I don't know about "relief" or "escape" but I'm comfortable with the idea of eventually having "had enough" of life.
Kind of tangential: the human-style characters in Iain M Banks' fantastic and thoughtful Culture series of novels tend to come to this decision after a couple or a few hundred years. Some times they go into deep sleep to be awoken based on some external criteria (for example, when the war that they conduct with another ~~species~~ (edit: society) is proven to be morally justified).
What today's fiction authors write, with no access to life extension technology, doesn't really tell us anything about what the reality would be like.
It's very rare to find a healthy person - even in their '90s or '100s - who actually wants to die. Many more younger people imagine they would want to die at such an age. I suspect the same will be true for 200 or 400 year olds.
You raise a very good point. I hadn't thought of looking up research on attitudes towards death in actual elderly people.
It's an unusual one because I'm specifically thinking about people who might want to die simply because they've seen and gotten from life all that they want, not people who are fed up with the (present-day) privations of old age. I suspect you're right that only a very small proportion of today's elderly match this
The closest thing I found after a little looking around is a recent initiative in the Netherlands called "Completed Life" - which seeks to extend the option of euthanasia to relatively healthy elderly people who have decided that their life is complete - and some associated research [0][1].
Lastly, on a slightly pedantic note, I think it's valid to invoke fictional worlds in response to someone who says that it's "insane" to feel a certain way.
One account I have heard from nurses in Geritology is the apparent importance of "will to live" - they have witnessed many times death following them psychologically giving up.
There could be some chicken vs egg factor (do they lose the will from health being hopeless or does their health decline with their psychological state influencing immune system, and to what extent?). That or spurious human pattern recognition (superstition) but it is possible that there is some literal survivalship bias.
> Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape?
I obviously don't have the experience of living an "overextended" life, but I'd imagine that it would depend at least partially on whether longevity extends to the people around you. Seeing the people you knew and love die is brutal, living that through several generations might get you to a point where you don't want to keep experiencing it anymore.
If life extension is technological, it's pretty hard to imagine how it wouldn't extend to the people around you. Technologies almost always get much, much cheaper and available to the masses after an initial period.
In such a scenario, you're going to see some people you knew and love die, but usually because of things like accidents, not old age, so it'll be entirely random, unlike now where elderly people have to watch all their friends die off around them, something they didn't experience that much in their younger years.
The kind of biotechnology we are talking about will be more like a cocktail of drugs and gene therapies. The price of entry will be in the millions, and maintenance in the tens of thousands per year. It will take many generations to be affordable to the masses
Oh please. Dentistry involves extremely personalized care, with crowns custom-made for every patient (these days by automated machines) and work done by highly-paid specialists on an individual basis, yet the masses are generally able to afford it. Once stuff gets out of the patent phase (20 years), it's going to become very cheap with tons of competition.
> Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape?
I think before that should have come the question whether a person who is only invested in their own life, and not interested in the tapestry or river of life, for lack of a better word, could be considered emotionally healthy?
Yes, I want to see and experience life, my own and that of others, but I'd rather die at some point, and know other life will exist, than live forever and squat on it. We can't be forever young, that is, some things will never be new to us again. Yeah, life is still fun, but not as fun as it could be for someone else. To me, that matters.
> Arendt argues that human action is contained within the notion of plurality as the most basic condition of human life, which in turn rests on her concept of 'natality'. In an almost poetical way she writes in this same essay how the world is constantly being refilled by strangers, outsiders and newcomers who act and react in an unforeseeable manner, in ways that cannot be calculated or predicated by those already familiar and stationed there, who will eventually leave and be replaced by others. The very fact that we come into the world through natural birth shows that the world is continuously being transformed and renewed through birth. Thus, 'natality' highlights this emphasis on the capacity of new beginnings with each and every birth.
I'd say natality more than makes up for mortality, while immortality removes natality, and doesn't even begin to cover the loss.
I'd rather there is something beautiful I miss out on, than something mediocre I get to experience, doubly so if it's made mediocre by my insisting on experiencing everything that goes on. And on top of that, there is the mediocrity of the lens through which we experience things, our own mediocrity, that also should not be increased lightly. New life makes life, the universe and everything better, it just happens to not extend my own life to infinity. But I can't have it both ways, not in an intellectualy and morally honest way, they way I see it. If everybody was truly immortal, as we are now, and for the reasons we want it, everybody will start to suck super badly real quick, and they'll suck too much to even notice it. The majestic and ever fresh river of life would turn into a petty, stinky puddle. Or I could wish for immortality myself, and mortality for everyone else -- but what would that make me, and what about friendship and love?
you are positing that an extended amortal life is at the expense of someone elses' birth.
But why should it be?
If we're talking SF, we might as well agree on a method to handle that, e.g. force people to go off-planet at some age and make room for new people. The universe is big enough.
(I meant to write a novella on this for a long time :)
> you are positing that an extended amortal life is at the expense of someone elses' birth.
> But why should it be?
That's the default, considering we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and even without immortality on the expensive of others is already quite the thing. I'd say the burden is on showing how that could change, not to mention why it absolutely must and will change... rather than just assuming it.
> we're talking SF
I'm "just" talking immortality, that I take for granted in this context, not additional things. At the least, those additional things can't just go one way, just because assuming immortality is assuming something hitherto impossible, doesn't warrant assuming other impossible things, while dismissing other possibilities, both possible and hitherto impossible, just because they'd spoil the parade.
Why would some live at the expense of others, or prevent others being born? Well, having "eternity" to lose, one must not let anything unpredictable happen, one certainly must not let anyone have the ability to harm oneself. The universe is too big to let anyone just get away and potentially hatch unpredictability. That is certainly a way to look at it, and it only takes a few with enough power to have that outlook for my dystopia to occur -- while your utopia would require nobody with power going that route, everybody always agreeing on "playing nice".
We can't even agree on a way so people don't starve and die for lack of water, we can't exactly agree to not ruin the planet, potentially leading to catastrophic shifts in rather short timespans, we already live at the expense of those who might be born after us -- but we're going to handle immortality well, if only we had it? We're greedy and murderous about shitty trivialities, about trinkets -- but we'll play nice when it comes to something like living forever? Seems unlikely, certainly not a given.
The possiblity of immortality combined with the fact of ongoing concentration of wealth and power, plus automation, might lead to a rapid depopulation of the planet indeed, but not by moving anyone anywhere. Why keep people around that are nothing but a potential threat, that serve no use, that are not even an exploitable resource, because they take up more space and resources than means of production requiring no workers that are orders of magnitude more powerful, and after some point plain unnecessary either way? After people "have everything", not by being content and loving life and the world, but by owning it personally, what they still need is for nothing else to be able to rise up.
(I also meant to write a short story once, about a little girl who skipped the weekly dose of the government mandated antidote for the biological weapon terrorists supposedly unleashed, say, 150 years ago, because she wonders if it's even true that not taking it is lethal, since nobody she knows ever failed to take it even once. She manages to hide the pain and the skin discolorations that appear after a few days, finally staying up all night the last night gritting her teeth before the day the next weekly dose is given out, sneaking into the bathroom early to wash off her sweat, before her mother wakes her. It was supposed to begin with her vowing to never do that again, then starting to ask questions about the past, but I never got beyond that.)
Immortality + no other technology improvement is not a realistic assumption, that's why you get to a non-realistic result of "people have to die eventually" from it.
The immortality is not a thing you take and then have to kill others to not allow them to take it from you.
The only way to not die is to have a huge society that invents new treatments, discovers new physics, builds machines to prevent death from random comets, from earth's magnetic field running out, or sun exploding. The mere 7 billion we have now is not enough for any of this.
Nicely put. It is also my intuition that immortality would ultimately be very unhealthy for our species and environment. I tend to think about it in terms of morals and beliefs stagnation, or the death of new ideas but I like your argument.
When I was 9, I cried all night because I realized that one day, we might meet aliens and go to other galaxies and whatnot, and I would just be dust in the ground by then. The thought of thousands, millions of years of events and me just having been a blip, felt crushing. And there are many people I miss, and many people who died before I was born I would have loved to get to know; that I "made peace" with that doesn't mean it doesn't make me sad. It is sad, it's sad that people die, even after a long life. It's sad for friendships to end. But that I'm sad doesn't mean I'm not also happy and grateful, and prefer to be content with being a single finite thread in a much bigger tapestry of life, rather than just going on forever, kinda defacing that tapestry.
I mean, that's the binary "immortality" option. I'm not against medicine, or people living longer. But if someone genuinely wants to live forever forever, I really would question how much they thought it through.
It's not a binary immortality decision, luckily. It's just not comitting suicide (or dying in a car crash) every day. Most people will do that, given the choice.
Of course choosing to die is anyone's right and it is bad that most countries still ban euthanasia, but often people want to die not by choice but because of illness or some kind of misunderstanding, and helping them is a good thing. I don't think that by "psychological care" OP meant "forcibly putting people into ward" which could justify your reply.
Most of the people I know with that view would be very happy with whole brain emulation, so it's not really about the meatbag.
You sound like you think you reside somewhere other than your "meatbag" when you die? Of course if that was true we wouldn't be nearly this uppity about the whole death thing.
More likely downvoted for a sweeping, conversation ending dismissal of anyone who disagrees with you, without bothering to add any substance.
There are plenty of comments in this thread that agree with you, that are doing fine. It’s not your argument, which to be honest is not particularly unpopular or unconventional.
First of all "kills us all" is highly exaggerated and what happens largely depends on what we do in this years.
But even assuming the kills us all part is correct, dying now is worse prospect than dying in 30 years so i don't see how that can be an argument for psychological unsoundness.
> Once again, downvoted for holding a Controversial Opinion that the hive mind doesn't like.
I did not downvote you, but i don't think you were downvoted for holding a "Controversial Opinion", unfortunately many people hold opinion similar to yours, you were downvoted because calling some people crazy without giving any explanation why you do it.
It's not the same, writing style matters in getting your message to the reader, the style of your comment looked hostile, and not motivation nor the logic of your argument were discernible from it.
