It was an effective hack. I'd wasted 3+ hours jumping through hoops to get access to some basic service and was running into one hurdle after another... Then I got to a point that I wanted to scan a QR code from an old screenshot and so I opened my trusty QR code app to navigate to the website but when I opened the app; it wouldn't let me scan as usual; instead, there was a legit-looking update button on the page saying I needed to update the app; it was shown as part of the app interface itself (not some side ad). After 3 hours of running into a deep recursive rabbit hole with one hurdle after another, I was at my wit's end... I needed to read that QR code NOW! This was one hurdle too many which I didn't have the energy to even think about! I was too busy thinking about the other 4 layers of nested issues which I was trying to unwind myself out of! And so my muscle memory kicked in and hit the update button! Then BAM! Even before my system 2 thinking kicked in (to remind me that updates should be done through the app store), within a second or two, a message flashed on the screen and I knew my phone had been hacked. I noticed later that I received a whole bunch of extortion emails.

Thankfully, I never put anything sensitive on my phone. I treat it as a public space. I wasn't logged into any session on any app at the time. I immediately did a factory reset of my phone and changed all my passwords just in case. But damn, that was an effective hack! I trusted this app for 5 years and it betrayed me in a fraction of a second! This was surprising for me as I'd never been hacked before. It showed me how even someone who fully understands the tech can be hacked if caught at the right time in the right situation.

It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.

Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.

Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.

Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.

My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).

I say this as someone who considers themselves "Optimistic by nature, pessimistic by experience."

I was born in lucky circumstances but that luck turned in my teens due to factors outside of my control. I have seen firsthand how it works.

Even now, I constantly have to catch myself and force myself to think pessimistically... And my pessimistic projections are usually right or sometimes not pessimistic enough.

But I know I'm a natural optimist by the fact that I don't give up. I've built so much software and startups over the years; most of them I'm still running on the side and keeping up to date even though I know consciously that there is zero chance they will succeed. Deep down I have a deep optimism that something will change and all the opportunities will come at once. Consciously, I know it is delusional but I'm fundamentally motivated by emotions, not thoughts.

It's a weird feeling having built products that work very similarly to (or better than) other products which rake in millions of dollars but not being able to find a single customer due to all sorts of weird contrived socio-political reasons.

My view is that unlucky people don't trust the system (for a good reason) so they don't trust the text; given the nature of the experiment, it is reasonable that they would think the text is a trap to mislead them. It actually mirrors reality perfectly because most people are constantly misled about everything... But a few lucky 'chosen' people are not. In terms of the experiment it would be like showing unlucky people text which shows an incorrect number and the lucky people would see text showing the correct number. That's what's actually happening in real life.

What lucky people don't understand is that merely surviving, without receiving special treatment, is actually very difficult and it requires constantly jumping over all sorts of hurdles and deceptions and you can't afford trust third-party information because every time you did, you ended up losing everything or wasting years of your life. Lucky people are wrong to trust third-party information. They only learn how wrong they were when they stop receiving special treatment; then reality comes as a shock!

What is shown to the majority is what the media wants to show them. The media's purpose is to mislead people. Only a small handful of people are actually lucky enough to have mentors who will tell them "The media is misleading, I know because I influence the media; here is reality: ..."

For example, it is my personal belief that there is a selection mechanism for high suggestibility (by social media and search algorithms which can monetize it). Basically suggestible people are helped in their careers because they act like a money pipeline which redirects money they 'earn' back to social media companies. Social media companies might be thinking of people as straight money pipes leading outward vs bendable pipes potentially leading back towards themselves. Which kind of pipe would they select to pump money through?

This has a side effect of creating strong social alignment over bad ideas. If you empower suggestible people to make decisions, then whoever is above them can bend them in any direction they want.

I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.

Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.

I used to think success was mostly about luck but now I think there are selection mechanisms but they're not selecting for what people think. Selection is not based on skill or hard work.

The hard part is that some APIs return items in a different order or with different indentation so my engine normalizes all the variants into consistent objects.

It's quite impressive that LI works at all given the complexity.

Every joule of human energy is energy that could have been better spent to produce AI slop for other AI agents to consume.

A bit of a tangent but still on the subject of environmental pollution; the other day I found out that CO2 sensor sensitivity naturally drifts over time... So when a CO2 sensor is replaced for long term climate research, if they try to calibrate the new sensor to the old one at the time of replacement, the drift would be carried over into the new sensor even if no actual real change of CO2 occurred... Apparently there are standards to prevent this but mistakes have been identified multiple times with the methodology for setting that standard... Anyway measuring data accurately is really hard.

People do not appreciate correctness enough.

Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.

The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.

With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.

Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.

When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.

Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.

The real problem is centralization of power.

Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.

That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.

My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.

You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.

Getting the design right the first time requires vision, foresight as well as a deep understanding of all relevant parts and priorities. Very few people can do it without hindsight.

I'm an experienced software engineer and team lead who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was that they were often way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.

Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors, monitoring and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed and needs runtime monitoring and fallbacks, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.

The safety mechanisms only end up making themselves useful by increasingly the likelihood of failure to begin with.

My view on fallback mechanisms is that, in the event of failure of the main system, they shouldn't be so complex as to try to keep the system running as if nothing had happened; they should just provide graceful failure and sometimes they aren't needed at all. Just an error log is enough.

Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.

Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.

Developers being forced to use horrible Microsoft products is the logical consequence of that.

As a software engineer, most of my job exists to give credibility to the narrative that Microsoft is useful... And I don't even work for Microsoft. It's clear that there are deals behind the scenes which force many large companies into Microsoft contracts. The engineers have to work with what they get and pretend the tech is OK but behind the facade, it's clear from the jokes on the Microsoft Teams chats that they think differently!

Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.

These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.