samhw

10 ms·

1.
by samhw 2y ago
Yeah, I am very troubled by it. I had a friend staying with me last year who I hadn't realised was schizophrenic (a hopelessly vague diagnosis but he undoubtedly had parted company with reality) and off his meds. It was horribly sad. H
2.
by samhw 2y ago
Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing. And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whet
3.
by samhw 2y ago
The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from off the goose The law demands that we atone, When we take things we do not own, But leaves the lor
4.
by samhw 3y ago
It also continues to farm human beings. Tens of thousands of human beings each year are murdered to order (or, more accurately, they have their organs cut out and then are left to die) for Western transplant tourists who will pay upwards of
5.
by samhw 4y ago
What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (and likely competent) to read the facts and others&#
6.
by samhw 4y ago
So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality. Your comment doesn’t really seem to be trying to substantiate your claim, so much as it’s trying to pai
7.
by samhw 4y ago
It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to wh
8.
by samhw 4y ago
Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised. To my infinite horror I actually tried a dose of what came
9.
by samhw 4y ago
In the same vein, I was discussing police responses to mass shootings on Twitter, and was quite surprised to find Wikipedia took me to a disambiguation page when looking up “[random small town] shooting”: https://twitter.com&#x2F
10.
by samhw 4y ago
The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightmarish even in its blankly factual wording): > Because of t
11.
by samhw 4y ago
Not to mention Damien Hirst (and I suppose Warhol's 'factory' was the real pioneer). I don't understand it. My friend has a bunch of 'his' paintings - high six figures a pop at the very least - which look like
12.
by samhw 4y ago
I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.
13.
by samhw 4y ago
Well, this is bad news for the existence of infosec professionals...
14.
by samhw 4y ago
What do you mean ‘a civil law issue and not a common law issue’? The UK’s civil laws[0] are very largely composed of common law; the two concepts are orthogonal, not opposites, and both or one or neither can easily be true at once. A comm
15.
by samhw 4y ago
Yes. They can delete it, they can create it, they can mutate it. That’s how it works when you send information about yourself to somebody else for them to store on their hard drives. This is true utterly irrespective of whether they in fac
16.
by samhw 4y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure non-Londoners appreciate this. The escalators at Angel (where I grew up) go 60m deep. Someone skiied down them and hit 30mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_tube_station#Escalator_s... htt
17.
by samhw 4y ago
Jesus, that thing looks like Lamborghini designed a tank…
18.
by samhw 4y ago
But, like they said, it's talking about the legal reality and not the moral reality. I find it hard to see how that could be either factually or morally wrong.
19.
by samhw 4y ago
NOTE: I can't now edit this comment, but I wanted to clarify, per below, that many of these issues are more about my experience of Cassandra in the specific context in which I experienced it , and not the database itself. It's a
20.
by samhw 4y ago
Yeah, I 100% agree that many of those problems are inherent to distributed databases. There are an interesting few which kinda straddle the line in that respect – stuff like counters and the aforementioned individually tunable consistency,
21.
by samhw 4y ago
His initials were LT, if that helps (if not, I can clarify his whole name over email or however people privately communicate on HN?). I may well be exaggerating his 'major'ness - I'm not that familiar with the Cassandra contr
22.
by samhw 4y ago
> far easier to run than Cassandra I know precisely nothing about Scylla, but somehow I still agree with this. Cassandra is far and away the most horrendous software I've ever had to work with (Kafka coming in a close second). This
23.
by samhw 4y ago
Eh, I was semi-addicted to heroin, and I can testify - hell, I can give you a list of usernames from memory - that that's absolutely endemic on Wickr. It's the #1 go-to location for it[0]. It's not just 'virtuous' s
24.
by samhw 4y ago
Powerful people have long weaponised self-deprecation as a means of letting off steam and blunting more serious attacks. (That theme is elaborated very well in the LRB here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n14&
25.
by samhw 4y ago
The most fundamental tenet of capitalism. Capitalism's most fundamental tenant, on the other hand, is probably Starbucks.
26.
by samhw 4y ago
I think you could then count on the expectation that, as they say, 'not a jury in the land'...
27.
by samhw 4y ago
Yeah, I worked at a UK bank and was given gardening leave even when I left to start a (somewhat orthogonal) competitor. Actually, they didn't even insist that I served out my leave before starting work. It's an odd system.
28.
by samhw 4y ago
I was addicted to heroin, I’m intimately acquainted with the harms of drugs. Whether I or anyone else wants to control others is entirely separate from the question of whether it does harm . And, incidentally, however inarticulably agonisi
29.
by samhw 4y ago
I don’t quite get this simulation/execution distinction. Consciousness is a function, not an entity. To simulate a function is precisely to execute it. There’s no meaningful distinction whatever. (It’s the second-order distinction betw
30.
by samhw 4y ago
I agree with what I think you mean , but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [ to you , an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly

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