This looks like fun.
Werewolf is based on the game Mafia, which was created in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student in the USSR. In 1997 Andrew Plotkin added the Werewolf theme and documented the rules. … [M]any players, including myself, consider it to be one of the most difficult and elegant games ever created.
The latest Zen Pencils is quite something.
Encryption and veganism tend be maligned, niche interests. The crypto nerds who keep their laptops under lock and 2048-bit key and those brave enough to completely eschew animal products are similar groups — both thoughtful and invested in their beliefs. But neither gets much traction in getting others to adopt their practices, because those practices are costly (socially, in time and expense, etc).
As the technology behind vegan food has improved, so has the palatability of the product. Londoners can go to Vx for cupcakes that are creamy and delicious — if they don’t mind being bombarded with “Vegan Power” scarves and animal rights literature.
Much more effective would be for vegan shops to sell their cupcakes in other outlets — and not branded as vegan. Those who care can look at the ingredients or find the brand online. Casual consumers could pick them up in a supermarket and not know the difference, but have unknowingly eschewed animal products, contributing to the cause.
Encrypted chat app Cryptocat has little mainstream appeal over Skype or Facebook Chat. Much better would be for a popular platform to use strong cryptography. Those who care would know which mainstream products are the highly-encrypted ones. But average consumers, if given a seamless experience, wouldn’t need to know that government dragnets can’t get at their data.
Give your niche products wide appeal if you want mass adoption. Fighting for hearts and minds is important — but making your product mainstream will sweep up those people whose minds you don’t change.
Today is The Day We Fight Back.
Sign the petition, and join the movement against mass surveillance programmes.
Danny O’Brien, International Director at the EFF, explains in more detail what the petition is in support of:
The short answer is that you’re signing your support for a set of 13 principles on the application of human rights to communications surveillance ( see https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ ), that were worked out last year (pre-Snowden, actually) by a coalition of technologists, privacy activists, and legal scholars … to push the idea in international venues and among key lawmakers in various countries that mass surveillance (as well as a bunch of other practices conducted by the NSA and other spooks, including corruption of crypto standards and backdoors) is a violation of existing human rights standards.
This is important internationally because if the NSA gets away with its current behaviour, it’ll establish a norm that such surveillance is okay for any government to conduct. We need to push back against that norm.
…
I’d encourage anyone who wants to understand better how we’re trying to get all governments, not just the US, to craft better surveillance legislation to read the full text of the principles at https://necessaryandproportionate.net/text You can also ask me questions at danny@eff.org . It’s a long haul project, and we’re conducting it alongside legal actions in the US and abroad, shoring up and disseminating crypto tools, and other non-policy defences. But it’s pretty amazing to get unanimity with hundreds of privacy groups on some basic principles with which to start building proper, 21st century, surveillance law.
NS Pritchard left this poetic review for the timeless Casio F91-W:
Cars break down, phones malfunction, computers get infected
but the F 91 soldiers on.Cheap and ubiquitous. Everybody seems to have owned one. Its “beep beep” woke thousands this morning. It measured and guided their days all long.
It has a stopwatch, a light, an alarm:
This is what I need and all I need from a digital watch.In moderate climes the battery will last for seven years (based on an alarm and one seconds’ worth of light use per day).
I wish my life was so efficient and so certain.
I wish I was so dependable.
Most arguments sympathetic to mass surveillance programmes make two points:
The first claim is demonstrably untrue. The second is doubtful, and unproven.
☰
1.
Government mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and Tempora are illegal and out of control.
We know that, for example, GCHQ lied to the UK National Security Council about the extent of their surveillance programme, that a US government privacy board believes NSA bulk collection of phone data is illegal1, that the NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders and that they cracked the encryption used in the UN’s internal videoconferencing system (in clear breach of international law)2. The last six months have seen numerous other details of the extent of dragnet surveillance programmes become apparent.
A legal opinion provided today to MPs suggests that ‘GCHQ’s mass surveillance spying programmes are probably illegal and have been signed off by ministers in breach of human rights and surveillance laws.’ 3
A recently-released FISA court statement shows that the NSA’s programme has long since gone beyond the legal framework that officials say it operates within:
Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA has been repeatedly running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall… regime has never functioned effectively.”
That article also says the statement ‘details many instances in which the NSA flat out lied to the court’ and that ‘the agency had “substantially misrepresented” the extent of its “major collection program” (including the harvesting of “internet transactions”) for the third time in less than three years.’
Incredibly, Congress recently had to ask security expert Bruce Schneier to brief them on NSA activities becuase “the NSA wasn’t forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted [him] — as someone with access to the Snowden documents — to explain to them what the NSA was doing.”
I think it’s pretty unequivocal that both the NSA and GCHQ have lied consistently about the extent of their spying and data collection. I’m not sure why we should take their press officers at face value when they say that their programmes are proportional and lawful.
2.
Effectiveness is a dangerous topic.
Even if, say, torture efficiently got information, if it also galvanized the world against you, provoked many suicide bombers, got your own people tortured, lowered the population’s trust and faith in the government, distanced your allies, increased the costs of maintaining the military, and so on, it might not be worth it.4
Nonetheless, the utility of PRISM-style bulk surveillance has yet to be proven. One analysis of 225 individuals charged with terror offences in the US since 9/11 showed that:
… traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal.
A number of mathematicians and statisticians commended in this Wall Street Journal piece that avoiding an immensely high false-positive ratio would be a monumental challenge with a dataset so large — and that there are likely better ways to spend the security services budget.
The case for dragnet surveillance is far from clear.
☰
Mass surveillance is illegal and ineffective.
People are pushing back. If you want to help, you can donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Part of me wants to suggest using strong encryption, switching away from the major providers we know to be tapped by the NSA and so on. Do these things by all means, but know that this is merely painting over the problem. The rot goes so deep, with so many layers of the internet compromised (software, hardware, people and organisations), and the security services have such enormous resources at their disposal, that policy overhaul is the only real option for disabling the global panopticon.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations[.] — James Madison
Choice bits of the Internet.
Alyssa Frazee shows how to teach R to a non-programmer in an hour. I’ve also been having fun with Code School’s free Try R course.
Matt Mullenweg writes about The Intrinsic Value of Blogging:
We’ve gotten better at counting [likes, +1s] and worse at paying attention to what really counts. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself[.] … Second, write for a single person who you have in mind as the perfect person to read what you write, almost like a letter…
Angela Chen at the Wall Street Journal attends a CFAR rationality workshop and outlines some of the exercises they did:
“I learned that if I want Max to do something in December, I should think about December Max as a different person,” he says. Instead of just putting a reminder to do something in a few months, he’ll plan ahead and send email reminders and incentives for his “future self.”
Dave Hill at The Guardian implores us not to give money to beggars:
For 10 years Thames Reach and others have been trying to persuade us that handing loose change to sad, dishevelled, beseeching suitors on high streets does more harm than good … “because of the incontrovertible evidence that the vast majority of people begging on the streets are doing so in order to purchase hard drugs”. … If you want to help with money, give it to a relevant charity.
How have I never heard of this before?:
Hacker School is a free, full-time, immersive school in New York for becoming a better programmer. We’re like a writers’ retreat for programmers.
Cal Newport writes:
I find it useful during this giddy season to remember that an emphasis on getting started, though currently popular, is not timeless. …
Epictetus doesn’t reject action. But he believes commitment to a pursuit must be preceded by the careful study of what is actually required for success.
He uses the Olympic games as an example. … For most budding ancient athletes, Epictetus implies, [the arduous reality of training] would likely dim the glamor of pursuing the Olympics. But not for everyone. As he then concludes:
“When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war.”
Paul Graham says something similar in his essay on how to do what you love:
[I]f you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.
I suspect many people would find both heuristics useful: start cautiously, being realistic about what’s needed for success, and always produce. Together, they stop you pining for a life that’s not what you thought it would be and guide you towards one you’ll love.
Mental prowess in pill form is always tempting. Modafinil offers heightened alertness and wakefulness even during sleep deprivation; piracetam promises enhanced cognition and intercerebral blood flow; ergoloid offers purported memory and anti-ageing enhancements. There are many more.
I’ve promoted these agents to friends and taken some of them myself. The philosophical and ethical case for cognitive enhancement is well established1; that they work is (at least for some drugs) beyond doubt.2
But advocates of their use might want to consider the alternatives first. Those taking them rarely consider the ‘optimised base case’—a scenario in which everything else cheaply possible is done before making an intervention. It’s another way of asking: what’s the control group for this experiment? Testing a drug on people who have a severely deficient diet is all well and good, but your potential consumers might be best advised to make sure their diet is adequate (cheap) instead of taking your drug (expensive).
Compared to taking smart drugs, the optimised base case is distinctly unsexy: exercising, meditating, getting enough sleep and a good diet that avoids insulin spikes will get you most of the benefits that cognitive enhancers offer. These things are cheap, easy, free of side-effects and proven to work (unlike many cognitive enhancers). Edge cases3 excluded, it’s worth doing them first.
Gwern offers readers a warning in his article on dual n-back, a technique for enhancing working memory and possibly increasing IQ, suggesting they turn back and focus on interventions with bigger marginal returns:
To those whose time is limited: you may wish to stop reading here. If you seek to improve your life, and want the greatest bang for the buck, you are well-advised to look elsewhere.
Meditation, for example, is easier, faster, and ultra-portable. Typing training will directly improve your facility with a computer, a valuable skill for this modern world. Spaced repetition memorization techniques offer unparalleled advantages to students. … Modest changes to one’s diet and environs can fundamentally improve one’s well-being. Even basic training in reading, with the crudest tachistoscope techniques, can pay large dividends… And all of these can start paying off immediately.
Work on your optimised base case by making easier, cheaper interventions to your productivity first. Only then is it worth improving it further.
Hailo is a London-based tech startup. Its product is a mobile app that lets you find and hail a nearby taxi.
It’s not the first or last cab-hailing app, but it’s best-in-class after a few years and is now also available in a number of other cities around the world. The founders describe themselves as “three taxi drivers and three internet entrepreneurs.”
From a customer’s point of view, Hailo fixes a lot of problems that cabs have: sometimes-surly drivers, a pick-up charge, waving one’s arm trying to find a cab, having to pay in cash. And it gives benefits to drivers, too: one taxi driver told me that Hailo had revolutionised his business.
The company’s success hinges on:
The thing that struck me the most while thinking about this was how elegantly Hailo addresses the pains of both taxi users and taxi drivers.
Arguably 