jumper_F00BA2

Sympathy for the interviewer. Well guess what, you're not going to find much luck pulling this yarn.

Some interviewers get the fist. And that's just the way it goes.

If I'm supposed to play toady to this dog and pony show we're trying put on together, don't step in front of me with some condescending question, that we both know is cherry-picked trivia. You design questions to stump people, knock them off balance, introduce a choke, and project a facade of superiority, when we both know that's not fair play, and you expect something other than contempt?

I'm not reciting all the state capitals, every U.S. holiday on the calendar, and every county in the state of California for you. Try your luck with the next applicant.

You can't expect me to roll over as subordinate, when I'm looking right at you, and you and I both know that the canned question you just asked is total bullshit. Sorry, now I know you're a follower, not a leader, and I won't be led by you. Interview over.

And besides, do you really believe that passive aggression, as a personality trait, isn't a possibility, simply because it wasn't on display during that particular interview. Most smart people do have a passive aggressive mean streak, because it's a tactic, not a personality trait. It's in everyone's tool kit, and smart people use it in anger. If it gets used on you, especially when everyone in the room was trying to make a good first impression, maybe you did something to provoke that.

So some self-important "tech luminary" claims to have engineered a secret weapon feedback loop, and it's so incredible that it hacked everyone's brain, and wowee, he's so smart.

It's easy to pin post-hoc rationalizations for his own success, onto a self-aggrandizing personal narrative, after becoming successful. Believe whatever airbrushed fish story you like.

B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov showed us the truth about operant conditioning for sure. And indeed, the principle extends to Great Apes if you reward them with delicious snacks for using an iPad correctly.

But humans have executive function, and more downtime than we know what to do with lately, because modes of behavior are more efficient now, than even one decade ago, and there's a gap left behind, leaving a preoccupation vacuum in it's wake. We don't know what to do with ourselves, and that imparts a malaise of idle restlessness, especially relative to the pace of change.

Computers, mobile devices, ubiquitous applications, smart appliances, have become something like a ball hog in a game of basketball. They keep grabbing the ball and scoring, and never pass the ball to a human, because they always possess a better chance of scoring themselves, so it would be irrational to put the ball into a human's hands. Except we're the ones that wanted to play the game. We didn't show up to sit on the bench and watch a game played by robots.

It's less about the operant conditioning of our pleasure centers (oh, oh, excuse me! fancier words: dopamine receptors, because neuroscience) than the fact that we've truly got nothing better to do than watch Saturday morning cartoons. We're bored, the world is scary, and funny cartoons in our bedroom is safe.

You're conflating something to fit in with your world view, regarding the bicycle analogy. Motorcycles have existed since the early 1900's, and people already ride them at high speeds. It's not about the bike. It's not about The Mind Bike. It's about seeing the forrest for the trees.

The B.F. Skinner box for our dopamine drip is but one tree, and there is an entire forrest of drastic change shaping new social norms.

If you consider what will happen to traditional family structures in India, if you took away arranged marriage, I suspect you'd begin to notice a massive sea change in world views among those affected in less than a decade.

That's the degree of transformation unfolding, everywhere emerging technologies find new ways to alter routine daily behaviors, although such transformative effects are not limited to family structures or courtship rituals. It also affects culturally agnostic activities like driving a car or mailing a letter.

If one deludes themselves into a postive outlook of sunshine and smiles because the perception of nihilism seems detestible, expect to be unpleasantly surprised now and again, because taking a hard pragmatic look at what's right under your nose is necessary, to not get blindsided by others who aren't always so cheerful.

If I come across as negative, it's probably only relative to your preferred frame of reference. I tend to stay neutral and objective wherever possible, since life is pretty much always this way. The deconstructivist concept isn't a personal invention of mine. In fact, I think it's rooted strongly in zen/buddhist ideology. It finds it's basis in the understanding that while the whole is the sum of its parts, each part, taken as an island unto itself, has less purpose, when removed from the greater context of the whole.

A bodily organ cannot stand alone, but what we are doing to the various cultural norms, around the globe, is experimenting with the transplant of synthetic organs, to see if society can survive, if we take away the heart and lungs in exchange for a heart and lung machine. Maybe this, by turns, is truly an achievement for some, but not everyone sees a payday for these efforts. Some don't get their organs back.

Thanks!

I could probably write something, but the world wouldn't let me enjoy it. So I languish in pointless tech jobs producing executable web fluff that lives between the browser and the database ('middleware'), that will go into the trash in less than five years, because you're supposed to pantomime productivity in exchange for food and shelter.

Whelp! Back to the treadmill!

Thanks again! I am not an author. It'd be tough to carve out a niche for myself with mere words.

When faced with questions that have answers I could obviously discern by writing and running two lines of code, I willfully shrug, answer by intuition, hoping that's the trap for the wrong answer, and wait for a facial expression.

Today I was asked a question about inheritance and references within a constructor, in which the answer was an either/or for the parent or child class.

I threw up my hands and deliberately said "I dunno parent, no wait! Child!" because honestly who cares, when you can figure something like that out without even googling for it.

A question like that is like asking someone what might they expect a Hello World! program to print.

Waste my time, and I waste yours right back. I could care less what you think about me.

No. That's not how human behavior works. The "dopamine-fix/pleasure-addiction" concept is deeply flawed, and serves only as Pop Culture's mental crutch, occupying place where an explanation for a deeper problem belongs.

It's hand-wavey, unverifiable magic that fits in broadly with anyone's self image, without contaminating the circumstances by laying blame or guilt at the feet of the individual.

The truth is that many of us have a lot of down time, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know what to do with ourselves, because so many other optional behaviors have been rationalized away from us, and removed from any normal equation.

If you were reading a book or knitting a sweater or mowing the lawn, your behavior would similarly directed into yet another pointless passtime, gifted with a deceptive sense of seeming purpose. But the cause-and-effect relationship interacting with electronic media, while intellectually occupying, suffers from effects that evaporate as soon as you pull the plug or as soon as the battery dies. This leaves a gaping feeling of wasted time, as soon as the power goes out, when there's no more electricity.

So, what if we turn our attention to activities where we can cause some sort of effect, which has no basis in electronic systems demonstrating evidence of the effect we have? Surpise! 99% of what you're legally permitted to do is essentially pointless time wasting, where you spin your wheels until you die unfulfilled, only to pass a world of questions to the next generation, with no answers to match.

One might say that our society, our culture is hollow, empty and meaningless, but with enough of a deconstructivist outlook, everything starts to look like that. When you take things apart (a bicycle for example), disassembling recognizable objects or concepts to their fundamental building blocks (handle bars, pedals, chain, wheels), often this destroys something beyond recognition, only to leave one with a feeling of regret at the loss of the thing they once knew.

With advanced technology, we've disassembled fundamental aspects of human civilization, at a pace where the people who have lived through previous decades, now must cope with a near total reorganization of typical modes of behavior, while also raising the next generation, without having many answers for what comes next.

On both sides of this equation, this feels like a near total loss of control. And for some, it actually is.

Gee, what to do with all this spare time you have on your hands, now that communication is near effortless, crosses the globe in an instant, discounting inflated prices built to accomodate a previously well-understood overhead cost, of staying organized in a world where staying on the same page with someone hundreds of miles away used to require carefully concerted planning?

Beats me, partner. Just don't hurt anybody. The times, they are a'changin'. Maybe knit a sweater?

Ah, come on. It's time to get real about all the Spencer Gifts level of bells and whistles added to all this technical garbage, as a convenience upsell.

Luxury items are exactly that. A luxury. When everything is perfect, a luxury is wonderful.

But luxuries are suicidal to retain, in a crisis scenario.

The problem with the mindset of staple-gunning Specer Gifts luxury mode convenience onto practicalities of critical infrastructure, is that you wind up with a UV flourescent black light fire extinguisher. Which is awesome, if you're playing lazer tag in a party time glow-bowl bowling alley, while listening to Laser Floyd's Wall at the planetarium. But we're selling radical day glow fire extinguishers to regular people, for daily use, in the home, to Kmart shoppers.

This shit has nothing to do with domestic violence. It has to do with priorities, and graceful degradation. None of these special smartphone app convenience bonuses degrade gracefully, so that the core functionality may be retained, while stripping out the extra technical fluff of packet switched, TCP/IP, GSM 4G LTE, broadband wi-fi global availability, so that you can bounce your playlist off a router attached to satelite phone at a sub-station in antarctica for two factor authentication, because the QT library for the UI had a bug forcing you to turn it off and then back on again, so you can log back in, and change the channel on your smart TV with your phone without having to get up from the couch to find the remote control, because blu ray disks won't let you use the play button to watch the movie, and only the remote has the OK/enter button, and none of the buttons on the set-top-box player will start the movie.

1. In an isolated power plant, you ground things by literally stabbing a long conductor, with an appropriate diameter of perhaps an inch, about ten feet down into the ground. The depth is a key factor, usually to reach natural moisture in the soil, past the frost line in cold climates, and sometimes hit a shallow water table depending on local geography. Although ambient moisture and even static discharge via dry surface area alone usually do the trick. You literally ground a metal rod by sticking it deep into the ground, and then route gounding leads back to a service that provides electrical contact to the rod.

2. It isn't about the amps/voltages at all. It's all about heart strain, which is why they made note of the chest pains the victim was presenting with. With electricity, there are two main injuries to cope with: burns and cardiac arrest. In this case, it sounds like a brief discharge without any burning electrical arc, so no burns. The chest pains would seem to indicate that the current passed through the heart and surrounding pacemaker nerves, long enough to perhaps clench and strain the muscle (pulled miscles/soreness leading weakened low pressure), or stop the heart, denying blood flow, which can damage both heart and brain tissue. With brain tissue damage due to oxygen deprivation, loss of blodd flow, it would resemble a concussion. Based on the provides description of the event, CPR wasn't necessary, so figure it was electrically induced heart strain and not full cardiac arrest.

Honestly, the whole thing sounds like a sort of staged social experiment, to see how a personality mix devolves, amid a stressful, seemingly life-threatening incident.

Not to mention... searching... Google?

Really.

Does that sound like something anyone would ever expect to return fruitful results enabling criminal activity? Does anyone imagine this being the sort of thing a person operating an encrypted server would do either deliberately or inadvertently? And what would it even mean, to have that in Google search logs?

Here on HN, to most of us, figure it means less than nothing. On some level, it might actually harm the authenticity of the prosecution's technical credibility.

I'd imagine the goal of the prosecutors though, is to select the most technically inept grandmas, to pack the jury with.

I think the level of security provided by passwords or password managers is probably of little import, when confronted by a nation-state actor, and indeed a top tier nation-state actor, with nigh unlimited resources, and an axe to grind over a serious grudge.

We have wi-fi routers being used to passively see through walls, with enough fidelity to read lips and record finger movement.

Put someone under a microscope long enough, and every single password they use will reveal itself. Whether locked behind a manager app (sooner or later you'll snag the master password for it) or directly entered.