From a New York Times article yesterday about a different natural disaster (the wildfire in Maui):
> Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.
Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, got her start investigating crisis communications and disinformation which would emerge during crises, at the University of Colorado Boulder.
She discusses this in some of her online presentations on YouTube. If you're interested in those, I'd suggest looking prior to ~2020 and ~2016 specifically as later discussion gets more caught up in COVID-19 related and Trump-related topics. Which are interesting in their own right but not the sources I had in mind.
(I'll see if I can locate a representative video, there's a lot to comb through.)
Does Kate or any of her peers ever discuss the particulars of how language is used by those on both sides of various disagreements to imply certain facts without asserting them outright (as in the GP comment)?
I'm not sure if she discusses that specific element of disinformation, though her research covers a number of dimensions, from disinfo-at-scale in social networks to types of disinformation.
You don't need bad actors for a disinfo campaign. There's a certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media, and they're fairly common. I've seen it a few times now and it's crazy. They'll make things up that could jepordize people's lives for the likes, I guess.
Also, having seen FEMA at work first hand, they are approximately useless. I could see a lot of anger happening organically.
> certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media
They're the "everything happens for a reason" types. Their belief system doesn't properly integrate chance events, so when confronted with one, they create a bogeyman. Because somebody being in control, even a bad somebody, is more comprehensible than nobody being at the wheel.
Sometimes, but not always. There are PLENTY of "highly" rational people who do similarly as they utilize reasoning at the "close enough" level as is the cultural (and culturally enforced) norm in their country/era. And if you protest based on a more strict approach, expect to be dismissed ("debunked") via culturally ingrained, rhetorically persuasive memes.
Avoiding all errors in cognition is often extremely difficult, ain't nobody got time for that sort of "pedantry".
There are also just those who actually always had kooky beliefs, but normally they weren't relevant so even their acquaintances didn't know, but after a disaster they feel they're obligated to help, which manifests in them espousing their kooky beliefs on social media.
> FEMA giving victims in Maui a measly $700 while other parts of the US federal government spend billions upon billions to fund not only the war in Ukraine
You’re comparing cash handouts to military aid. (Also, the $700 figure is incomplete [1].)
>WASHINGTON -- One week since President Biden declared a major disaster declaration for the state of Hawaii in the wake of the devastating wildfires, the Biden-Harris Administration and voluntary agencies provided survivors with immediate needs such as food, water and shelter and approved millions of dollars in disaster relief. To date, FEMA has approved more than $3.8 million in assistance to 1,640 households including more than $1.57 million in initial rental assistance.
Occam and Lisp are both developed from the Lambda calculus and quite close relatives. The main difference is that Lisp is strong-dynamically typed (like Python), and Occam is statically typed (like, say, Java).
Occam was based on Hoare's CSP rather than Lambda Calculus and the relationship between your average Common Lisp program and Lambda Calculus is pretty distant.
> This same phenomenon is the reason why John Ousterhout wrote Tcl and the GNU project started Guile.
Except that Guile is an implementation of Scheme, which is essentially a somewhat minimalist variant of Lisp. So in this case, a real programming language was included intentionally as configuration language.
And this is the same concept as why GNU Emacs is an editor written in Lisp on top of C routines - very similar how data science is often done in Python on top of Numpy and several other packages.
> Async Rust is especially problematic in the enterprise world where large software is built out of micro-services connected through RPC.
A weird way to use Rust since you can do a lot of messaging within the process, and use the computing power much more efficiently.
RPC is essentially messaging and message-passing. Message-passing is a way to avoid mutable shared state - this is the model with which Go became successful.
RPC surely has its use but message passing is another, and very often inferior, solution to the problem set where Rust has excellent own solutions for.
> We want to use the whole computer. Code runs on CPUs, and in 2023, even my phone has eight of the damn things. If I want to use more than 12% of the machine, I need several cores.
Isn't that already, in this strong generality, an almost always wrong assumption?
Sure, one can do massively parallel or embarrassingly parallel computation.
Sure, graphic cards are parallel computers.
Sure, OS kernels use multiple cores.
Sure, languages and concepts like Clojure exist and work - for a specific domain, like web services (and for that, Clojure works fascinatingly well).
But there are many, even conceptually simple algorithms which are not easy to parallelize. There is no efficient parallel Fast Fourier Transform I know of.
And there are even different degrees of parallelization. Some things will scale almost linearly to CPU cores, some will share a little state and see diminishing returns, some will share a lot of state and maybe only make good use of 2 cores, and it'll all depend on the hardware too.
> When sandbox builds are enabled, Nix will setup an isolated environment for each build process. It is used to remove further hidden dependencies set by the build environment to improve reproducibility. This includes access to the network during the build outside of fetch* functions and files outside the Nix store. Depending on the operating system access to other resources are blocked as well (ex. inter process communication is isolated on Linux); see nix.conf section in the Nix manual for details.
> Sandboxing is enabled by default on Linux, and disabled by default on macOS. In pull requests for Nixpkgs people are asked to test builds with sandboxing enabled (see Tested using sandboxing in the pull request template) because in official Hydra builds sandboxing is also used.
> To configure Nix for sandboxing, set sandbox = true in /etc/nix/nix.conf; to configure NixOS for sandboxing set nix.useSandbox = true; in configuration.nix. The nix.useSandbox option is true by default since NixOS 17.09.
This appears to use namespaces etc (basically containers) rather than a VM but I think it may be secure. Their goal is to aid reproducibility but if the network isolation actually works, then at least the build will be secure.
Note that an infected source may either run malware during build, or embed malware in the compiled binary (or both). When running the binary you're not protected at all by this sandboxing, unless you use something like Qubes (which is quite heavyweight)
Guix builds are sandboxed per package (I'm pretty sure it cannot be turned off at all). The Guix build containers don't have network access.
Guix package definitions include a cryptographic hash of the source, don't autoupdate and have people review when there is an update.
The Guix package definition includes what dependent packages this package needs. These dependencies will be built first and the result made available for the Guix container of the final package build. Nothing else is available in there.
My local food store still give me sticky small olive labels which can be collected in a booklet, which earns an discount once it is full. I love that. And they ask me every time if I want my olives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_wave