If the pitchers are getting too good, just make it harder to pitch. Don't make it easier to hit better pitches.
Golf is also an arms race too. Look at the lengths of golf courses over the last 50 years. It's comical. It used to be 6000 yards was a championship course... now it's over 8000.
They used to put bunkers in front of greens to make them more challenging, but the equipment evolve to maximize height, and stop the ball on a dime. It's completely convoluted, because we just keep letting technology overcome every obstacle, but players don't like the obstacles, but you're not supposed to like the obstacles. So we let the tech overcome those obstacles, and then we build new, more difficult obstacles, and it's a never ending process of legalizing more tech, and then building more obstacles. And it continues until the game is unrecognizable from what it was a half century earlier.
There are discussions about lowering the seams (harder to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less aerodynamically effective) as well as lowering the mound.
Those of us that have been around quite a while have seen consistent ‘rapid progress’ in technology and automation over the last 30+ years. This isn’t the first time there’s a new world changing technology.
> It provides a channel for operatives to exfiltrate data out of non-NATO countries very easily.
I'm not convinced this is the case. For example China's gfw has been very effective at blocking TOR traffic, and any TOR connection in other countries is like announcing to the government that you are suspicious.
It’s a little silly to say “for example” and then intentionally pick what is widely known as the most sophisticated and pervasive system for controlling Internet traffic ever created.
The parent said “non-NATO countries”… there are 162 of those that are not China.
(It’s also a little silly to specify “non-NATO” since U.S. intelligence services have to exfiltrate data from NATO countries too…)
To get data out of China, the U.S. undoubtedly has special systems, which are worth the special investment because it’s China.
If you can find TOR nodes, so can the Chinese government. They can then just block these addresses.
Furthermore, the great firewall is quite advanced, they use machine learning techniques to detect patterns, so even if it is TLS on port 443, they may be able to detect it after they have gathered enough traffic. There are workarounds of course, but it is not as simple as just using a TLS tunnel.
Tor was made for spies. But you know what's really bad for spies? If accessing a certain IP/protocol/behavior reliably reveal your spy status.
For Tor to be effective for hiding spies it has to be used by the public. Even if it's only nefarious actors (say spies + drug dealers + terrorists) it adds noise that the adversary needs to sort through.
What I fucking hate about many of these conspiracies is how silly it is once you ever work with or for any government entities. You can't get two police agencies in neighboring cities to communicate with one another. The bureaucrats are fucking slow as shit and egotistical as fuck.
It's important to remember that the government and even a single agency (like the NSA) is just as chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities as any big tech company has (if not worse). Yeah, most of the NSA is focused offense, but there's groups working on defense. Those groups are 100% at odds. This is true for the 18 intelligence agencies. They have different objectives and many times they are at odds with one another and you bet each one wants to be getting credit for anything.
The US involvement should warrant suspicion and with any technology like Tor you should always be paranoid. But it's not proof. Because guess what, the US wants people in other countries to use high levels of encryption to hide from their authoritarian governments while the US can promote democracy movements and help put a friendly leader into a position of power. AT THE SAME TIME they also want to spy on their own people (and there are plenty of people in the gov that don't want this). Inconsistency is the default because it's a bunch of different people with different objectives. So the US gov both wants Tor to be secure and broken at the same time.
> It's important to remember that the government and even a single agency (like the NSA) is just as chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities as any big tech company has (if not worse).
And yet even as early as 2003 they were taking a copy of every single bit that ran over the AT&T backbone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A). It's amazing how effective these "chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities" can be. We're entirely dependent on whistleblowers willing to risk their lives and freedom to learn about what they're doing to us.
Yes, they can be very effective. There's no denying that. The proof is in the pudding as they say, since we have governments and businesses. But that's tangential to the point I was making.
...You must be working for a different government than I've experienced. Government orgs will initially suffer from siloing problems, but once a synergy is uncovered it tends to get leveraged hard after a while. Remember: when it comes down to it, the difference between government reach, and everyone else, is really just who you can communicate with smoothly.
Now things like SCI are things; but there are ways to handle that too. It's more a slowing force than a stopper.
I dont see how TOR is better than just spinning up a server on the public cloud for each asset. Since each asset would have a different IP they couldnt use one assets knowledge to catch the others. Non-NATO countries tend to monitor internet traffic and so would know if you access TOR.
Each server is only used by a single operative though, how do you even find which IP to analyze? The story with Tor and espionage is that if an asset connected to cia website the gov which monitors internet access would know they went to the site. Even if its not a public site they just need to have one operative defect and tell them the site and they can catch all the other operatives who use it. But if everyone connects to a different IP I dont see how traffic analysis helps you discover you is connecting with the cia.
> But if everyone connects to a different IP I dont see how traffic analysis helps you discover you is connecting with the cia.
I assume that they're connecting multiple times with the CIA - it's not just a one and done drop. That's trivial to look at - if you see someone connecting repeatedly to an IP address that doesn't associate with any known website/service and you see them do it consistently then that's suspicious.
Maybe if the IP addresses rotated it wouldn't be as noticeable, but if you're going over the clearnet then you can't disguise the IP address you're connecting to (short of proxies but then you're giving up the IP address of the proxies).
To be fair, not all definitions of Zionism refer to colonizing the area around jerusalem. More generally, zionism is around creating a jewish state and controlling their own destiny.
correct, my point is op seems to carry an emotional burden with the word "zionism". which is really only explained by the recent (since 10/7) media cycles IMO.
The price of gold is through the roof. Gold is ~$2500 per oz, while platinum is $950 per oz. However, most gold is 14kt (58%) or 18kt (75%) while Platinum is 90%+. That, and platinum is a heavier (technically denser is more correct?) metal, so there is more platinum in an equivalent ring, and it weighs more. The actual price on finished jewelry isn't as big as you would think.
However, "retail" jewelry stores often price things using what they call Keystone (2x markup) or even triple keystone (3x). So, a $500 piece would sell for $1000-$1500.
> Once we have models that can act as full senior SWEs.. the models can engineer the models.
This is such an extremely bullish case, I'm not sure why you'd think this is even remotely possible. A Google search is usually more valuable than ChatGPT. For example, the rust utf-8 example is already verbatim solved on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/l5m1rw/how_can_i_effi...
The implicit assumption here is that a human "senior SWE" can engineer a model of the same quality that is capable of simulating him. Which is definitely not true with the best models that we have today - and they certainly can't simulate a senior SWE, so the actual bar is higher.
I'm not saying that the whole "robots building better robots" thing is a pipedream, but given where things are today, this is not something that's going to happen soon.
('18 alum) Yeah I agree. We even had internal-only versions of OCW with more recent recordings and more material.
Although I agree that professors were not accessible, and TAs were often not that helpful. But, I never felt like I didn't have the resources I needed. I just lacked enough time.
I did feel like i would have been able to _learn_ better from a smaller school with fewer students, and teachers hired for teaching instead of research. But I still don't think that would have outweighed the benefit of the MIT community and resources.
Could an iceberg with a few seal families on it have drifted from the Arctic to the Antarctic? Presumably in the tropics the seals would have had a bad time and gone hungry and overheated, but once they got to cooler waters again, they would have been surrounded by food they love with zero competitors.
Life travels on the ocean a lot farther than people realize, and often species you'd find improbably.
Ants spread around the world by hitching rides on coconuts or waterbirds. This now means there's something like a global war among various ant colonies that invade each other this way.
I thought Wind, Wings and Waves to be a pretty interesting description of how species made it to Hawaii. Basically it either gets picked up in storms or large clumps of land make it across the ocean. Life only has to make the journey seldom or almost never and then take hold once to get to a new place.
It's my understanding the ant spreading was more related with increase in navigation than birds/floating. that'd be why the Argentine ant has spread everywhere in Europe in the last century rather than being ubiquitous since the dawn of time.
