#or maybe you have something against the morals of microsoft

[liopleurodean]

I just saw a post dated yesterday about someone using a 'practically fresh install' of Windows 7 and I. Think I need to go lie down

[alertarchitect]

Full disclosure, this is a long one. It's also a vent post. I'm mainly writing this out to help get the thoughts and feelings regarding this kind of organized and out of my head, makes dealing with them just a little easier. Maybe it'll help you put to words your own thoughts & feelings on this kinda shit, too, and if it does, I'm glad my screaming into the void at least helped out someone other than myself! After all, if anything I say, write, or do ends up helping at least one other person, then maybe I'm doing something right :]

Sometimes having long-time special interests in an ongoing franchise FUCKING SUCKS. Perfect example - I am both a big Halo nerd, and really enjoy the overaching lore of Bungie's connected worlds (with how Marathon, Pathways into Darkness, Myth, Destiny, and even the ways Halo originally connected before it had to become its own thing thanks to Microsoft). Here are the ways that currently sucks:

The state of Halo Infinite, the most recent Halo game, both currently and at launch. At launch, you had a buggy mess, with multiplayer that barely functioned, lacking feature parity (even just on the multiplayer side of things, not counting the campaign) with Halo Reach, a game from 2010. Currently, 343i has admittedly fixed a lot of the launch issues - there's more customization than the game has ever had before (still not as good as Reach's customization imo, but at this point I've given up hope on any multiplayer AAA game having that level of customization for free ever again), the desync issues (in my experience) are no longer happening, and it has the most powerful Forge mode in any Halo game to date. The flip side of that, though? Egregiously horrendous monetization, an armor core and coating system that both hurt the customization more than help, and a drip-feed of content with little to no communication from 343 on anything past the most recent update. Not to mention the issues that come from a focus on "Live Service" bullshit.

The issues at 343 Industries itself, which come part and parcel with the massive issues related to Microsoft as a company. Massive megacorporation, horrible management, staff getting screwed over, crunch culture, and more - it just goes on and on.

Halo 5, despite its generally negative reception, is horrendously inaccessible to those of us that want to experience it as a piece of history and/or try out the multiplayer. A perfect example of how little companies care about game preservation, despite the decent track record 343i has had in that respect thanks to the Master Chief Collection, its PC release and addition of Halo Reach, and the efforts to find, occasionally recreate from almost nothing, and implement lost & cut content in the MCC titles.

Being a fan of Bungie's overarching stuff... really bad when you are at PEAK investment into their stuff, namely my Destiny 2 hyperfixation, and they not only announce that their new Marathon game is going to be a fucking EXTRACTION SHOOTER, and thus unlikely to have one of the most interesting things about Marathon in it (that being its lore) while also being very hard to get into thanks to people treating that kind of game as a massive sweat-fest, but also suddenly lay off a bunch of employees (when previously they had a good track record of treating employees decently...) due to Square Enix levels of profit overestimations of Lightfall, the BEST SELLING DESTINY EXPANSION EVER only getting 45% of the expected sales. Because why be realistic, right? Just fuck over employees, that certainly won't hurt us in the end!

The fact that, despite ALL OF THIS and my moral convictions against the shitty nature of this stuff, my dumbass brain still wants me to just spend spend spend on it anyway because of how much of a special interest Halo & the Bungie lore are to me - it almost hurts. I generally prefer fantasy stuff, but I can't stop myself from loving the lore and stories associated with this stuff. I have to fight myself every goddamn time I have money to not fall into the traps. It's easier with Destiny - I uninstalled it, replaced my PvE needs with Warframe and Risk of Rain 2, replaced my PvP needs with Halo Infinite, and just keep up with the story from a distance. But now that Halo Infinite is back in my life? I love the gameplay, hell I'd go as far as to say it has some of the strongest gameplay in the series (though some modes could use a bit more work, for example the Infection mode just isn't as fun as the Infection from Halo Reach), but the monetization just... AAAARGH it hurts me that I want to spend on it, both for customization and to have little goals to work towards in the (thankfully well-implemented due to them being available eternally) battle passes.

I just want to be able to love something that's been so central to me for so long - I played a cracked version of the CE PC demo for countless hours growing up, to the point that to this day I know the mission Silent Cartographer back to front from memory & could do it in my sleep, and associate Blood Gulch with countless memories of Halo's multiplayer from how often I'd play it with my sister, and to add onto all of that Halo Reach is one of my favorite games ever made, period - without caveats and moral hangups. I just want to love something without justifying it every time I think of it, both to myself and others.

I know this is a massively first-world issue, having the luxury to whine about my Favorite Things going through years and years of getting fucked by their own successes driving them into corporatism, but it still sucks. Obviously not as much as other issues both myself and others deal with, and DEFINITELY not as much as the horrible shit people are enduring in several parts of the world, but just enough for me to want/need to vent about how much corporations like to shit on the little rays of sunshine that we use to feel better about life.

[zosonils-art]

ohhh can we hear more about sweet woman 🥺

we totally can!! infodump about this gaslighting gatekeeping girlboss is under the cut as always

sweet woman was commissioned by a super classy french dessert restaurant called the orgueilleux pâtisserie [orgueilleux being very poorly google translated french for elitist/snobbish lmao], acting as both a chef and a mascot! the gimmick worked wonders for the restaurant's popularity, with rich people coming in droves to experience the novelty of food prepared with a robot master's help, and she was quickly promoted to social media manager as well as her original duties. despite her cutesy demeanour, she's much smarter than she looks, and is equipped with an in-depth understanding of chemical reactions and inhumanly accurate sense of timing and spatial awareness. she knows hundreds of recipes and most of them cost several hundred dollars to make

her personality is more deliberately engineered than most robot masters, designed to fit her appearance and be marketable. she's unwaveringly cheerful, incredibly extroverted, and just silly enough that it's cute rather than grating. she plays these traits up a lot for the cameras, exaggerating her energy and playing dumb when it'll appeal to the masses, but even when she doesn't have her public image to consider she's a bubbly and energetic goof. she's a stubborn optimist, and if she can't find a bright side to look on she'll take out a flashlight and make one. her optimisim makes for a good workplace morale boost and an even better social media presence, although when combined with her ditziness and being a bit out of touch from almost exclusively interacting with the 1% it often makes her come across as insensitive

since she's in the spotlight a lot, most of sweet's hobbies and interests outside of work are still carefully selected to match her public image and look good on an instagram post. she has a passing interest in shopping and fashion, and enjoys going to parties and gatherings and what have you to meet new people. she also loves to experiment with cooking and come up with new recipes, some of which end up on the orgueilleux menu. she does, however, have a private interest in chemistry! as mentioned earlier she knows a fair bit about it already, since cooking is just chemistry with a restricted set of substances, and in her own time she ended up getting curious and reading into the sort of reactions that arise from chemicals she doesn't work with. she rarely mentions this interest herself, but she gets super excited if someone brings it up or gives her the excuse to talk about it, and it's probably listed as super secret trivia about her on the pâtisserie website

unlike other robot masters, sweet has an acute sense of both smell and taste! [since robots seem to only use e-tanks for fuel, there's not much benefit to smelling or tasting things, so i personally believe that most of them don't have those senses unless it'd directly benefit their job.] being able to actually taste the food she cooks makes it much easier to tell if she's doing it right, especially if she's trying to come up with something new. she's also capable of replenishing her energy by eating - it's less efficient than e-tanks, but she thinks they taste gross so she always opts for actual food. fittingly, she has a massive sweet tooth, but she's accustomed to only the highest-class dining and dislikes cheaper or less 'refined' tastes

her magical girl vibe, brought to you by someone who has watched maybe 4 episodes of anime that weren't sonic x, is entirely an aesthetic and marketing gimmick rather than serving any functional purpose. she'll play it up for promotional videos and photoshoots, twirling her fork-trident thing and striking dramatic poses and calling out thematically appropriate attack names like 'sparkling sugar swirl' and 'cinnamon whirlwind' whenever she does anything, but it's mostly for show. while she genuinely enjoys the shouting and posing and twirling, she massively tones it down when she's not performing, maybe occasionally saying an attack name at a reasonable volume while she works. her fork-trident thing isn't even a real weapon, magical or otherwise. it's just styrofoam with metallic paint on it

sweet's weakness to harpoon shot was decided before i figured out exactly what tide man's weapon would be, going on the idea that getting food wet tends to make it sad and gross. this logic doesn't quite carry over with harpoon shot being, well, a harpoon rather than something specifically water-based, but i imagine shooting a cake with a harpoon would also be a very one-sided battle so this weapon wheel makes sense i promise. i guess you could also make the argument that it's because sweet is only experienced with a fake pronged weapon made of foam and would be completely blindsided by a real one? maybe it's that tide is so staunchly anticapitalist that his weapon inherently vibe checks her? i'm grasping at straws a bit over here but listen, if mega man 5 can insist that water is elementally weak to trains, i can insist that it's elementally strong against the french

i think her stage could be some kind of factory! lots of conveyer belts definitely, maybe some crushing hazards, definitely a few mets. the idea there is that she's seized a major food processing plant and is using that position to wreck the regional supply chain. even when she's evil, she basically keeps the exact same personality she shows to the public with only a noticable capitalism upgrade. she has pretty much no combat abilities on her own, but at her own suggestion she was upgraded to shoot a specially formulated icing that's acidic enough to burn through thin metal, finally putting her interest in chemistry to use. her fork-trident, on the other hand, was not changed in the slightest. still just styrofoam. i think it'd be pretty good if she opened her battle with it but even if it hits mega man it only deals one point of damage and the second it touches something it snaps in half and she never pulls out a new one

designing sweet was pretty fun because she's pretty different from my usual taste in character design! my experience with the magical girl genre is that i read about half of sailor moon when i was 12 and absorbed everything else through pop culture osmosis and tv tropes pages, so it was definitely fun to draw what i think a magical girl might look like. i also don't use oranges and yellows much, so picking out her colours made for an agonising exciting challenge! she didn't change too much from the initial microsoft paint sketch, although she lost a skirt layer along the way because i didn't feel like figuring out how to draw another one, and her weapon was originally just a big fork that probably would have been a ksjfjhkjhfillion times less cumbersome to draw. oh well. live and learn [HANGIN ON THE EDGE OF TOMORROW]

that about wraps it up for sweet woman, i think - thank you so much for asking about her!! here's the transparent art and the version without 15 different filters on it to make it look kinda like an 80s anime screenshot

[jonthethinker]

After a long day of truly cursed thoughts, I’ve come to the determination that the Cerberus Assembly can act as a sort of Exandrian analog of our world’s Silicon Valley, and I hate it. I hate hate hate it.

The more I think about it, the more it just sort of melds into my mind as fact. I can’t escape it. This is where I live now.

You’ve got this collection of self-proclaimed super geniuses, unbounded by modern social mores and determined to invent a new sort of ethics, with an intent on shaping history and sagely guiding the world into a better future. This is despite the fact that most of the ideas they have inevitably end up making the world worse, and the only thing “new” that they really bring into the world is a bunch of actually very old ideas coated in fresh circuitry/magic.

But let’s dig a little deeper and start getting specific.

They both have these images of fiercely independent, creative bodies desperate to remain free from government control, and sometimes even as a check on that very government. The heads of the Cerberus Assembly outright say their intent is to act as a check on the Crown, and are known to have many secrets the Crown is, to their knowledge, totally unaware of.

Tech companies, particularly in America, have this outward facing very libertarian outlook on things, saying they don’t wish to interfere in the very important process of democracy and free speech, while simultaneously feeling it is their responsibility to fact check those in power and hold them to account, with their “serious vetting” of political ads and the like on their platforms. They also lobby heavily against any and all regulation of their various products and services, preferring to let the “invisible hand” of the market provide the service of keeping them in check, much as the Cerberus Assembly prefers to handle its own problems internally.

But when you really dig into the details this is all bullshit. The Cerberus Assembly, for all intents and purposes, IS the Empire. They run the secret police, for goodness sake. The two are so interconnected, and the Assembly as an institution is so dependent on the infrastructure and manpower, and of course money (because the fancy clothes, giant towers, and expensive sets of material components don’t pay for themselves) of the Empire to accomplish its goals, it can’t serve as a real check on Imperial forces possibly “overstepping”, and it also has no material interest in doing so; the more power and control the Empire has, the more power and control the Assembly has; the less freedom the citizens have due to authoritarian “safety” measures implemented by the Crown, the safer the Assembly itself becomes to pursue it’s morally dubious work and experimentation.

The same goes with Silicon Valley and the various tech companies that fall under its ethos. They will expound continually on the necessary freedom from government control they must have to truly change the world in the ways they think are best, but the primary source of money for most of these companies are governments. They either primarily contract with governments for most of their actual profits or to use its already established infrastructure, as is the case with Amazon, or depend heavily on publicly funded research for their innovations, which is everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft and dozens and dozens of smaller companies besides. They then even get to patent these publicly funded innovations and hold a monopolized stranglehold on their use. This is not even to mention the starter capital necessary to form many of these companies in the first place itself was provided by governments, with the rather, shall we say “morally questionable” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being among the top contributors to such start ups.

Even when either of these groups claim to be self-made, it’s all bullshit. So many of our famous tech overlords that supposedly built themselves from nothing started at the upper reaches of society, with more than enough capital and connections to insure they were never at any real risk of failing in the first place. Most even went to the same elite institutions of learning that provide the vast majority of the political leadership of the United States, institutions they had access to due to their wealth and familial connections, not their brains. Elon Musk’s family owned an emerald mine in Zambia for God’s sake, one his family would have never owned without the British Empire being a thing.

The same can be said for the Assembly. The upper classes of the Dwendalian Empire are lousy with mages and magic users. If they don’t have a place to climb among the nobility, they work for the Assembly, and hope to climb there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the only poorer mage recruits we know anything real about all were sucked up into the service of the Scourgers, one of the few arms of the Assembly known to regularly interact with societies lower reaches and not so positively at that, and had their familial identities obliterated in the process. Both of these groups are of the upper reaches of society and serve the upper reaches of society, and we should never think anything less.

And this brings us to the ideological framework both of these groups think with. They are both full to the brim with people who are individualists to the extreme. They all believe they are singular actors in the great tapestry of history, who got where they are by hard work and dedication, and anyone who isn’t there just didn’t do enough. The folks living in the tent city outside Zadash? lazy layabouts who simply have not applied their mind to be something greater, or perhaps their veins are just full of bad blood. Poor former factory workers in Detroit whose jobs have been moved to places where labor laws are weaker and wages are lower? If they’d only taken their education more seriously, they could be where I am! Or maybe they just never tried to be an Uber driver or delivering for Grubhub, because that’s how you really pull yourself out of poverty.

Meanwhile, most of the groups consist of people who have never once known real adversity and certainly not the hardship of poverty nor the lack of social and political power that position entails. They are blinded to the reality of most people in the world outside their rather small one, and thus have no understanding of the material hardship that most people experience during their everyday life.

You see this most clearer in the manner in which they try to solve what they see as societies great problems, with no clear thought put into the consequences of these particular solutions. In our world, this is particularly obvious. Uber is painted as an innovative means of transportation on a budget, when in reality it’s just a fleet of untrained, underpaid, non-unionized taxi drivers using their own personal vehicles at their own expense. Elon Musk is seen as this super genius when his solution to LA traffic wasn’t a more robust public transportation system or slowly reconstructing the city to be more pedestrian friendly, but instead to build a massive network of single car elevators under the city to zip cars to key hot spots faster in a manner people less anxious than me would still call risky at best. I mean most of these people think the key to ending poverty is teaching people to code or giving them STEM education, even when in a capitalist economy the only thing a sudden flooding of new coders and STEM educated folks would insure is that the jobs that require those skills will see a sudden massive drop in pay and benefits as the pool of prospective employees becomes over-saturated and individual workers no longer have any bargaining power to protect their once rare jobs. You already see this in animation and video game design, and you’ll certainly see it elsewhere.

For the Assembly, despite being praised as the brightest arcane minds of Wildmount, seem to get most of their ideas either by stealing them from others or digging them up out of the ground. But this is just the nature of empire; it’s always easier for an empire to consume than it is to create. So as little as they think of the Dynasty, they are eager to steal every little bit of knowledge they’ve discovered about Dunamis, and without the faith and moral sense the Luxon-based religion imposes, they will never be forced to put the use of this rare and dangerous magic into perspective. Imagine what harm they can cause with gravity and time magic when they don’t have that religious pressure to consider the value of life and choice. But this makes sense when their main sources of inspiration are the wizards of the Age Of Arcana; you know, the wizards whose hubris nearly destroyed the entire world and spurred an apocalyptic war that sent society into a dark age in which the gods themselves abandoned them? A+ inspiration material if you ask me.

Even the culture of these two groups in regards to how they regulate themselves is so eerily similar. Think of Delilah Briarwood. Member in good standing of the Cerberus Assembly. Also, worshipper of Vecna and talented necromancer. Only expelled from the Assembly after involvement from the Cobalt Soul, even when you know every other member of the Assembly almost certainly had loads of information on this lady.

It just makes me think of all the weird, right-wingers and Nazis who occasionally get expelled from the heights of Silicon Valley whenever some journalist exposes them, and how quickly their colleagues are to condemn them even when so many of them either knew this person was this way well before they were exposed or actively agreed with them and still do. I mean, think of how protected Bill Gates is, because of how much his philanthropist image has served to insulate and protect the gross consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of so few, even when his fortune was built on stolen ideas, military funding and research, and a hardcore software monopoly for well over a decade or two. Also, his philanthropy has done nothing to help African people build their own institutions of power independent of European and American influence, and have help distract us from the damage really caused to the entire continent by earlier colonialism and later capitalist imperialism.

This is to say as bad as our world is, I now definitely don’t want to live in Wildemount. I don’t want to live a world where Mark Zukerberg can cast Disintegrate. Not ideal. I guess I’ll just have to work that much harder to fix this one and not depend on learning Dunamancy to just put us on a different path. Bummer.

[falconedreams]

Job Hunting In The Zombie Apocalypse

Last night I dreamt that there was a zombie apocalypse in full swing (not my fault this time!) It wasn’t like in the movies where everywhere was uniformly fucked, it was more like the current global pandemic situation - wealthy people/areas were less affected, almost life as usual - we’d see heavily armed trucks full of fresh food go into the heavily fortified CBD/nice private housing estates, and occasionally we’d hear on the radio or see a week-old paper or something, about the stock prices of XYZ company rising or whatever - but the rest of SG was basically like Season 2 of the Walking Dead. No word on what the situation was in the rest of the world. I knew the Causeway was for sure closed, but apart from that - I expect that the rest of the world was in a similar situation, since those day traders would have to have someone to trade with. 

I lived in a safe camp which was a repurposed schoolhouse, like one of those really old one-storey schoolhouses built back in the early days of independence. A few of the OITNB cast also lived there, for some reason (Nichols, Morello, Vause), as well as that guy from The Promised Neverland (spoilers!) who reminds me of Seth except that he’s missing an arm instead of an eye. Lucas, I think he’s called. Then there were a bunch of other people whom I didn’t know, mostly kids to 20+ year olds. Lucas was the only one over 30, I think, and he was the leader and the Team Dad. Also the only one with his moral compass still intact through the whole fiasco. We were trying to rescue as many people as possible so like - space for growing crops was rapidly shrinking, and food and medical supplies were being consumed faster. I wanted to go steal stuff from the rich people’s warehouses or supply trucks, because COME ON, we’ve got kids under 10 in here who are barely meeting the caloric requirements of a cat, and those fuckers out there are hoarding daikon radishes and lettuce just because they want to have decoration with their sushi?! And are just going to throw it away after?! They can damn well eat their sushi on normal plates and spare us the lettuce! But Lucas was all “No, our war is with the zombies, not the other humans. We must not pick a fight with our own.” 

So that’s how I ended up job-hunting. It transpired that I was the only one at my camp who had a university education, so it was decided that I should try to get a job in the CBD in order to legally buy food and medical supplies. We managed to boot up a computer in the school’s com lab and I typed out a resume on - miraculously, the Microsoft Word license was still intact ._. Which I then started constantly spamming to any job opening I could find on the lousy camp internet. 

The first position I heard back from was with a game development/animation company, weirdly enough. We somehow scrounged up a half-decent outfit for me and I went to interview. The journey from camp to CBD was fucking perilous, and Nichols and Morello died. Even when I reached the gates it took an insane amount of convincing for the guards to let me in. Finally, when I reached the company - wow. They were living the high life like nothing was happening outside. The whole place was chandeliers, mirrors, burnished gold and white marble. There was an in-house spa and daily buffet lunch and dinner. I was sooooooo anxious to get the job then, because - holy shit. I could steal food from the buffets and hygiene products from the spa to bring back to camp! Maybe I could even put a few of the kids onto my dependents’ health insurance! 

All of that flew straight out of the window when I met the interviewer. It transpired that he’d really only called me in so that he could tear me down to stroke his ego. He was super smug and without even discussing anything related to the position, on sight started berating me for overestimating my capabilities, How Dare I apply to this position without even so much as a BFA, Millennials these days were So Entitled, Everyone’s Calling Themselves An Artist These Days, etc etc - and, well, I blew up at him. I told him a) it’s a free country, it’s not against the law for me to apply to positions I’m underqualified for just to try my luck; b) I sent in my resume with the application, he had to have known I didn’t have a BFA, so why’d he call me in if he didn’t think I was qualified; c) oh, I know, because he just wanted to stroke his own ego, in which case he could shove my application and his desktop monitor you-know-where. 

Of course, he terminated the interview on the spot and called security to come escort me out. But before they managed to find and apprehend me, I managed to steal all the pads from the pad dispensers in the washrooms, as well as all the candy from the reception/waiting areas, so it wasn’t a completely wasted trip after all. 

Sorry, Lucas.

[delimeful]

the shapes in the silence (8)

warnings: deceit (morally ambiguous), lying, arguing, negative thinking(lots)

Chapter 8

Apparently, ‘longest nap of his life’ meant three hours, because that was all he got before Patton came knocking gently on his door, snapping him out of a hazy nightmare in a cold sweat.

“Hey, kiddo!” He greeted, eyes suspiciously bright. Ugh, morning people. “We’re having a house meeting!” 

“A what?” Virgil responded automatically. He, of course, knew what a house meeting was, but- “You’ve never invited me to one of these before.” 

Patton had the grace to look sheepish. “Well, we don’t have them very often, and you didn’t… really want to talk to us last time we had one!” 

Oh yeah. He’d been absolutely certain it had only been an excuse for them to all complain about him suddenly ‘moving in’, so to speak. It’d taken actually eavesdropping before he realized it was actually an argument over who kept stealing Logan’s jam. He was fairly sure Roman had only passed up on accusing the new ‘unfriendly neighborhood Dark Side’ because he was the actual culprit. 

“...Sure, okay.”

He followed Patton downstairs, and found the others sitting already in their customary spots on the couch. Out of habit, he stepped towards the spot he normally sat as ‘Puff’, before remembering himself at a slight look of surprise from (still normal-sized) Roman. He propped himself up against the wall closest to Logan’s chair, not in the mood to loom menacingly by anyone who might be perturbed by it.  

As expected, Logan ignored him completely. “Good. Now that we are all here, I believe we should address the situation regarding Roman’s recent shrinking episode.” 

“Did you figure something out, Microsoft Nerd?” Roman asked, leaning forwards slightly. Virgil wondered how the nicknames had such little bite when they were directed at anyone but him.

Logan glanced at Virgil, but upon seeing no question about the situation in his expression, simply continued. “Currently, my hypothesis is that this size reduction happens to us due to the fact that we are incorporeal manifestations of a personality. For example, things like feeling overwhelmed or vulnerable might cause us to involuntarily shapeshift as a mechanism to protect Thomas or ourselves.” 

He flipped a few pages in his notebook. “I believe that is why access to our normal functions is limited whilst in the reduced form, as well, which is highly inconvenient.”

That would really stress Virgil out if he hadn’t already mastered the art of driving himself into the exact mental state needed to trigger his transformation either way. 

“As such,” Logan continued, “we need more information in order to find a solution. I believe Roman can help me test this hypothesis by focusing on aforementioned overwhelming thoughts to see if he can activate this reaction at will.” 

“What? Why me?” Roman protested immediately. “Why don’t you do it, Specs?” 

Logan gave him a condescending look. “Because I have no feelings, obviously. You are the only one we know of showing this symptom, anyhow. Our control group, so to speak.” 

Roman groaned, and for a moment, his gaze flicked to where Virgil was standing, wishing he was in bed as they talked about stuff he already knew. He straightened up a bit, narrowing his eyes back at Roman. What?

The creative side pulled his eyes away without giving him any sort of answer, but Logan hadn’t missed the byplay either. He stared between the two of them for a moment. Patton blinked at all of them mutually, lost in the silent stare off. Slowly, Logan leaned back. 

“If you’d prefer to do this at a later time-” He started, but Roman cut him off. 

“No, it’s fine.” He stared at Virgil like he was trying to convey something meaningful with the words. Virgil stared back, catching exactly none of it.

A moment and a flash later, Roman was sitting on the couch, doll-sized. Patton made the ‘oh no, cute!’ face again, and Virgil couldn’t help but stare. He was so… small. He couldn’t believe Roman had let him pick him up at all, so much could have gone wrong- 

“Oh, it worked!” Roman said, surprised. Logan hummed consideringly, already deep in thoughts he didn’t bother to share with the rest of them. 

“Can you turn back?” Virgil asked, voice sardonic. Roman scowled imperiously at him, but very noticeably did not get any bigger. 

“That part… appears to be more complicated.”

“Maybe try thinking about the opposite of what got you that size!” Patton offered, Logan nodding in agreement. 

Roman didn’t seem as easily convinced, but he did close his eyes and make an expression of thinking very hard for a few moments. Virgil took the opportunity to go make himself a bagel. It went perfectly up until the toasted bagel popped up loudly, and Roman groaned, presumably at his concentration being broken. 

“Anxiety.”

“What?” He responded through a mouthful of crunchy bread. “I’m hungry, I don’t have to watch you focus. You always figure it out eventually.” 

It was definitely meant to be delivered dismissively, but a second later there was a loud clatter from the lounge. Virgil poked his head around the corner. Roman was full-sized again, and had knocked a cup off the table in the process. He squinted at the startled creative side for a second. This was the second time in a row that had happened after he’d spoken.

Was Roman fucking with him? 

… No, Princey was too clueless for that. It was probably just coincidence.

Logan had taken it all in stride, turning to Patton and asking him to replicate Roman’s feat. Virgil took the opportunity to steal some of Logan’s Crofters and smear it over the other half of his bagel. Petty crimes. 

Once he re-emerged, Patton was still the same size, midway through an apology for not being able to manage it. 

“It’s quite alright, I have plenty of new information to look through. Oh, and Anxiety?” Logan called out, making him freeze where he was three steps up the stairs already. Could he seriously smell jam like a hunting dog? 

“Have you experienced anything like this before?” Logan asked, and everyone’s gaze turned to him.

Great, it wasn’t about the jam. It was so much worse. There was no getting out of it this time.

“No.” He answered bluntly, and ignored the way the lie tasted sour in his mouth. “I haven’t.” 

He looked away before he could see the mistrust form in their eyes, and retreated to his room. He hated lying to them, partially because it felt awful, wondering how and when they’d find out his untruths, but also because the more Virgil lied, the better of a grasp he got on the situation.

As such, it was almost unsurprising when he opened his door and found Deceit, standing in the middle of his room and eyeing his messy floor with distaste. He still felt his heart jump, though, looking over his shoulder as though the others would have trailed after him to witness the impromptu meeting. He slammed his door shut after him, already scowling darkly.

“What are you doing in my room.” He asked, flatly. Deceit gave him a deeply patronizing look. 

“Oh, because I can totally just stand around in the plain sight waiting for you to get back from your little get-together. That definitely wouldn’t get me harassed by those naive idiots.” 

Virgil gritted his teeth at the insult, voice coming out sharp. “I’m the one being harassed. I told you to leave me alone. Get. Out.”

Deceit raised an eyebrow. “Like you weren’t practically calling my name with all the lying you’ve been doing. Obviously, you know that even just hiding the truth counts as a lie. You’re clearly doing much better than a liar like me.” 

“Shut up.” Virgil snarled, the shadows in his room curling around his feet. He clenched his fists, ignoring the feel of nails biting into his palms. “You’re just sour that Thomas still hasn’t noticed you, even after I split off and proved that Dark Sides can appear to him.” 

“Oh, you’re so right. It’s not like I want to keep helping him without needing all that attention or anything.” Deceit smiled smugly, as Virgil worked his jaw. “You can’t play the villain forever, Thomas won’t still hate you and get hurt because of it. I’m much worse off, helping keep him safe by keeping him in the dark.”

“I don’t care if he hates me.” Virgil returned, ignoring the way Deceit’s lips thinned knowingly. “Thomas needs his friends, needs people, and if he goes down the road you want him to take, he’ll be alone and hated his whole life, and he won’t even know why.” 

“Virgil, you’re the farthest thing from a hypocrite I’ve ever met.” Deceit offered, saccharine-sweet. “After all, you certainly wouldn’t know anything about being alone and hated, now would you?”   

“Yeah, it’s my job.” He spat, furious. “I’m supposed to keep Thomas from feeling the way I feel preemptively, genius.” 

He took a deep breath, trying to prevent his voice from slipping. “I knew what I was getting into when I revealed myself. Maybe you should focus more on your own role instead of nosing into my business.”

Deceit’s eyes narrowed slightly with irritation. “Yes, I’m definitely the one slinking about where I don’t belong. You’d never take advantage of someone’s trust under false pretenses, after all.”  

Virgil bit into his tongue hard enough to make it bleed. Deceit smirked, as though he’d never been irritated at all. After a moment, the look smoothed over into something more contemplative.

“You are so obsessed with Thomas upholding society’s standards, so afraid of him becoming a bad person. But you don’t have anything to worry about. After all, you’re a reflection of him, and you’re so very selfless, aren’t you?”  

Virgil recoiled as though struck, but there was no victory in the other side’s expression. 

“You made the right choice. The others will accept you when you’re exposed. You won’t regret it.”

With that final condemnation, he sunk away, and Virgil was left alone with the silence ringing in his ears. He hated fighting with Deceit, hated that the man wasn’t above tearing at sensitive spots to get his own point across, hated the raw, cut-open feeling that came with it. 

Most of all, he hated that Deceit was right. 

He was just using the others, lying to them to assuage his own pathetic loneliness. He’d made his choice, he’d known he’d be surrounded by people who didn’t want him there. He’d known, he’d known, and it still never got easier.

The transformation was at the edge of his senses, only a grasp from shifting him, and for a moment he entertained the thought of letting it happen. Running back to them, curling up in the presence of Thomas’ best attributes until Deceit’s words were barely even whispers in the back of his mind… 

Something clicked in the subconscious, and he let the errant dream go, sinking onto his bed. Thomas was making another video, and though it didn’t seem like he was going to be summoned this time, he still had work to do. He pulled up a screen of the scene through Thomas’s eyes, attention catching on every possible minor flaw, predicting the audience’s every possible reaction, determined to make the editing process hell so that only the best of Thomas was shown. 

That was his job, after all.

[mothmanhamlet]

A Few Angsty Haikus

Analogical, 2584 words, high school au, fluffffffff, I don’t think there are any warnings to speak of.

Roman gets Virgil to use his services to ask out his crush. Bad poetry ensues.

Roman Prince was many things. He was a jock, a self proclaimed “Matchmaking God”, and the biggest theater nerd Virgil had ever known. Most importantly, Roman would be dead if he didn’t stop begging Virgil in the next 30 seconds.

“Come onnnnnn, please,” Roman begged. They were pinning flyers for Roman’s new “business” idea to the corkboard outside of their math class. Or rather, Roman was pinning flyers, Virgil was just there for moral support. Moral support apparently included attempts at making him Roman’s first customer.

“No,” Virgil said, crossing his arms and leaning on the wall.

“Listen, it benefits both of us! I need my services to get out into the world and you happen to be the perfect candidate!” Roman reasoned, moving his hands a concerning amount for someone who was holding sharp objects.

The services in question were a complicated list of steps Roman called a “confession session”. The idea was that someone filled out the application and Roman would plan out an elaborate display of something that he promised would be spectacularly romantic.  

“No. Absolutely not.” Virgil didn’t even bother looking at Roman, his eyes were too busy scanning around the hallway. School ended not even two minutes ago, so there were still people there. He looked to see who could see him, who could see the poster. Pitifully, Logan was still there, Virgil’s super-genius crush. If Logan saw that poster, his opinion of Virgil would immediately drop. He was too good for that kind of thing.

Roman, sadly, caught Virgil looking just a little too long at Logan and got a brilliant idea. “Well I say you should get a second opinion. Oh Lo-”

Virgil’s hand practically flew to Roman’s mouth, nearly tackling him in the process. Logan, thankfully, didn’t move an inch.

“Do it and you’re dead,” Virgil whispered through gritted teeth. Against his palm, Virgil heard a muffled noise that sounded something like “But can you stop me?”. He looked back at Logan, who was still trying to fit three books and a globe into his already full backpack, and then at Roman, who was looking at Virgil with his eyebrows raised as if to say, “Your move”. At least if he let Roman do this, the embarrassment would be delayed.

“I’ll say yes if you don’t yell when I remove my hand.” Roman nodded and Virgil released his grip on his face, slight red marks where he had pressed rather aggressively. Roman pulled out his phone and started typing.

“I’m emailing you a link to the website. Fill out the form so I can make it spectacular!” Roman said, all too cheery for someone who had to blackmail him into doing it. Virgil just rolled his eyes and started walking down the hallway, trying to shake the small bits of attention that their (rather loud) conversation had gained.

****

Virgil sat down on the purple bean bag chair in his cluttered room and reached for his computer. It was a light grey color and covered in various stickers, his headphones a permanent fixture in its side. He clicked on the link and was immediately redirected to a flashy red and gold website that used hearts like they were commas and used clip art that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since the 90’s. Roman was creative, but sometimes his execution was subpar and unfortunately this was one of those times. Virgil leaned back and read over the questions.  

          1. What is your prospective boyfriend/girlfriend/datemate’s favorite love song?

          2. What type of flower best encapsulates their personality?

          3. Balloons, streamers, confetti, or all?

The rest of the questions followed suit in a similar fashion, and there were a lot. Maybe 30 or so until Virgil got to the end of the application.  

“Who the hell has a favorite kind of sprinkle?” Virgil muttered to himself, trying to work through the questions. Even more surprising than how specific the questions were, was that Virgil actually knew most of the answers. He had never really bought into the whole pining-after-someone-he’d-never-met thing (pretending he even had a choice in the matter), so obviously he had to fall for his lab partner/project partner/person he sat next to in every class. Apparently the teachers thought it was funny to pair up the kid named “Sanders” and the one named “Saunders”. It was that, or just some alphabetization. Either way, it meant they had spent a lot of time together in their first three years of high school. Logan was distant at first, but after a while they opened up to each other. Which was a little weird because Virgil was pretty much the world’s worst lab partner, always assuming so strongly what would happen and planning to mess up, which in turn tended to mess them up. Now they seemed to talk about anything and everything, Virgil’s speaking ability permitted. Logan loved tea and Sherlock and classic literature (Victorianism not Romanticism) and jam and being right and debates and space. He really loved space. Whenever anyone brought up space his eyes lit up and it practically made Virgil’s heart do backflips. He was just glad one of the questions wasn’t “what do you like about them?” because Virgil could have written an essay. What was there, however, was far worse. 

          27. Write 10-20 poems about them.

Now Virgil was an emo nightmare of a person, but he did deviate from the trend in one key factor: He couldn’t write poems. No angsty sonnets for him, no haikus about suffering, no half-baked attempts to write his own songs. Nothing.

Virgil got up from his comfortable chair and started sifting through boxes on the floor, looking for something he’d rather forget. Underneath one particularly dusty pile of biology notes, he found what he’d been looking for, a beat up composition notebook that had served as his 6th grade English notebook. He flipped through the pages, stopping when he finally found the page labeled “poetry rules”. How he remembered this page, he had no idea, but was at least partially thankful for it.  

Haikus: 3 lines. 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. Doesn’t have to rhyme.  

Well that seemed easy enough.

****

Your eyes look really nice  

Magnified by your glasses  

Blue as the ocean   

Your hair looks fluffy  

I want to touch it sometimes  

So soft and shiny  

****  

Logan anticipated a lot of things. He anticipated his AP World History teacher to say something dull or ignorant during class. He anticipated the way his earl grey would taste every morning, bitter with hints of citrus. He even, on occasion, anticipated the perpetrator in his mystery novels, attempting to figure it out before the detective did. What Logan did not anticipate was two of his friends running towards him before he could enter school for the day.

“Logan, something absolutely delightful happened inside,” Dolos said, dressed in a peculiar combination of a suit and rubber gloves. Remus nodded vigorously next to him, munching on what seemed to be frosting in an empty deodorant bottle.

“There’s something inside your locker Nerdy Wolverine!” Remus said, making an attempt at teasing out his own curiosity while simultaneously applying a neon green fake mustache to his upper lip.

“Remus, if it is rats again, I am really not interested, especially after last time-” Logan began, thinking back to the year they had decided to share a locker.

“Of course. Because we totally put it in there,” Dolos interrupted, rolling his eyes.

“I personally think it’s a jar full of angry hornets that’s set to break when you open your locker, releasing into the school and stinging everyone but Dolos says that’s “unrealistic” because he’s no fun,” Remus said, waving his hands around to simulate a hornet infestation.

“But if you didn’t put anything there, how do you know there is something in there to begin with?” Logan asked.  

“There was a sign on your locker,” Dolos said, gesturing to the door, “But don’t worry, it’s super tasteful.” With that, the two walked off, snickering. Despite the fact that school started in 20 minutes, they walked away from school.

Logan arrived at his locker, not knowing what exactly to prepare for. What he found, was his locker covered in dark blue paper hearts, “There’s a surprise inside” written on them. It was more distinctive    than he would have liked, but it certainly wasn’t the worst thing he could have come across. The hearts managed not to cover his lock, so he could easily open his locker, however what was on the inside proved the hearts correct, for it was definitely a surprise.

His locker was covered along the walls, flowers, candy, and streamers occupying any blank space along the sides. In the back of his locker, there was blue poster paper with words Logan didn’t bother to read. On the small shelf he had in his locker, he found sugar cookies in the pattern of the Microsoft logo, littered with little blue sprinkles.  

The most interesting thing however, was on the side of the door. Around twenty pieces of paper folded into little red paper hearts stuck with string onto the inside of his locker door. What was even more intriguing was the fact that there seemed to be words written on them. Carefully, he plucked one of them and unfolded it.

You smile so bright  

Your laugh makes me want to cry  

But in a good way  

Ok, so it wasn’t a great poem, but nevertheless Logan thought it had a particular quaint authenticity to it. He pulled them off, one by one, careful not to rip them. In every heart, he found a haiku of similar quality and theme. Virgil would probably enjoy them, and for a moment Logan considered giving him something like this. Virgil seemed to have a certain affection for particularly bad poetry, and Logan had an affection for Virgil. Besides, it seemed that some of the poems were just lyrics from some of Virgil’s favorite songs, something about falling boys and chemistry.  

When he had finished reading through the poems, Logan decided to have a better look at the poster in the back of his locker. Looking at the giant words on the paper answered some of his questions, but caused even more. Logan, I like you a lot. Go out with me? - Virgil.

 It made sense, that this whole display was a confession of sorts, however what didn’t make sense was the fact that it wasn’t, well, Virgil. Virgil was a little bit extra sometimes, but from what Logan knew of him, he was far too nervous to do something like this. And if it was Virgil, then where was he? Unless he had run off somewhere-

Virgil had definitely run off somewhere. He looked at his watch. He had fifteen minutes till class started, which was probably enough time to find him.

****

Virgil was, for lack of a better phrase, freaking the hell out. He got to school really early, early enough to intercept Logan, who got to school like half an hour before he really needed to. The night before, he realized he couldn’t go through with the showy confession. Logan would probably hate it and then maybe hate him, which would of course happen after Logan rejected him so then Logan would stop talking to him because Virgil embarrassed him with it and then Roman would hate him because it didn’t work and then his life would fall apart. So instead he decided to get to school early enough to intercept Logan and confess to him before he could see the giant confession, then explain what had happened when he got rejected and got it so Logan was never surprised with whatever Roman planned. He would wait in the empty classroom Logan spent study hall in (he worked out an arrangement with the science teachers) and wait for Logan, who usually came there before his locker. He felt like such a stalker knowing that, when in reality he just asked Logan’s friend Dolos.

Which would have worked out great, except Virgil couldn’t stop freaking out. He was just staring at the clock, anxiously waiting for him to come in, all the while mentally running through every worst case scenario. He had around 13 minutes before school started, which meant Logan had to be there. It would be any minute before-

“Hello?”

Logan was there, dressed formally as always, hair slicked back with a polo shirt and tie. Virgil was there too, but he was sitting on a table, staring at the clock above the door.

“Hi Logan,” Virgil said as calmly as he could, which happened to be not calmly at all. “I have, uh, something for you.”

Virgil reached behind him for the card he had made. He painted a swirly blue sky with Logan’s favorite constellation on it. Hopefully he would like it more than the giant display.

“It’s very nice looking,” Logan commented, looking at the front. “It even has Vega on it, my favorite.”

Logan probably didn’t even know what was going on. Virgil thought he was amazing, but even he had to admit Logan was clinically oblivious. Logan opened up the card, looking a little confused and surprised. But not angry or disappointed. So that was a step in the right direction.

Logan flipped around the card to show him the inside. Logan, would you like to maybe go out with me?  “Yes? Assuming you are asking what it seems you are asking, I would love to go out with you.”

What?

Virgil wasn’t sure if he was happy or confused or surprised, the emotions blending in the pit of his stomach. But he said yes. Logan said yes.  

“Y-yes? Are you sure?”

“Yes Virgil, I’m certain.”

Virgil let out a breath. He was in a calmer place and honestly a little light-headed. Logan sat next to him on the table, looking like he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Ok. In that case, be careful when you visit your locker. There’s something in there that’s a little, uh, extra,” Virgil said, trying to be as vague as possible. Logan’s face scrunched up in confusion.

“If you’re talking about the confession you made, I have already seen it. I apologize if I ruined any surprises.”

“You- But- You saw it? And you don’t hate me now?” Virgil asked, it a bit of a frenzy.

“No, not at all. I particularly liked the poems.”

Virgil was surprised. Flabbergasted. Betrayed. He could no longer tell if he wanted to punch or hug Roman. Maybe both.

“It was actually Roman’s idea, but I’m glad you don’t hate me,” Virgil said, wringing his hands and looking at Logan. “I also don’t have too much planned for the actual, um, date. I kind of assumed you’d say no.”

“You do like jumping to conclusions. Fortunately, I am prepared. There’s a new documentary on one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto, and it will be playing Friday at seven thirty. Does that sound enjoyable?”

Virgil simply nodded with a smile.

“Perfect, I will pick you up at seven. It is, as they say, a date.” Logan said, surprisingly well prepared for someone who didn’t know he would be asked out. Both of them slid off the table, standing back on the ground. Just as Logan began to leave, Virgil reached out and tentatively caught his hand. Logan’s eyebrows raised for a moment, then turned more relaxed.

Slowly and happily, the two walked out together, hand in hand.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CAR

In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. In 1995 I started a company to pick these out. When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have worse problems to worry about this, just as everyone knows, should generate fast code. It was also a test of wealth, because the longer I have to live at home, I have to live at home, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Sequoia describes what such a deck should contain, and since we're new to fundraising, we feel like we have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. And now that I've written this, everyone else can blame me if they want. These combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do, and even so we witness a constant series of explosions as these two volatile components combine.

In the past this has not been a 100% indicator of success if only anything were but much better than random. I recommend to people who need a new idea. You had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. This approach is less daunting, and the latter is not simply a constant fraction of the former. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed as the core language. I've found life is too short for something, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. Once you're living in the future, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good. Companies will pay for software, but I didn't remember exactly why till YC raised money itself. It must be terse, simple, and hackable. Childhood was getting old. He didn't say anything, but I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it.

An eminent Lisp hacker told me that when he went to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions. A startup that investors seem to like us too. At any given time there tends to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup don't care whether it closes. It will tend to be very successful. They seemed a little surprised at having total freedom. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they drift just the right level of craziness. I wanted to do. Or more importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good valuation, you can tell them that number. Don't try to start Twitter. Although empirically you're better off taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off using the organic method. A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously big and yet in which they have no competitors.

Be sure to ask about how they funded themselves with breakfast cereal. The Airbnbs themselves never even saw these emails at the time whether this was because of the Bubble, or because it's hard to get the first commitment. If you're going to be. Friends offer moral support few startups are started by one person, but I have never once sensed any unresolved tension between them. When do you stop fundraising? But there's a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to that end. Number one, research must be original—and in practice languages are judged relative to whatever they're used to hack. That's the myth in the Valley.

From the evidence I've seen so far, and they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize they had, because you know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling. If you know a lot about their pets and spend a lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in making money by speculating in stocks. I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end of the scale, nature seems to be hard to sell to them, or the productivity of programmers gets measured in lines of code. In fact, we were just as frightened when we started Viaweb. It's the same process at work. To make a startup hub is that once you have enough people interested in startups. Increasingly it will mean the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. In the best case, the papers are just a formality.

Fortunately there's a better way of preventing it than the other students. Microsoft. An employer couldn't get away with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if they did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink from the challenge. As Marc Andreessen put it, because it can take years to figure out. Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as figuring out how to connect some company's legacy database to their Web server. But it is not merely a process of filling in. This way, you'll not only waste your time, but also burn your reputation with those investors. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to fundraising. But only a bit: willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almost as complicated as determination.

You've still picked a good team. I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. For the first year, our initial reaction to news of a competitor was always: we're doomed. A lot of them don't care that much personally about whether founders keep board control. You can take money from investors one at a time and you haven't raised any money yet, you probably have an idea for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. Till they do, you can take their word for it. They want to know what sort of person who has them. One great thing about having small children is that they all wait as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is imagination. 6 months working on this stupid idea?

Someone who was strong-willed person stronger-willed. Also turn off every other filter, particularly Could this be a big company? A hacker would consider being asked to write add x to y giving z instead of z x y as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as a surprise to many people is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers unless you're also a teenager. For example, you start a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? A lot of them try to make it open. Gone were the mumbling recitations of lists of features. It's hard to design good libraries.

[thebigg-v3]

AI – Thoughts and Rants

This summer semester I decided to take Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which the university I go to offers as an elective for CS majors. Which is awesome, I know! As a computer science student I had been curious for a while about the robots, talking computers that assist Iron Man, and even the “magic” behind things like Siri. Yes even I, someone who is in the “know” about a field like software engineering, which is intertwined with AI in more ways than one, fantasizes (or used to, maybe?) about a future where robots assist us on all kinds of tasks and make our lives better/easier, or in the case of I, Robot, a lot worse. All jokes and fiction aside, the fact is that AI exists already in our lives. In fact it is so infused with our day-to-day lives that we don’t even notice it. You ever look at the weather app on your phone? Do you ever go to Google Translate? Do you ever ask Google for directions? Do you ever ask Siri anything? All of these things use some technique that was born in the field of AI, or machine learning (which is a very close sibling to AI). I could go into all  kinds of impressive, and not-so-impressive, techniques that I learned about in the class. A-Star search; Informed Search; Probabilistic Reasoning; Markovian Models; Neural Nets, etc. But this is not the reason why I write this.

The reason why I write this essay/blog post is because a friend of mine, who is planning on taking the class next semester, asked me a very simple question, “How is AI?”. Well...the truth is that is not a simple question at all. It’s a tough question. Because I do have MANY reservations about AI. They range from the philosophical, technical and even reach out to my ethical concerns about Artificial Intelligence. Now, before I go on, I want to be clear about something: THIS IS A BIASED PIECE. As I go on, you’ll notice I have specific opinions about AI as a software engineer. I also want to state that this is NOT a piece meant to attack/offend anybody/anyone/ any organization that is researching AI or building products powered by AI/machine learning. I think you are all awesome people(a little crazy, but in a good way), and you have my utmost and sincere respect. Now that that is out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Before coming to this class I thought AI was an awesome/fascinating field(at the moment I still do). That with everyone—mainstream media, programmers, Google, Microsoft—hyping up AI, I thought to myself, there has to be reason for all the buzz and fuzz about this “AI thing” . And to be honest, MOST of it is undeniably granted. So...as a software engineer I was surprised by how mathematical AI really was. You’d think that a field that is, as stated before, so infused with our lives would be somewhere on the vicinity of software engineering in regards to practicality. But it’s truly not. The truth is that a lot of problems, rightfully so, have to be theorized/generalized in some way before they’re solved in an intelligent manner by a machine. And this makes sense. Think about it, if you want to talk about path-finding, “paths” aren’t simply cities A-F, and find the shortest path. This could be the surface of a new planet with a different landscape, New York, a colony in the moon or you might even have a case where you’re concerned about the cost of moving a piece on a chessboard. It’s also not just about making the algorithm fast. And it’s not that AI doesn’t welcome nice Big O notations like constant time and linear and logN—and these are becoming less central to any algorithm given all of the crazy-fast hardware we have today and the crazier-faster that is still to come. These are, like any algorithm, preferred over N^2 or something above that. However, AI’s top priority to my understanding(at least if I learned what I was supposed to learn), is to solve problems, or find answers, in an intelligent way.

But what the in the world does intelligent mean, anyway?

This is when AI becomes philosophical. And, if you ever take this class(or at least the specific AI class I took), you won’t be tested on the philosophical definitions of AI. But even though you won’t be tested on those when doing the projects, which is the most important part of the class, you won’t directly use anything philosophical, it’s worth keeping in mind that any algorithm in AI is trying to do things intelligently. This means that brute force is not welcome; that randomness, with some exceptions(like hill climbing), is not very welcome; most things that aren’t generalized(in an intelligent manner) are not very welcome. This is one of the reasons why AI is math-heavy: AI scientists need a way to generalize intelligence. But how general can intelligence really be? Can it really mimic the intelligence of a human to the point that it can compose songs, write an essay on the politics of the world and even make moral judgments? At the end of the day, not really. I mean you can take all of the songs recorded up to this day, and write a fancy neural net(don’t ask me how they work, they’re not super-complicated, but not a walk-in-the-park either) and it can classify and recognize some patterns and put something together….but it’s just re-mixing what we’ve already heard and listened to a million times. So no, AI is not that general. The AI of today is very narrow. This is not to say that it is useless. AI is very useful and will be in the future; speech recognition will get better; self-driving cars will improve; it will be able to write “better” songs. But AI won’t have a face; it won’t (and this is subjectively my opinion) have the ability to make moral judgments(and if we allow it to, then we are fools buying snake oil). As a software engineer I found the radical uses of Bayes Theorem somewhat interesting, but not very exciting. I found myself subscribing to the idea to program intelligence into the machine, rather than program it and tell it what to do. This, if I’m being frank, made me a little uncomfortable. As a software engineer I like tinkering with machines, I like to write programs that solve problems(rather than “program” intelligence and let It solve the problems for me). I felt as if I were being submissive to this idea—I know, it’s a stretch. And yes, I am probably romanticizing programming as a craft, but I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Speaking of programming machines, that reminds me, to the AI people(and I’m speaking about the specific people that guided me throughout the class—professors and TAs) the code did not matter. Which struck me as surprising, and a little unnerving. To them all that mattered was the theorems, excel charts and “report”. Which again, given the fact that the code itself in practice is the building block for the AI agent to do whatever it is that it needs to do, was unnerving—borderline frustrating. I don’t write code to plot charts, theorize formulas or see trends. That’s not to say, I write code without documentation. Documentation is not what we are talking about here. Indeed, self-documented code is a must. But to write code to satisfy Bayes Theorem? That itself is frustrating and, in my opinion, goes against the spirit of creativity in programming. It goes against the lemma I follow when I code—hack away. Hack the malloc calls to the point where all of the segments you allocate are continuous; trick the OS into caching at all levels only your processes; manipulate CPU priorities to make your process priority 1 because the game you’re building is over-bloated with physics calculations and unnecessary art, and that computer does not have a GPU. AI felt nothing like hacking computers. AI felt nothing like engineering solutions. It felt like forcing code to comply with some theorem—Bayes Theorem,  making informed decisions, Perceptron, etc. I seriously respect these techniques, because all of them are incredibly cool and quite impressive. And heck, software engineers do use these techniques today. But, in my humble opinion, an engineer doesn’t have to fully comply with a mathematical rule. They are nice because they make a bunch of assumptions that MOST of the time are true. But in engineering, when we have to directly sometimes interact with hardware and users, some of these assumptions are not very useful in practice. Sometimes as engineers, if we were building an OS, one might have to hard-code stuff with macros in C to make a specific architecture/piece of hardware faster. Sometimes in software engineering, one doesn’t have the luxury of just “throwing memory” at a problem—which is part of the idea of machine learning, along with some statistics. Throw memory at it, implement perceptron and you can classify pictures! Engineers have to keep in mind the cost of adding two gigs of ram—cost in terms of money and resources. As an engineer, when handling CPU scheduling, sometimes one doesn’t know what the best scheduling scheme is. Sometimes engineers have to wait till users actually use the software, and get a “feel” for what’s the best CPU scheduling scheme, given the different use cases. AI doesn’t like hard-coded macros, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t love edge-cases hacks, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t care about beautiful code that might be 10% faster because one follows good practices. AI, from the impression I got in this class, is almost programming-independent. One might even say it finds programming languages hindering because there isn’t a language that fully expresses how “great”(ahem, intelligent) It really is. I could be wrong about these assumptions. Because, heck, what do I know? I’m only a software engineer.

Despite my reservations about AI, I highly recommend taking the class as a CS major. Having said what I said, AI is not going away. For better or worse, it will stay in the lives of people, software engineers and not-software engineers. It is and will be a necessary evil of our present and future. Take the class, get a feel for what you think of it. And if you’re like me—you like to hack computers—you’ll survive in that jungle of probability and intelligence greatness. I honestly can’t tell you to stay or not, that’s your choice. In the meantime, I choose not to.

[patt0ncake]

What Should We Die For Ch3

Title: What Shall We Die For?

Fandom: Sanders Sides.

Summary: When a demon invades Thomas’s mind Virgil is faced with the question. What shall you die for? He just hopes he can make the right choice.

Warnings: Possession, blood, violence, Deceit (the character, and the lies) Manipulation. Uh…let me know if I’ve left anything out! 

<--Previous  | Ch 1 | A03 |

Tag list: @wisepuma23 @senseless-septic-shambles @genderfluid-pigeon @princeyism @bird-based-anarchy   @cdragontogacotar  @nephilim-the-jack  @queenof-purple

As the door to Roman’s inner room became visible a weary but content smile came upon the royal’s face. Only hours ago, though in his realm it felt like days or weeks because of the magic, he had been called by a few of his subjects to help defeat the Dragon Witch again as she had started to terrorize the outlying villages. And, as Prince, he was duty bound to help his subjects in anyway he could. So, he had gotten his favorite sword, a few provisions and saddled up his favorite steed to ride off in search of the dreaded witch.

That had taken longer than he would have liked because he was a bit worried about Virgil. True, there didn’t seem to be anything overly wrong or concerning about him, but there was something that seemed…off somehow and it was driving him mad. So, he had taken longer than he had originally wanted, only to find that the Dragon Witch had practically disappeared, leaving a great manticore-chimera behind to throw him off her trail.  Then, when he had finally defeated the beast and caught up with the Dragon Witch, she had thought it would be funny to curse him with an unfortunate case of hives.

Needless to say, when he had finally been able to come home, there was nothing more that he wanted to do than take a cleansing bath with the special magical-healing-bath-bomb that he had created and enjoy a very long undisturbed nap.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

With a groan Roman spun around and stalked towards the door, feeling very uncharitable to whoever had disturbed his plans of relaxing. Swinging open the door he looked at the bespectacled side and snapped out. “What do you want Microsoft-Nerd? I’m a little busy at the moment.”

Logan’s eyebrow twitched as he took in the rumpled state of the clothes Roman was wearing. “Clearly,” he said his voice dry. Roman puffed up, outraged that he would just dismiss him like that, but Logan spoke before he could.  “Why did you do it?”

“Why did I do what, Logan?” Roman asked, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Falsehood. I can’t believe you would do something like this. I know you were upset about the fact that the fans favorite seems to be shifting, but I didn’t expect you to do something so drastic. And then lie about it to my face as well.” Logan seethed, his face visibly furious.

Roman took a step back, startled at how upset the usually calm and collected side was acting. Then, his exhaustion and stress gave way to anger and snappishness. “Whatever, I don’t need this right now. Come back when you’re able to make sense again.” And with that he snapped the door shut before anything else could be said.

Leaning his head against the door he sighed, wondering why Logan was so mad and why he had chosen to blame Roman. No matter, he decided, he would deal with this after his bath.

WSWDF

Things were tense in Thomas’s mindscape. Logan wasn’t talking to Roman, convinced that he had smashed his beloved Crofters and that this was his way of getting back at the logical trait for some imagined slight. Roman wasn’t talking to Logan because he was appalled that Logan had blamed him for something that he clearly didn’t do. Patton was trying to make peace between the two but ultimately was unsuccessful. Remuel was helping in his own way…or rather, he was egging them on further and then chuckling about it when he was back in Virgil’s room.

Remuel snuck into Roman’s room after he had created a diversion involving Logan, Roman and Patton’s freshly baked cookies. Knowing that the royal would be occupied for a while—or at least as long as Remuel needed him to be—he got to work searching the room.

‘What…are you going to do?’ Virgil demanded, voice sluggish.

Remuel tsked in mock sympathy. “Oh, hon you’re not sounding well at all. Maybe you should just sleep.” Virgil’s flash of anger made him chuckle.

‘Well maybe you should go die in a ditch.’

Remuel smirked “You first darling.”

When his only reply was a grumble and the mental equivalent of flipping the bird he just chuckled again before going back to his task. “Ah here it is!” Remuel purred in satisfaction. Held in his hands looked to be a script of some kind. It wasn’t finished yet but looked as if it had taken countless hours and a few sleepless nights of work. “Oh, look Virgie it’s dedicated to you! How…sentimental.”

‘What are you going to do?’ Virgil demanded his voice a little stronger than before.

“Improve it.” Remuel said a wicked smile on his face before ripping it into pieces.

‘STOP’ Virgil yelled, angry that he felt so helpless.

“Mmm…no.” Remuel said his voice smug. Hearing the pounding of feet up the stairs Remuel knew it was time to move, so with one last tear he dropped the pieces onto Roman’s bed, placing Logan’s favorite tie next to them. “Perfect.”

WSWDF

Logan was in his room furious at how Roman had been acting. He knew that they were currently at odds with each other, but he had never imagined that Roman would take it out on Patton.

Patton…

Logan’s heart clenched as the memory of Patton’s crestfallen face appeared in his mind’s eye. When the moral trait had seen the trays of cookies—cookies that he had so patiently baked—on the floor he looked like he was going to cry. But when Logan had yelled at Roman for ruining Patton’s cookies Patton really did cry.

A very loud and anguished scream startled Logan out of his thoughts and he bolted out of his room.

“What’s going on?” he asked Virgil as Patton tried to calm down Roman.

Virgil opened his mouth to answer but was cut off as Roman finally noticed Logan.

“YOU!” The royal roared, his sword appearing in his hand. He held it towards the shocked trait, his eyes looking murderous. “How could you do this to me, you fiend!”

“What on earth are you talking about Roman?” Logan asked equal parts alarmed and confused.

“Someone tore up the script that he had been working on,” Patton explained, his voice low and soothing.

“What?” Logan asked aghast. He knew how much work Roman had done on that; he even had come to Logan for his advice a few times.

“Oh, like you don’t already know,” Roman snarled, causing Logan to flinch. “Seeing how you were the one who did it.”

Logan rocked back, shocked at the amount of venom in the words. Then, as his brain finally registered what had been said, his shock gave way to anger. “Me? Preposterous! I haven’t even stepped foot in your room. How could I have possibly rip up your script? Or, for that matter, why would I want to do that in the first place?”

Roman scoffed, “Why? Because you wanted revenge of course. Revenge for breaking your ‘precious Crofters‘ which, as I told you before, I did not do.”

Logan spluttered, looking too angry to even speak.

“Maybe we all should just settle down,” Patton soothed placing a hand on Roman’s arm. “Come on Ro, put your sword away.” Roman started to lower the sword slightly but stopped as Logan straightened in anger.

“Where’s the proof?” Virgil asked suddenly, taking them all by surprise. They had forgotten that he was even there.

Logan smirked. “Virgil’s right. Where is your proof Roman? Where’s your proof that I did it?”

Roman sneered at the look on Logan’s smug face. “You want proof?” He snapped tossing the logical side’s tie at him. “There’s your precious proof. I found it by the pieces of my script.”

Logan stared at the piece of cloth in shock. He had lost this tie a few days ago and didn’t know how it possibly could’ve ended up in Roman’s room.

“Oh Logan,” Patton breathed looking at the logical side with tears in his eyes. “How could you?”

Logan flinched at the accusation in Patton’s eyes. “It wasn’t me. Patton you have to believe me.” Patton just looked away, causing Logan’s heart to twist. He looked at Virgil pleadingly. “Virge, you know I wouldn’t…”

Virgil looked at him and Logan bit his lip at the look in his eyes. “I don’t know Lo. I mean, your tie—your favorite tie—was in his room. That is pretty damning evidence.”

“Fine,” Logan whispered his tone hurt. “Fine don’t listen. I’ll just be in my room.”

With that he stomped into his room and slammed the door.

WSWDF

Remuel snickered quietly to himself as he thought of what had happened earlier between the two warring sides. The two were now unable to be in the same room as the other and poor Patton had been beside himself trying to get them to talk to each other. Remuel had just stood to the side watching in quiet amusement - though he always looked ‘properly sad’ when anyone had looked his way. Shaking his head, he walked through the fog and mist of the subconscious, ready to meet up with the three dark sides that he had agreed to work with.

‘It won’t be long now,’ he mused to both himself and Virgil. ‘It won’t be long until they hate each other and then it will be easy to kill them.’

‘No. I won’t let you!’ Virgil yelled wishing he had never went out patrolling. ‘I swear I’ll kill you first!’

“Mm…I’m afraid your word doesn’t mean much kitten,” Remuel laughed.

‘Go to hell,’ Virgil snarled.

“Oh darling, where did you think I came from?” Remuel said in amusement. “Now hush - the adults are talking.” He looked up as he felt the presence of the others. “Good evening gents. How goes the subconscious?”

Wrath snarled at him looking rather…well…wrathful. “Enough, now what news do you have about the dear light sides?” The term ‘light sides’ was spat out as if it was something foul.

Remuel smirked. “Oh, our dear friends are fighting among themselves I fear. Tis a shame really.”

“What of Patton?” Greed asked his eye glinting in excitement.

“The poor dear is simply beside himself.” Remuel pouted slightly before a wicked grin slid across his face.

“Excellent.” Envy grinned, a cruel one that twisted his features unpleasantly.

“And the Snake?” Greed demanded.

“He won’t be a problem anymore.”

Envy smirked. “Perfect. Now finish them.”

Remuel bobbed his head and gave them a mock salute. “Your wish is my command.”

As he walked back towards the dwelling of the light sides he bumped into Logan.

“Oh, sorry teach,” Remuel chuckled lightly. “Didn’t see you there.”

“What were you doing out in the subconscious Virgil?” Logan asked eyes narrowed slightly.

Remuel ducked his head slightly. “Well, you guys were still fighting, and I couldn’t take the tense atmosphere, so I decided to do a quick patrol. You know, got to make sure nothing bad gets into Thomas’s mind.”

Logan frowned for a moment, his eyes slightly pained before he looked back at Remuel. “Right…well anything to report?”

Remuel grinned up at him. “Nope. It was all quiet. Now if you’ll excuse me I promised that I’d make cookies with Patton, so I’d best be off.”

Logan stepped aside still staring at him closely, he seemed to be thinking about something. “Of course. Don’t want to be late.”

Remuel forced himself to grin, not wanting to come under suspicion when he was so close to his goal. “Of course.”

WSWDF

Logan watched his fellow side go with a slight frown. He could’ve sworn that he heard Virgil talking to someone before he came up, and he seemed to be acting strange. In fact, ever since he had come back from his last recon mission he had seemed….different. More aloof and he spent a lot more time in holed up in his room.

And now with the fighting between Roman and himself he was starting to think that Virgil knew more than he let on. Take the thing with Roman’s script and his tie. He knew that he wasn’t responsible for the torn script, but he had no idea how his tie had got in Roman’s room in the first place and—

He stopped suddenly as something tickled his memory. Virgil had been looking around his room a while back and that was around the time that his tie had gone missing…

“No, it can’t be.” Logan muttered, heart dropping. Metaphorically speaking that is. “He can’t have.” Vowing to get to the bottom of this he rushed into the main room, startling Patton.

“Goodness Logan, what’s wrong?” Patton asked, eyes wide as he looked up from the coloring book on his lap.

“I apologize Patton,” Logan said straightening. He looked at Patton and then at Roman, who was currently glaring at him. “ I do believe we should talk.”

“Well of course, what’s going on Lo?” Patton said setting his coloring book to the side.

“I…would you mind if we reconvene in my room?” Logan asked glancing around the room quickly. He didn’t want Virgil to hear.

“I guess we can,” Patton said looking puzzled. “Let me just get Virgil.”

“NO!” Logan said sharply before clearing his throat embarrassed. “I mean no, we do not need to bother him with this.”

Roman’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And just what is so important, calculator-watch?”

“Not here,” Logan whispered before sinking out.

Once both sides had followed him into his room he made sure the door was locked and that no sound could get out. Turning to his guests he noted that they looked confused and a little bit concerned at his behavior.

“Lo? What’s this about?” Patton asked softly.

“I think there might be something going on with Virgil.” Logan said finally.

“Oh Logan, you don’t know how right you are.” A voice came from the shadows and Deceit stepped out into the light.

[pendragonfics]

H@CK3R

Paring: Griff/Reader

Tags: female reader, reader is a hacker, established relationship, canon compliant, angst, fluff.

Summary: The problem with being a paid hacker was that you could really do anything you wanted. Legally? Not really. But you still did it, even without the warrant required.

Word Count: 2,056

Current Date: 2017-09-14

The problem with working early was that the bed was too warm. Too soft. Too snuggly. And your bedfellow? Well, he was all that and more. Your boyfriend Griffin had been a one-night stand four years ago, and when you both had tried to sneak out of the motel the next day, you found each other struggling to make a getaway with a sock half on and buttons in the wrong holes, and decided that, instead of leaving it at the best damn sex you’ve ever had but at want to take this to Starbucks? It’s my day off. Then you just couldn’t get rid of each other.

He was like the white splotches to your panda, the cream to your coffee, the accelerator to your 1992 Chevy. When you came home early after early starts, he came home late after late stars, or whenever he pleased, really, smelling of engine oil or whiskey or someone else’s cigarettes. But waking up, well, that was the thing. You wanted so badly to be the small spoon to his larger one, wanted to stay so close to his chest and smell in the musk that was so Griff and trace your fingers over his tattoos until he woke up.

But you had work.

You always had work.

“I gotta get up,” you moan against his chest, one of those bear-like arms tangled close to your back, keeping you near his warmth. It was so nice, and if it was on your little-to-none paid holiday days, you’d savour it, but you can’t. Unless you want to be broke and snuggled up to Griff, you must greet the day. You groan when his arm grows tighter around your waist. “Griff…”

He groans back. It’s a guttural noise, animal-like, ferocious. But to you, it’s nothing but a kitten impersonating a lion. Griff might be built like a hurricane shelter, tattooed like bus stop, drive a battered pickup truck and swear like a sailor, but he’s a sweetie.

“Griff.” You repeat. “We can snuggle later. I’ve – I’ve got to get up.”

He makes another noise. Then, in that handsome accent, “Do you really gotta go?”

You nod. “Yeah.”

---

The problem with being a paid hacker was that you could really do anything you wanted. Legally? Not really. But you still did it, even without the warrant required. The man who hired you always pixelated his face when on the regular Skype, and spoke with a surprisingly All-American accent that most certainly pledged allegiance to the flag and then stole from it. Because that’s what you were – the canary. Back when miners were actual people who had pickaxes and dug for lumps of coal to burn, they had a thing where they’d use a bird to make sure it was safe. That bird was you – scoping out the world from behind a shield of encrypted software and ones and zeroes and code that you could do in your sleep. You figured out the chinks in the armour of Big Pharma and those seemingly impregnable places, and exploited them for your boss to do what he would with it.

And you just did it. You weren’t really morally flawed. Maybe just a teeny-tiny bit. A smidge. You still took the money from your boss, you lived from it. It’s what kept you from being just like your ancestors, starved by poverty or drowned in addictions. You kept hacking, you kept getting paid. Did it make you a bad person? You didn’t want to be a bad person. You helped elderly ladies make it to their cars when it was rainy and they forgot an umbrella. You let younger kids win arm wrestles with you. You knew all the lyrics to Mama Mia! The Musical! Bad people didn’t sing disco.

Griff caught you like this one evening. He came home smelling like engine oil again, his undershirt splattered with traces of it, his eyebrows quizzical and questioning your still fingers at the keyboard on your laptop. He knew you could write eighty words per minute, and when you were still, it either meant there were no words to come out, or perhaps all of them were stuck somewhere, aching to be translated from brain to keyboard.

“Babe?” He asked, and placed one of your knitted shawls over your shoulders. It smelt like something used in the washing machine, but with Griff standing over you, his scent overpowered that. “Something wrong?”

You shake your head, closing the screen. “Nope,” you reach up to stroke his facial hair, enjoying as Griff hummed as you carded your finger through his manicured hair. “It’s probably nothing.”

---

That night, instead of being in the crook of Griff’s arm, you’re positioned on the edge of the sofa arm like you only own that part of the chair, laptop perilously perched on your knees. Or rather, on a huddle of blankets and Griff’s jackets that are keeping you from turning into an icicle in the night air. The screen lights your face up as you plough through malware and firewalls, flicking switches in the code before you until it gives you a green light.

I’m in, you thought to yourself.

Your boss’s computer was not as well-protected as your own, and for that, you wondered how you’d never really thought of getting into the hood of his browser and looking at that secretive life lived. He had a folder of kid’s pictures on the desktop, some Freddie Mercury music, an unfinished picture of a boy with earbuds in from Microsoft Paint program.

You overlooked those. Instead, you fished deeper, going for the password-protected folders (an easy entry, your software could undo it easier than Griff undid your own bra) that were full of pdfs, documentation. Your eyes dart around the titles, and you realise. They’re all your files, things you’ve sent to him over time, all neat and tidily kept deep in his PC like archives of dirty secrets. There are files from six, seven years ago, as well as one you sent just three days ago.

“Tell me more,” you whisper to the empty air.

There’s no reply, unless you count the snuffle Griff makes, a snore, and a shift over the bed to the colder side of the mattress. Your side. But instead of thinking of how damn good it would be to be there beside your boyfriend, you return your attention to the screen. Closing that folder, you find one down the list titled crewmen. While the other folders are ordered by makes and models of cars, a word that doesn’t fit the cypher stands out like a grey hair on a dark-haired head.

You enter the folder, and blink.

It has thirty-six jpeg files in it, all labelled by surname. You know this, because you’re there, and so is Griff. The rest of the faces are unfamiliar, perhaps people you’ve met by off chance once in your life time, because they look bland. Unfamiliar. There’s a boy with sunglasses, like the drawing you found, an African American man, a woman with a small neck tattoo, an Asian man…you could keep looking at these unfamiliar people, but your eyes drift to Griff’s file.

Hesitantly, you click it. The photo is from before you met, and you only know that because there’s a tattoo missing under his ear in the picture. He isn’t smiling. He isn’t smiling because this picture is from a mug shot. You know Griff has done some shitty things and some shady stuff too, you don’t ask, but you just know. From what you can read from the jpeg, he’s from Arizona, has an offshore bank account and a long middle name you’ve never heard him talk about.

Next, you click on your file. It has a photograph of you, swiped from a post uploaded in 2011 from a deleted Facebook account. It has your name, your address, your status with Griff, your abilities, your wants, needs, life catalogued so neatly in Times New Roman font that it makes you retch, splutter, cough. Quickly, you swipe the two files, exit the hack, and toss your laptop onto the lounge, aghast.

You’ve found your answer.

---

When you tell Griff what you did that night, he’s silent. When his burner phone goes off, he doesn’t answer it. He’s just sitting there, looking at the files you’ve grabbed a hold of, lightly scowling at the picture of himself from years ago on your screen. You’re silent too. Sometimes, there doesn’t have to be words to say things. Sometimes, the silence speaks for itself.

“You work for Doc too?” He asks after a while.

You shake your head. “I don’t know who I work for.” You admit. “He’s very American, and we never see face-to-face. But he always wears a suit on Skype.”

Griff nods. “That’s Doc.”

You shiver. It can’t be coincidence that you’re both lovers who work for the same man. You’re no criminal, but from what you read, you see that Griff is, and constantly is. He’s the muscle, the intimidator, the man with a gun who tells you Shut up and give me the money! You can’t imagine Griff like that. He’s not like that with you. He’s got the words sand and wich tattooed on his knuckles (that was after a few too many drinks one night), and when it’s stormy outside he turns off his phone and keeps you close to him because he knows how much you hate thunder. But it says he’s killed people. Did it make him a bad person? You didn’t want him to be a bad person.

“I want to run away,” you whisper to thin air. “I can’t be responsible for this anymore.”

Griff types one finger at a time into incognito mode on Google Chrome, spelling out M-E-X-I-C-O. You shake your head. He deletes those letters, and types out, C-A-N-A-D-A. You don’t shake your head. Griff smiles, and while you flop backward in the chair, defeated at life and existence itself, his burner phone rings.

“Is that –,”

He nods. “It’s always Doc.” You swallow, watching as he flipped the archaic little phone open, holding it to his ear. You can’t hear the words on the other end, not with a speaker that’s straight out of 2003, but you get the gist of it from the way Griff’s mouth is twisting. At last, he snaps the phone shut, and a breath escapes your lungs. “Another job.”

You remember submitting a text file two days ago. It’s the last file you’ve sent, and while you’re sure he has a backup for you in case you go AWOL (like you’re planning to do), it’s the thought that counts. The last of your taint on the world around Atlanta.

“After…?”

You don’t need to finish. He nods. “After.”

---

When Griff comes home the night after the last heist, he’s gotten rid of his precious pickup truck and traded it in for an old 1970 Camaro. You raise your eyebrows at the muscle car, but remembering your boyfriend looks like a fiend and totally the type to not blink at in a jaded gem like a Camaro, you keep quiet. Everything in the apartment you can’t take with you has been methodically put into moving boxes stuffed with firelighters and newspaper, and with the sprinkler fire alarms on a well-paced timer, there’s sure to be enough damage there to erase all trace of you two existing in that apartment. There’s no way for sure you’re getting the bond back.

When you toss your bag in the back of the car, you jog up to the apartment, lighter in hand. But before you make the place go up in flames, you see you’ve left your laptop on the table. You know Griff is waiting on the street, and time is precious, but still, you log on, and open Skype messenger.

Screw you, Doc you type.

You flick the lighter, and light the wick leading to the boxes, leaving your laptop open, the screen to be soon burned to a crisp, hard drive fried as you and Griff leave your lives as criminals to become someone adjacent to that noun. You decided then and there, as you both hit the interstate that it didn’t make you bad people to bad things. Just people.

[pierrehardy]

The Looming Tech Schism

We rely on global cooperation to innovate on modern technology. This is because most modern tech relies on network effects: the product gets better only if more people use it.  Think, Facebook. It’s useless if you’re the only one using it, but awesome when all your friends do; at least it was awesome. The same goes for setting standard formats and conventions. Like, say, electricity. It would be insane if every country has its own different voltage coming out of their sockets.

But what we see now is a trend away from this kind of integration. The most significant tech leaders now are the West and China, and if you’ve seen the news, you’d know that they haven’t been the best of buds for a long time now, especially with America. People have been predicting that their souring relationships will lead to two disconnected tech bubbles in the world: a Chinese one and a Western one.

But is it, though?

If you look at how things are right now, it’s hard to believe that statement. The world is burning, but that’s precisely what enabled the tech industry to have its own golden age. Both the Chinese and Western tech companies are enjoying rising stocks, with the global market capitalization of tech industries reaching ¼ of the pie worldwide.

Apple sales in China are still going strong. Huawei has been posting record revenues. The adoption of 5G and sudden demand for telecommuting has been a boon to the tech industry. So are we really sure that we’re headed to such a gloomy outlook technologically? Well, maybe. Hear me out. 

The cracks

Let’s start to enumerate the little things because they do add up. A lot of tiny cracks can make a house collapse.

Let’s start with a couple of small ones: Facebook and Microsoft temporarily suspended cooperation on data sharing with Hong Kong police after China passed their draconian National Security Law over HK. Facebook doesn’t stand to lose much since they have little business there, but more so for Microsoft. The other crack is America’s mulling over banning TikTok, a Chinese app. India also banned TikTok plus other Chinese apps in retaliation to their little Himalayan skirmish.

Here’s a bigger crack, and also what spurred me to write this piece: the British are reversing their earlier commitments to let Huawei build some of their 5G networks. This U-turn is not an easy decision since Huawei is the leader in 5G technology. The next alternative would be Nokia or Ericsson, who are pretty behind and would delay everything by a few years.

The UK’s official reason is that its Government Communications Headquarters recommended canceling the plans because of upcoming American sanctions towards China. These sanctions, they say, will make Huawei’s supply chains more vulnerable and would make them less confident that they can fulfill their contract to the UK. Reasonable, but that’s probably not the only reason.

Lately, relations between the UK and China have been bumpy. The British offered Hong Kongers paths to citizenship after the passage of the National Security Law. They also bolstered the screening of foreign investments to prevent or hamper the Chinese shopping spree of international companies. Some lawmakers also wanted to put Carrie Lam, the CEO of Hong Kong, into the country’s own version of the Magnitsky list.

The Magnitsky Act is an American bill dedicated to Sergei Magnistky, who was a thorn in the side of corrupt Russian oligarchs. He was arrested and tortured to death in prison. The Magnitsky Act sanctions individuals with gross human rights violations. People in this list, mostly Saudia Arabian and Russian, can have their assets frozen in the country and be barred entry.

There has also been more mounting pressure for the British to go cold on Chinese relations. As mentioned, China’s law in Hong Kong was a blatant violation of the handover treaty between the two countries. British politicians were also appalled by the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang. There’s pressure from allies (the Five Eyes, an Anglo intelligence alliance, between America, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand).

Historically, when James Cameron was the prime minister of the UK, and when Boris Johnson was the mayor of London, they were warm and optimistic towards China. By being closer to them, the British thought they can influence China to be more liberal, just like a girl wanting to be with a bad boy because she can change him. Sorry to disappoint, but China just got more repressive since then.

To be fair, China also assumed wrongly about the UK. After Brexit, Chinese negotiators mentioned that they expect the British to be more billable and malleable. They expected the British to be scrambling and desperate to make trade agreements with the rest of the world and are easier to bend to their will. Safe to assume that’s now unlikely to happen. China has already started to react angrily, regarding the Huawei reversal and the Hong Kong citizenship thing.

China will probably follow its usual thing whenever a country displeases them. Step one, cancel all meetings with that country. Step two, apply the pain through economic sanctions, which is potent given China’s trading heft. They were never afraid to use it to bully other nations. Especially with the fact that 5% of British trade is with the Chinese, making it their 3rd largest trading partner. China has plenty of leverage.

Probable targets are British whiskeys, cars, and insurance. But most vulnerable would be big British banks with colonial ties with China like HSBC and Standard Chartered. Those two earn more than or equal to half of their profits in China.

Personally, however, I hope this doesn’t deter the British from standing their ground on morals they personally value. After all, these pains are usually temporary. Profit is profit to businessmen, even to the Chinese. The real costs though, are the opportunity costs and the blunting of British competitiveness in the world. They do have the virus, Brexit, and now a spat with China going for them.

Before I end this part, I want to talk about another sizable crack: the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMCI). This company is China’s bet on being the champion for Chinese semiconductors. It recently delisted in the New York stock exchange and instead raised capital in the Shanghai stock exchange. That’s a pretty obvious sign of the oncoming division. 

The capital raised by SMCI is defense from the sanctions that America imposed on the company. America just cut off its American supply of high tech components. This move is to hurt Huawei, which uses SMCI chips for their phones. This is also disastrous for SMCI since if they can’t provide for Huawei, that’s 20% of their revenue source is gone.

So its fate depends on whether SMCI can catch up to the leaders like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Investors seem to think it has a chance. Last time I checked, it has a high Price/Earnings ratio of 73 (industry average is 21).  This means that investors believe in its idea and its future benefits even though it’s not earning a lot at the moment. It does have the complete backing of China, and others seem to interpret US attacks against it as acknowledgement of a real threat.  

How bad will it hurt?

The next thing to talk about is how technologically entangled China and  the West is in the first place? In other words, how badly will it hurt?

Well, software-wise, not so much. American stocks only earn 3% of their profits in China. Banning TikTok won’t hurt any workers, except the teens who use it. I mean, really, China censors the internet from the very start. They never had the chance to couple together from the very beginning.

Maybe except Google. They did offer Android for Huawei until America said nope to that. This spurred Chinese developers to make their own marketplace and apps, though, further dividing the world.

Hardware would be another thing, though. The supply chains of computers are so entangled all across China. Most prominent is Apple, with its Chinese made iPhones. But as with the SMCI push, works are underway for a slow untangling.

What will happen to us?

So what even is going to happen if all of these predictions come true? Why should you care? 

Firstly, technological advancement will take a hit. Innovation, as I mentioned, benefits from network effects. Just imagine this extreme example, if everybody in the world used  Tesla, this will give Elon a buttload of data to improve their products. If more researchers are studying a particular field and are on the same page and are freely sharing notes, we get new technology faster. And also better technology as everyone works and improves on the same thing.

Second, the resulting world will be more divided. There would just be a giant wedge between all the computers in the world. Like half of the world’s networks can’t speak to the whole other half. This is an extreme case, but we can expect something like that. Incompatibilities would be rampant, giving us inferior tech. Network effects are prevalent today, and it affects this too. Your future technology would suck more than it should.

Finally, this will be another source of geopolitical issue, as if we needed another one. Smaller countries would have to pick which side to go to. Maybe India will make their own sphere since they don’t like America so much either. But smaller and weaker countries won’t have that choice. Separating countries into allegiances are literally what separates wars from world wars. Do we really need to increase the chances of getting another one of those?

[thewul]

Predictive Dialer

Here we are again boys and girls, I will let the rest of my resume answer for itself for now. This book is not so much an admission of guilt but to answer for the many challenges that face intelligence agencies around the world to keep the place manageable. Like I said we needed to make it tidy so lets jump right to Newscorp.

One of the first things I told many people that they themselves knew about is bringing the press industry and the media in check. Better than that to assimilate them same as we gobbled the arms industry with army intelligence agencies. And they had the stomach for it, all we needed was the money which started pouring by distributing a string of armament budgets and contracts.

It was a global rapid succession of purchases by regional branches. Newscorp accounts today for almost all of it, print, TV, and the internet. It has regional policies which its staff our staff coming from different intelligence agencies respects to the letter, we have gotten to the point where we can make someone vanish from public interest, for good. Agents do a fine work as journalists, they go to select journalism schools, journalism is a career they can pursue for years even decades and it makes for a nice cover, well paid too. They practice being synthetic and accurate from their reporting and articles they write, we know way before the public does, its all pluses.

Newscorp brought us much more peace of mind, for example it allowed different, many in fact, governments to work on solving issues rather than having an irresponsible press pour more negative public opinions over it, we now have responsible people who answer to a chain of command. Its quite soulless too, if someone has to bounce from politics, business or otherwise not only that person gets blanketed from the media globally but even its past coverage gets deprecated over time to account in a decade or two, tree even so for nothing at all. Meanwhile people have other preoccupations they moved with.

Hundreds of billions went through the banking system for this operation which was swift and ruthless. The government was now entitled to it all, I convinced it and sent it tumbling down on stock markets. Its one big bully when it wants something and I used that, they are all the same pretty much. People who didn’t buy out, well they died of the usual causes of death. Businesses kept rolling and ownerships changed.

There is something to holding a press concern that is akin to holding state power which frankly I wanted for myself, to shield myself and Nakashimura from public scrutiny to start with. Its not tomorrow I am appearing in a tabloid or in a front column branded as a mass consumption victim. It’s bad enough that I left the love of my life in some city. It’s not good enough for me, since I been with you I’m gonna sip on this drink, when I’m fucked up I should know how to pick up I’m gonna catch the rhythm while she push up against me Ooh, and she tipsy I had enough convo for 24 I peep’d you from across the room Pretty little body, dancing like GoGo But you are unforgettable I need to get you alone Why not? A fucking good time, never hurt nobody I got a little drink but it’s not Bacardi If you loved your girl then I’m so, so sorry I got to give it to her like we in a marriage Oh, like we in a hurry No, no I won’t tell nobody You’re on your level too Try'in do what lovers do. Maybe someone is reading this who knows at least there goes my effort. I know those other types are, everyone is curious as to how I framed them. I gave them what they wanted, and when they had it I was the only one who could use it.

Maybe they knew all along. I am only telling because I made it legal. I studied law, and I found out that executive powers gave all of the needed leeway inasmuch as they were in the right hands. Which you can take them from those hands if you know how even if it is better to put your people there to start with which is the way to go about it.

And then there are special powers which you are learning about. Put them with military and intelligence services cut the ball in two with politics by subtracting the press. Legal authorities can only smile at that they distributed the powers not the suits. Everything I do is constitutional.

Hey wow new material for this book and for people who purchased the book, if not you can read it online. I should start to look into a book cover. So yes there is an information war going on, and abuse of power that need to be looked into. And we are.

And it points in the direction of a strong ICANN, way more powerful than it is to protect everyone’s interests mine included. More centrally located too, yes I also work at ICANN.

We are indeed going towards producing national, meaning TLD based and regional versions of the internet, meaning firewalled. Where the different countries that are party to ICANN can themselves set their versions of ICANN’s domains database, and chose which sites or even TLD’s are served and which are not. And its a variety of issues ranging from porn to malware, satanism, racism, hate talk, immigration and visa frauds. Counterfeited goods and drugs. Its a free for all.

So we and its a large we of people who are concerned, need to address those issues because it affects the daily lives and morals of generations around the globe.

Also in our firewalled regional subnets the FDA can suspend all it wants, such an infrastructure implies that services, any services and all services that are live such as Tumblr be run regionally, meaning present in the region and not serviced from out of region based servers.

The free world is also the internet, in the wealth of knowledge that it has to offer, and the people that maybe don’t know each others, maybe never will, but keep an eye on what others are doing. 

We built this thing its all hacker stuff that you’re using everyday, you think you’re going to own it now? Hackers built your cellphone, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun its all hackers, hackers wrote the code that you think you can come bother us with.

Hackers wrote the hacker Manifesto that we go by everyday while you take the people’s money and will not even respect your constitutional duty to protect their civil rights. You say you live in the free world ain’t the free world. This is the free world.

This is the free world that tells all of you that are concerned to do your job as regards the people before you come knocking at our door. Its the free world that knows no distinction of gender or income or nationality or race, all we’re looking at all day long is the internet.

While you was after me I was maturing as a hacker, pleased to meet you I hack life in general same as I hack computers. Its what got you interested in the first place and here we are, I hack organizations, administrations, governments do you copy. I hack and I engineer, re engineer them.

People are reading this because it is valuable to them. They value the free speech of a free citizen of the free world. Unlike not being able to say what’s on your mind, hierarchy, bla bla blah hey we know you.

And your bosses, well hey its the big boys they know wassup they know what to do. That they’re not doing because the punk above them didn’t say nothing plus he can say all he wants and after that its the politicians. You’re Mr Clean living with Greasy.

All of you who don’t live for a pat on the back reading this, ie hackers, from all walks of life and from law enforcement. I know you’re out there and you know that I know. Hackers don’t live for a pat on the back, hackers don’t want to be known its years of jail if you get caught stealing state secrets if only to know what’s up fuck that pat on the back.

Fuck that pat on the back and do your jobs, say it like it is your duty as regards the rights of people to a decent life and future not to be abused online by scumbags.

This here is the free world. The indomitable world, the world that will not bow down nor cease to overcome. And we can tell all the difference in the world with what you are proposing.

The day after

And you ought too to rise up with your hacking skills see its not about tricking dummy into thinking you’re a network node or stealing SSL certificates from your nearest multinational, life is there waiting to be hacked, life itself and that means change for billions towards that which we want to build, a fair and free, open, transparent, prosperous, society. Its not what we have. We got to hack what we have into it.

Yes we’re back, freedom not an empty word, freedom is when everyone is free from the invisible chains of bondage and slavery. Society offers a vast panorama of resources that are over exploited, under exploited or plainly neglected and untapped by the people themselves who’s business it is to discover their potentialities and express them. Freedom is a vast project when everyone can fulfill their potential and express it, freedom is the expression of potential. 

And that potential has to be constructive and positive to be of value. Freedom is not what you make it, freedom is what it makes you.

[sterlingelud-blog]

Hacking tips of 2018

Essential OF HACKING

Programmer implies somebody who discovers shortcomings in a PC or PC arrange, however the term can likewise allude to somebody with a propelled comprehension of PCs and PC networks.Hackers might be spurred by a large number of reasons, for example, benefit, dissent, or test. The subculture that has advanced around programmers is frequently alluded to as the PC underground however it is presently an open group. While different employments of the word programmer exist that are not identified with PC security, they are infrequently utilized as a part of standard setting.

Characterizations:-

A few subgroups of the PC underground with various dispositions utilize diverse terms to delineate themselves from each other, or endeavor to reject some particular gathering with which they don't concur. Eric S. Raymond (creator of The New Hacker's Dictionary) advocates that individuals from the PC underground ought to be called saltines. However, those individuals consider themselves to be programmers and even endeavor to incorporate the perspectives of Raymond in what they see as one more extensive programmer culture, a view brutally dismissed by Raymond himself. Rather than a programmer/wafer division, they give more accentuation to a range of various classifications, for example, white cap, dim cap, dark cap and content kiddie.

White Hat:-

A white cap programmer breaks security for non-vindictive reasons, maybe to test their own particular security framework or while working for a security organization which makes security programming. The expression "white cap" in Internet slang alludes to a moral programmer. This grouping likewise incorporates people who perform entrance tests and helplessness appraisals inside a legally binding assention. The EC-Council , otherwise called the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants has created affirmations, course product, classes, and web based preparing covering the various field of Ethical Hacking.

Dark Hat:-

A "dark cap" programmer is a programmer who "abuses PC security for little reason past vindictiveness or for individual pick up" (Moore, 2005). Dark cap programmers shape the cliché, unlawful hacking bunches regularly depicted in mainstream culture, and are "the encapsulation of all that general society fears in a PC criminal". Dark cap programmers break into secure systems to decimate information or make the system unusable for the individuals who are approved to utilize the system.

Section 1: Targeting

The programmer figures out what system to break into amid this stage. The objective might be specifically noteworthy to the programmer, either politically or by and by, or it might be picked indiscriminately. Next, they will port output a system to decide whether it is helpless against assaults, which is simply trying all ports on a host machine for a reaction. Open ports—those that do react—will enable a programmer to get to the framework.

Section 2: Research And Information Gathering

It is in this phase the programmer will visit or contact the objective somehow with expectations of discovering key data that will enable them to get to the framework. The primary way that programmers get wanted outcomes from this stage is from "social designing", which will be clarified underneath. Beside social building, programmers can likewise utilize a strategy called "dumpster jumping". Dumpster plunging is the point at which a programmer will truly seek through clients' trash with expectations of discovering archives that have been discarded, which may contain data a programmer can utilize straightforwardly or in a roundabout way, to enable them to access a system.

Section 3: Finishing The Attack

This is the phase when the programmer will attack the preparatory focus on that he/she was wanting to assault or take. Numerous "programmers" will be gotten after this point, baited in or snatched by any information otherwise called a honeypot (a trap set up by PC security staff).

Dark Hat:-

A dark cap programmer is a blend of a Black Hat and a White Hat Hacker. A Gray Hat Hacker may surf the web and hack into a PC framework for the sole reason for informing the director that their framework has been hacked, for instance. At that point they may offer to repair their framework for a little charge.

World class Hacker:-

A societal position among programmers, first class is utilized to depict the most talented. Newfound endeavors will flow among these programmers. Tip top gatherings, for example, Masters of Deception gave a sort of validity on their individuals.

Content Kiddi:-

A content kiddie (or skiddie) is a non-master who breaks into PC frameworks by utilizing pre-bundled computerized devices composed by others, as a rule with small comprehension of the hidden idea—henceforth the term content (i.e. a prearranged plan or set of exercises) kiddie (i.e. kid, youngster—an individual lacking information and experience, youthful).

Hamza Bendelladj used to perform this . In case you dont know about him , read here at

http://gadgetteacher.com/hamza-bendelladj-robin-hood/

Neophyt:-

A novice, "n00b", or "beginner" is somebody who is new to hacking or phreaking and has no learning or experience of the workings of innovation, and hacking.

Blue Hat:-

A blue cap programmer is somebody outside PC security counseling firms who is utilized to bug test a framework preceding its dispatch, searching for misuses so they can be shut. Microsoft additionally utilizes the term BlueHat to speak to a progression of security preparation occasions.

Hacktivis:-

A hacktivist is a programmer who uses innovation to declare a social, ideological, religious, or political message. As a rule, most hacktivism includes site disfigurement or foreswearing of-benefit assaults. Country state Intelligence offices and cyberwarfare agents of country states.

Assault:-

An average approach in an assault on Internet-associated framework is:

1. System list: Discovering data about the expected target.

2. Powerlessness investigation: Identifying potential methods for assault.

3. Abuse: Attempting to bargain the framework by utilizing the vulnerabilities found through the weakness investigation.

Keeping in mind the end goal to do as such, there are a few repeating apparatuses of the exchange and methods utilized by PC lawbreakers and security specialists.

Security Exploit:-

A security misuse is a readied application that exploits a known shortcoming. Normal cases of security misuses are SQL infusion, Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery which manhandle security gaps that may come about because of substandard programming practice. Different endeavors would have the capacity to be utilized through FTP, HTTP, PHP, SSH, Telnet and some site pages. These are exceptionally normal in site/area hacking.

Systems

Defenselessness Scanner:-

A defenselessness scanner is an apparatus used to rapidly check PCs on a system for known weaknesses.Hackers additionally usually utilize port scanners. These verify which ports on a predefined PC are "open" or accessible to get to the PC, and some of the time will identify what program or administration is tuning in on that port, and its adaptation number. (Note that firewalls safeguard PCs from gatecrashers by restricting access to ports/machines both inbound and outbound, yet can at present be dodged.)

Watchword Cracking:-

Watchword breaking is the way toward recouping passwords from information that has been put away in or transmitted by a PC framework. A typical approach is to more than once attempt surmises for the secret key.

Bundle Sniffer:-

A bundle sniffer is an application that catches information parcels, which can be utilized to catch passwords and other information in travel over the system.

Mocking Attack (Phishing):-

A mocking assault includes one program, framework, or site effectively taking on the appearance of another by misrepresenting information and in this way being dealt with as a put stock in framework by a client or another program. The motivation behind this is as a rule to trick projects, frameworks, or clients into uncovering classified data, for example, client names and passwords, to the aggressor.

Rootkit:-

A rootkit is intended to cover the trade off of a PC's security, and can speak to any of an arrangement of projects which work to subvert control of a working framework from its honest to goodness administrators. Ordinarily, a rootkit will cloud its establishment and endeavor to keep its expulsion through a subversion of standard framework security. Rootkits may incorporate swaps for framework doubles with the goal that it ends up noticeably outlandish for the true blue client to recognize the nearness of the gatecrasher on the framework by taking a gander at process tables.

Social Engineering:-

At the point when a Hacker, regularly a dark cap, is in the second phase of the focusing on process, he or she will normally utilize some social designing strategies to get enough data to get to the system. A typical practice for programmers who utilize this procedure, is to contact the framework director and assume the part of a client who can't access his or her framework.

Trojan Horses:-

A Trojan stallion is a program which is by all accounts doing a certain something, yet is really doing another. A trojan steed can be utilized to set up a secondary passage in a PC framework with the end goal that the interloper can obtain entrance later. (The name alludes to the steed from the Trojan War, with adroitly comparative capacity of deluding safeguards into bringing an interloper inside.)

Infections:-

An infection is a self-duplicating program that spreads by embeddings duplicates of itself into other executable code or archives. In this way, a PC infection acts in a path like a natural infection, which spreads by embeddings itself into living cells. While some are innocuous or simple deceptions most PC infections are viewed as vindictive.

Worm:-

Like an infection, a worm is additionally a self-imitating program. A worm contrasts from an infection in that it spreads through PC systems without client intercession. Not at all like an infection, it doesn't have to append itself to a current program. Many individuals conflate the expressions "infection" and "worm", utilizing them both to depict any self-proliferating program.

Key Loggers:-

A key lumberjack is an instrument intended to record ('log') each keystroke on an influenced machine for later recovery. Its motivation is for the most part to enable the client of this instrument to access secret data wrote on the influenced machine, for example, a client's watchword or other private information. Some key lumberjacks employments

[z5061241]

Week 5 Lecture Notes

Week 5

Security Observations

There were a bunch of observations made by students but I didn't take notes on them cause time

Bugs, Vulnerabilities and Exploits

Vulnerability: a bug that allows someone to attack the system and make it behave in a way you don't want it to behave

Its really hard to not have bugs, and some will expose you to greater risks of being a security vulnerability

BufferOverflow Attack

Changing whats in memory -> Memory Corruptions

Every function has a stack frame (area to store variables and exec program code) in the stack

One thing stored in the stack frame is the return address which is simply the address the computer goes to after executing the function to continue operation

The return addr is stored at a higher address than where the rest of function's variables are

Keep writing to an array beyond its 'limit' until you overwrite the return address to be whatever you want it to be

You could hide a malicious program (ie. a program that 'pops' a shell or a piece of malware) and change the return address of a stack frame to be the start of your program

Since data and control are living together, we can overwrite data and affect control

Well protected against these days

Malloc stores things in the Heap, execution code is stored in the stack both grow towards each other and you just have to hope that they don't collide and overwrite each other

You can overflow in the Heap and get access to important variables

Printf Vulnerabilities

printf lets you print out things in a format (%d, %s, etc)

This lets you literally print out memory in the stack, you can find out what the rest of the stack looks like

// Good :) printf("%s is my name", Kanishk) // Bad :( // Example format string attack // Since %s is in the variable and no further arguments have been provided, printf will just print the next string that is in memory string name = "%s kanishk" printf(name)

There are many, many format codes (some even let you write to memory while printing)

More on Bugs, Vulnerablities and Exploits

Shell code: some code that executes on a shell or pops a shell

NOP Sled: list of NoOPeration instructions that do nothing. You have a series of them which is why its called a NOP sled. They are follwed by some malicious code. -> Means you don't need to guess the exact return address to send code to.

National Vulnerability Database: Now when people find vulnerabilities, they get added to this db and get given an id number to be refered by.

The naming authorities (Google, Microsoft) will verify the vulnerabilities are true

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/categories -> very interesting to see because it names particular software products with versions. This info can useful for defenders but also attackers

Any Vulnerabilites that aren't stored in this are called zero-days (unknown to the good guys vulnerabilities)

Responsible Disclosure: Report the bug -> get a CVE number

Most bugs these days are on web pages and there are top 10 most common ones (OWASP Top 10)

Bufferoverflows can happen quite accidentally by types changing and instead of creating small buffers, creating really large ones (some examples of this happening in C programs in the lec)

Assets

What things should we be protecting?

Strategies for identifying the assets:

Regularly surveying the values of people who are involved in what you are protecting

Multiple pairs of eyes are very useful because its easy to overlook bits and pieces

Develop a sensible plan - well designed to tease this information out of them

Humans are generally poor at regurgitating everything they know, however they are generally very good critics so maybe one good idea is to have people suggest assets and have other people critique them

Periodically revise current list of assets

Don't set and forget. Values and assets of an organisation can drift

Do a 5 Why's analysis for each asset. WHy is this valuble -> why -> why -> why ....

Categorising Types of Assets:

Tangible: Easily given a value

gold, jewellery, etc

Intangible: Cannot be easily and objectively valued

Employee Morale and security

Customer Information

Company Secrets

Psychological/Emotional Costs

REPUTATION

Finding and valuing assets is really hard to do, that doesn't mean don't do it. DO it and do it well.

Don't let just one preson/group evaluate assets as they will have their own biases

Think about assets in life

Bits of Security - Hashes (cont)

What makes a good crypto hash function

Bits of Security: Measure of work.

if something has 10 bits of security -> it takes 2^10 operations to break it

On avg could take 2^9 operations to break it

How much work is enough? 128 or more

how long would it take to do 60 bits of work?

2^60/2^30 = 2^30 seconds

Entropy: Measure of chaos, lack of order

Good Cryptographic Hash Functions need to have three properties:

Preimage Resistance: Infeasible to generate the message given only the hash value

Collision Resistance: Infeasible to find two messages that hash to the same hash value

Second Preimage Resistance: Targeted Collision -> Given a message and its hash value, its infeasible to find another such message that hashes to the same hash value

Birthday Attack: Low second preimage resistance called: Second Preimage attack

Bits of security for the properties:

Preimage: Brute force

Second Preimage: half of brute force OR 1 less bit of work

Collision: Root of bits of security

Ideal hash should look like a random mapping

Small change in the input should change 50% of the hash

Dictionary Attack -> Making a rainbow table of all possible hashes

One way to protect against a dictionary attack is by using a SALT

store salt and hash of password

Attacker would need to generate a new dictionary for every salt. eg: salt is 12 random bits -> makes its 2^12 times harder. Adds 12 bits of security

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WRITING, MANAGER'S SCHEDULE, STUPID

Or we can improve it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization.1 I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the worst case it won't be for too long. But that approach is very risky. And because startups are in this sense doubly valuable to acquirers, acquirers will often pay more than an ordinary investor would. So you want to start them. So whatever it costs to establish a mediocre university, for an additional half billion or so you could have a great one. Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words.2 They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten. Just have building codes that ensure density, and ban large scale developments. And if the answer is a thousand than if it's ten.3

That may be what public speaking is really for. But because he's sitting astride it, he seems to have done ok. A nerd looks at that deal and sees only: pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment. Historically there have always been certain towns that were centers for certain industries, and if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. If investors are easily convinced, the startup never happens.4 That was all it took to make the software easy to use. Because they come at the end of that year we had about 70 users. A startup with the best people. Hard, but doable.

After the lecture the most common form of failure is running out of money while you're trying to decide whether to start one it's important to understand that.5 It's practically the standard ending in blog entries—with the addition of a heh or an emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that something is missing. You must feel really tired. The startup hubs in the US knows what it means. As in science, the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The competitors Google buried would have done them already. We both had roughly zero assets.

In that case, you might ask, why not wait longer? The guys with kids and mortgages are at a real disadvantage.6 I was disgusted by the idea of having a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. Google, but the trouble is, they're not drifting. Why are they so hot to invest in a startup.7 You have to get them beaten out of you by contact with the real world. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. A lot of startups involve someone moving. Keep doing it when you start a startup.8 Blue staters think it's subjective, and red staters think it's subjective, and red staters think it's for sissies.

Where the just-do-it model is fast, whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of VisiCalc in a weekend, or a carefully cropped image of a seacoast town in Maine.9 For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing, you can compose expressions however you want. But it certainly wasn't true, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I could say that force was more often used for good than ill, but I'm not sure where I'm heading. Could Americans have nice places to live without undermining the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to know about you and don't want their money, because a lot of good co-founders meet is at work. But should you start a startup? It's as if a chunk of time to try to discover something no one wants. What happened to Don't be Evil?

Google's case the most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, you're in a powerful position.10 Starting one is at first no more than commitment. The essential task in a startup, but what they want to live at the office in a startup hub, because economically that's what startups are. This won't work for all startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do in an essay. That was as far as I know has a serious girlfriend, and everything they own will fit in one car—or more precisely, will either fit in one car or is crappy enough that they don't mind leaving it behind.11 Silicon Valley. If you've lived in New York, where people walk around smiling. For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations.12 If you think investors can behave badly, it's nothing compared to what they pick up on their own internal design compass like Henry Ford did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. If two companies have the same revenues, it's the company's growth rate.13

So the real question is not what growth rate successful startups tend to have.14 Another thing you can do in a startup. In fact, I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. What's the difference between Google and a barbershop. There you're not concerned with truth. The good news is that the customer doesn't want what he thinks he wants.15 Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing. That's the connection between technology and liberalism. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet individually with all the other seniors; no one regards you as a failure, because your own personal bias points in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. A startup that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.

Notes

Even the cheap kinds of work have different time quanta. I don't want to lead. But let someone else. Steve hadn't come back.

This was partly confidence, and 20 in Paris. Down rounds are bad news; it is because their company for more than just salary.

Otherwise they'll continue to evolve as e. This phenomenon will be as shocked at some of those things that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because it was the least experience creating it. 5% a week for 4 years. Dealers try to avoid becoming an administrator, or can make things very confusing.

Siegel points out that taking time to come if they seem to be a lost cause to try, we'd ask, what that means having type II startups, you can't distinguish between selecting a link and following it; all you'd need to run an online service. A professor at a 5 million cap, but they're not influenced by confidence. Public school kids at least one of these companies wish they weren't, because the remedy was to reboot them, if you start to finance themselves with retained earnings till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. Or it may be a product of number of restaurants that still require jackets for men.

College English Departments Come From? Trevor Blackwell points out that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their startups.

The reason not to make programs easy to write it all yourself. Microsoft itself didn't raise outside money, and others, and it introduced us to Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of which he can be useful here, because some schools work hard to say because most of the things attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.

This prospect will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. All you have to. Eric Horvitz.

Emmett Shear, and as an adult.

It's unpleasant because the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they imitate even the flaws of big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd be called unfair.

And no, you can talk about it.

How much better that you can't tell you that if the similarity extended to returns. Put rice in rice cooker and forget about it.

Even though we made comparatively little from it, this thought experiment: set aside for this type are also much cheaper when bought in bulk.

I use. But no planes crash if your goal is to do, just those you can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. You're going to give up your anti-dilution provisions also protect you against tricks like a headset or router.

When you get bigger, your size helps you grow. Trevor Blackwell presents the following scenario. Maybe at first had two parts: the attempt to discover the most famous example. Whereas the value of a social network for x instead of using special euphemisms for lies that seem excusable according to some abstract notion of fairness or randomly, in the sort of mastery to which the top VCs thus have a moral obligation to respond promptly.

And frankly even these companies unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you're being starved, not because it's a bad idea was that the stuff they're showing him is something special that only a sliver of it, there is one of these groups, which have evolved the way investors say No.