You realize that Bitcoin is traceable, right? You kinda picked the wrong crypto to use as an example. Unless you’re completely in the Bitcoin system and never connect to any outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with an outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with someone who interacts with an outside system or so on (it’s not quite ad infinitum), you are most likely traceable. Tools like Chainalysis have been used by governments for almost a decade.

Your other points aren’t really valid if you ever want to convert Bitcoin to something that isn’t Bitcoin. I’m not aware of complete supply chains and grids that exist solely on Bitcoin (or any combination of crypto for that matter) so things like having control of your money, needing ID, and trusting centralized entities (sure, exchanges plural) are a huge part of Bitcoin.

It doesn’t sound like you have a good grasp on the differences between this case and Ross Ulbricht.

I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?

The Supreme Court has already ruled the police have no duty to protect. I highly doubt there will be a ruling in favor of the kids. If there is one, there’s absolutely no fucking way it stands on appeal in the Fifth Circuit or Supreme Court.

The baseline cloud certs should be much cheaper. AWS Associate tiers are something like 150/test.

You might also have luck with the big consulting companies. NTT, Slalom, Accenture, stuff like that. Might be less permanent but will pay pretty well.

If you are able to find a US govt job and can make it through the whatever period you need to be a contractor until you get hired on as a federal employee, this should cover you. I have a contact in a similar situation except cluster headaches. It’s going to pay less than private sector and you might have to learn some new skills for the right role. IIRC Softrams just landed a huge federal contract and hires warm bodies; might be a great place to start.

I’ve got a lot of contacts on the market right now struggling to land a gig that wouldn’t have struggled a few years ago. Do you have DevOps skills? Any security qualifications? Get both. Are you working on certs? Do some. Have you hired a resume service? Do so. The last two are things I normally think are kinda bullshit but they are edges that seem to matter right now.

As for a recruiting firm, I feel like all the good recruiters I’ve worked with would have advocated for me. That’s a total fucking crapshoot tho. I’ve worked with plenty that have shafted me. I don’t think there’s a specific firm for this problem.

All of the science isn’t based on a single study with fifty college kids. Here’s another one and another one and another one and a meta study. Since you disagree with accepted science and literature, I’m gonna disengage. If you’d like to provide more than your interpretation of the world, I’d be happy to continue. I’d take some analysis on cognitive load, maybe some understanding that people other than you exist, certainly less rambling about a specific bad experience(s) you’ve had with explicit methodologies.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I’d really like to see some citations.

• Interruptions suck for office jobs
• Check flow state citations in intro
• Search for “lean [your field]” and whichever lean principle you’re curious about

I know sharing facts won’t necessarily change your opinion; I wanted to highlight I’m not talking out of my ass to everyone else reading the thread.

If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.

Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.

I can’t find this being a problem. What circles do you move in where “jerk” is a problematic word?

I can taste the fish quite well with soy sauce and wasabi. The saltiness raises specific flavor profiles and the wasabi kicks as those profiles are coming down. Don’t put your mouth feel on someone else unless it’s identical (it’s probably not).

The more important difference is the quality of the meal. I’ll do whatever I want with low- and mid-tier meals. I don’t know about you; my dining out budget isn’t regularly hundreds of dollars a plate so it doesn’t really matter what the chef intended they can’t express it that well at that price point.

All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!

You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.

I mean it’s FOSS. Have you considered opening a PR to contribute what’s missing? You can be the change you want to see. I wouldn’t normally comment something like this. Your emphasis on “still” raised my hackles a little bit and led me to ask why you still haven’t made your own.

It’s a really powerful story and shows up a lot in SF academia. I was introduced to through Dr James Gunn’s histories.

I don’t know if I’d say “inherently hopeful.” Sturgeon’s approach to science fiction was “ask the next question” which is sometimes not so hopeful. I do think a lot of golden age and even new wave (which Ellison defined) is very hopeful. I think genres like cyberpunk and more modern interpretations of dystopian science fiction explore less hopeful situations. You also have stuff like “The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline which could be evaluated from many perspectives on hope.

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link