Just finished a 2 week trip to Namibia and South Africa and realized most of the good parts of South Africa (Cape, etc.) as well as Namibia are actually nicer than the US (in the sense of "average people I encounter are reasonable", not wealth and infrastructure where the US still dominates).

Saw some folks in the afternoon on the rainy streets of London with the lion and sun flag.

I'd like to hope for a great outcome in Iran, but this feels like the previous times where there were mass protests and it just ended up with a bunch of young people dead. Obviously stuff like this usually ends up like that until it doesn't.

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis > It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

the US if Tylenol actually caused autism

Japan's government says it has set a new record with nearly 100,000 people older than 100 years old

Real Art has never been more alive .. news.artnet.com/market/chris...

JAL food is so good (I haven’t tried ANA First ever though; I’m sure it is great as well.). Also managed 7h of decent sleep on a 15h flight (HEL-HND the long way due to Russia airspace closure and the eastbound arctic route having high winds.). I love AA frequent flyer redemptions — 90k miles o/w.

Heh, the CACM version of "microscope and tweezers" is in libgen. (Not the IEEE S&P version, or the web version at www.mit.edu/people/eichi... ). *Personally* I'm more concerned that this is how the model learns to write code with buffer overflow security holes :-)

people often (rightfully) talk about how humanities literacy changes and broadens your perspective STEM also does this; you realize 1) the miniscule fraction of the universe we occupy 2) the miniscule fraction of available energy we use on earth 3) how far from optimal almost every system is

Amazing watching how fast the OpenAI image generator stuff has taken over social media; creativity reduced to a short phrase prompt. e.g.

Went to Vail to ski for a bit after ETH Denver. Super fun (although definitely prefer Niseko), but very sore now. I love ibuprofen.

This is such a beautiful city. Shanghai, on the Bund.

In Australia for the first time in my life (have to go to HK next week, and it was $700 in ff miles to fly business class to Australia first). Long trip -- SJU-JFK-LAX-BNE, which actually was operationally shortened by the airline (yay!) from SJU-ATL-MEX-LAX-BNE.

Spent the past week learning how to ski in Niseko, Japan (up in Hokkaido); beautiful place and lots of great people. Looking forward to some more ski trips in the near future!

Got to visit the center of the world for insurance yesterday (probably 60-70% of the high end part of the industry flows through here, with firms a few blocks away.)

Enjoyed my time in Asia. Interesting seeing the contrast between Japan (“nice” but static) and China (fast development, better in some ways already, but still rough corners, but far fewer than before).

Excited to see Shanghai tomorrow (going for 2 nights); haven’t been there since 2015.

Nice reverse engineering work to uncover the workings of iOS 18’s inactivity reboot. naehrdine.blogspot.com/2024/11/reve...

10x more excited for Netflix Engineering’s postmortem writeup than I was for the fight itself.

Wow. Such timing (entirely unrelated to the Trump media thing in PA), but wow. www.cnbc.com/2024/10/22/m...

In awe of how well the SpaceX mission went this weekend. Pretty optimistic about the “launch unmanned Starship to Mars in 2 years” plan. Less so about manned in 4y, but even if it takes 6, 8, 10, or 12, still incredibly impressive. www.spacex.com/launches/mis...

At the Network State conference in Singapore — which is a great location, given Singapore’s history as one of the few states ejected from an existing state, and turned from third to first world based on one man’s vision and the effort of millions.

Lisbon is quite beautiful in the morning.

Fuck ITAR.

My cat opened a sake bar

Here at PoW Summit in Prague, excited about HCPP later this week. Great conferences, then off to Cosmoverse in Istanbul and then home (finally!) for a while.

Pretty nice coming back to my hotel in the middle of a day of various conferences and finding tasty food offerings from the GM; way better than wine/etc that I won’t drink (which I got in Korea and now brought with me here to try to regift).

i need caffeinated cup o noodles in my life

Since so many people in DWeb use Discord, @danny.spesh.com wondered why there is no decentralized alternative? @expede.wtf broke that down and much more in the latest episode of DWeb Decoded👇 https://open.spotify.com/episode/68u0Cl7Id9BMvvr4pIqKNJ?si=dda4b30aebee4693

Went to El Salvador this year for the first time; remarkably nice place. Obviously still has poverty but now that crime has been addressed through the One Weird Trick, seems like a lot of investment opportunities.

The American cultural equivalent of Pikachu is the AR-15. Both are an agent of violence wielded by children that can only make one sound.

Going to Las Vegas for "hacker summer camp" from Wednesday to Monday; I will probably buy a badge for Defcon and visit but aside from a few villages, mostly over it, although will try to do meetups elsewhere with friends.

At ZCon4 in Barcelona — lots of great privacy and liberty discussions. Mostly focusing on policy stuff myself right now, rather than tech research, but both are represented.

Hacking robot from Red Balloon Security. It pulls a chip, chilled in liquid nitrogen, from a target running system, using a robot arm, and puts it into a reader device, taking advantage of memory permanence in a chilled environment to bypass security. At REcon Montreal, my favorite conference.

the best thing about the volcano snail is that it looks EXACTLY how you’d want a volcano snail to look

This is really disappointing news for anyone who’s experienced high-volume brigading and harassment on Twitter, or been targeted by prominent clowns. Block Party did a great job offering an important service.

I wish I could convince cats to sleep on/guard *my* truck, although I am already paranoid about checking underneath before driving, and definitely don’t want them to go into wheel wells or engine.

Going on a 2 month trip (Montreal, Asia mostly Japan, Europe mostly France, lots of trips back and forth) where I might come back home for a few days at a time. Trying to decide which recreational electronics to bring. Probably mini 3 pro. Switch?

Somehow I missed the recent drama, but overall looks like Jay+team made the right short-term moderation call. Long-term pushing all this out to opt-in providers is the way.

Somehow this boat looks more fun than the $10mm+ yachts.

Loved my time in Miami for Bitcoin 2023 — spending some time here at home and then Montreal for REcon next.

Loved visiting Zuzalu for 30 hours (mostly on a whim, drove down from FC in Croatia). Lots of amazing people. Future events of this kind (long running conference/festival/network-state crossovers) will be even better.

Endless conference (someone put a second, related conference in the same hotel right after this one, more on policy vs science, but since here anyway…)

Cats of Brac