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Dan Kaminsky Profile picture
Dan Kaminsky
@dakami
We can fix it. We have the technology. OK. We need to create the technology. Alright. The policy guys are mucking with the technology. Relax. WE'RE ON IT.
Dec 19, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The problem with algorithms is that abject stupidity can seem smart when separated from context.

Older COVID patients are ~100x more likely to die if infected. But the residents are spending *months* in COVID wards, *intentionally*.

They’re much more likely to get infected. Now, these twenty something residents may not die quickly. But we don’t have the complete data on “Long COVID”. Hasn’t been long enough.

Early data is not good. Up to 30% are ending up with chronic respiratory disorders.

“It’s like if 40 pack-years of smoking was contagious.”
Dec 19, 2020 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
@jeffiel Jeff,

Nobody stays where they’re hated. We are hated, taken completely for granted as tax dollars and despised as invaders otherwise. I’m an actual SF native who has spent most of his life here. It deserves to lose tech, full stop.

You know why we can go?

No mortgages. Oops. @jeffiel Where was leadership when it came to letting tech put down roots?

The NIMBY bullshit here is so extraordinary, it can be seen from outer space. Literally. Here.
Dec 18, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
wait for it
wait for it wait for it
Jan 5, 2020 • 48 tweets • 10 min read
You can’t vouch for your own bug. You will always see it as the most beautiful bug that ever did bug. Doesn’t matter if you’re the one who does the thing, or even if you’re right. If it needs a vouch, recuse yourself. It’s ok. It’ll hold up on its own, or not. Learn either way. On the flip side, be careful whose vouches you do trust. Review boards have drama that has absolutely nothing to do with you, starting from the reality that they can’t accept all the good talks. No room.

People in such situations sometimes get shitty. Don’t take it personally.
Aug 25, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If you want to understand why Linux achieved “world domination” — how it unambiguously wrecked, and rendered irrelevant — Windows and OSX in the cloud, it wasn’t exactly technical superiority.

You choose them, you spend all your time fighting fiddly licensing bugs.

Once. Nothing is more expensive than having to ask permission.

Nothing is more desired, by some.

@nVidia, you don’t need to bind your ****ing control panel to a single motherboard. It’s ok.

I can hack around all this, and will.
Jul 7, 2019 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
Hypothesis:

At the microprocessor scale, moving data and computation are not actually different things. You’re always moving bits. You’re sometimes changing them.

Bits may fly straight to RAM and back, or spin inside the CPU. Either way, distance traveled.

Coding is routing. All models are wrong, some are useful. I think this unified view of computer engineering is interesting. Explains the enormous effects of locality, smaller processes, etc. Shorter distances.

Faster clocks? Bits don’t have to fly as far. Less power per bit. Lighter spins faster.
Jun 28, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It's why we talk about them as concentration camps.

Somebody thought about how to make this experience more miserable, to children. Somebody optimized.

Local actors extrapolate. "Well, clearly we're not supposed to be nice to these kids. We'd have resources if we were." "Nobody could have foreseen"

Bullshit. We know exactly where this is now, and exactly where this is going, and that's why we're calling them concentration camps.

If someone did this to your kids, you'd lose it. You'd be right to.

Stop kidnapping kids. We can't handle 'em.
Jun 19, 2019 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
@chrislhayes I know you're trying to respect the humanity that is not entirely flushed out of ICE. I saw those emails, you've probably spoken to those people.

This *system* is *going* to flush our kind out. It's designed to do that, inexorably. It doesn't happen immediately. When we talk about history repeating, what we're saying is that we've seen these processes evolve before. There are forces. They're set up in a certain way. Things happen that are not, you know. Random.

We have camps. They're concentrating a class in a place. Some are dying.
May 27, 2019 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
twitter.com/i/moments/1132…

We need books.google.com actually working. If the "marketplace of ideas" is to work at all we can't be locking up everything *but* tech, and then wondering why *only* tech seems to vaguely function.

I adore Wikipedia, but it's not enough. Let me be clear. I *absolutely* respect librarians. Not because they know how to maintain and locate physical sheets of paper, but because they are sherpas across vast tracts of not obviously connected human knowledge.
May 5, 2019 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
There is only one Actually Bad Idea.

"You must be perfect. To fail once is to be exiled forever."

I see this concept, this burden, this prediction in people, systems, and sometimes myself. I have never seen it be useful or true, ever. Not once.

You get to fail. How you learn. I don't say this much, but if there's somebody in your life that needs to see that message, please forward it to them. I've never seen any idea ruin more lives than desperate perfection. I've never been more relieved than when I realized, OK, I'm still here. I get to learn.
Apr 26, 2019 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Huawei’s P30 Pro probably has the best cell camera on the global market right now. They’re doing magnificent work, with Sony sensors. Much respect.

There is literally concern about Huawei’s moon shots. Basically their AI has learned what the moon (mostly unchanging) looks like. So when you’re in moon mode, and you try to take a photo of the moon, it (supposedly — let’s assume this is true for the sake of this thread) combines incoming signal with the learned constraints of the moon to generate an accurate image without physical demands (tripods etc).
Nov 15, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
To maintain consistency of governance in existing institutions, the British system uses Shadow Secretaries. Brexit requires *new* institutions, because the world of 2018 isn't the same world from before the EU.

So, what I would say is: Pause Brexit. Build Shadow Institutions. They may be new, they may be a transformation of the old, this may or may not be possible. But the whole magic of the Shadow model isn't just that there are competent people, but that outsiders know who they are, what they'd be dealing with, what sort of deal they can rely on.
Nov 15, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I know it's a little presumptuous for an American to comment on Brexit, but hear me out.

One of the things I've really admired about British political architecture has been the concept of Shadow Secretaries. At any moment, there are certainly going to be parties not in power. But political winds may change, new coalitions may form, and who is in charge of what may change. That new talent is *ready* for this eventuality, already trained and known and competent to the degree one can be without actually having the job -- that's pretty cool!
Nov 8, 2018 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
This is complicated, but at least it’s a technically analyzable situation. Warning everyone now, I am *absolutely* speaking in a neutral capacity here. I may not support your politics, or my own.

Summary: Video compression might have done it. It was probably edited. First, the type of edit here claimed is not rare at all. I’ve generally heard it referred to as, well, “frame f***ing”. Happens to television shows quite a bit in syndication — scenes aren’t removed, but they’re sped up just enough to add an ad or two.
Jul 12, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"People overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in ten."

...assuming a system that can survive wanting to do a thing for ten years. There are other, more agile systems that can only want to do a thing for one year.

Disruption is blind. If you're reading this, you are probably a multi-decade project. Surprise!
Jul 10, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
People see these sort of tweets, they make fun of their authors for being really stupid, and they entirely miss the point.

It's a game. It's an *old* game, of wits. It's called sophistry. Can you argue a stupid position well enough, that you force your opponent to do work? See, baby prisons are really stupid. Stupider, really, than flat earth theory -- you have to learn the Earth is round, whereas we know baby prisons are dumb before we can talk.

But, it's work to map out this stupidity safely. And any error you make, causes the sophist to win.
Jul 4, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Bear witness.

It's time to start addressing the Central American War. A lot of people don't want to do the Adult thing. There are many other discussions, that do nothing to actually help children, but they're fun for us.

Nope. We are going to have to have the shitty discussions, for us, that protect them. That's our job. Kids can't vote.
Jun 30, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Adults gotta adult, or there's just not going to *be* adults anymore.

The intelligence community actually knows this. Rex Tillerson commented, he sure knows this. Adults *know*.

You are what you do. You are what you don't do. We are all what we're all doing, or not.

Yikes. And if you think adulting is *just* doing the scary thing, like, that's how you know it's a good idea, you're afraid to do it.

No.

Sometimes a thing is scary because it's a really bad idea.

Respect your fears. Face them. Choose them. Conquer the *right* ones.

Or be stupid.
Jun 28, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
thehill.com/homenews/campa… Some of you won't care, that's where you are. OK.

Some of you have models, that predict the future, that didn't predict this. The world doesn't work like you thought.

Our Nazis play a few moves ahead. Are they more surprised than you?

Shit got real. The teams that know the score tend to beat the teams that don't know the score.

I suppose not always.

It's actually sometimes tricky to know the score, though. That is a thing that happens, or is made to happen. Hard to tell.
Jun 16, 2018 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Banning kidnapped children from hugging isn't even Nazi shit.

It's Dolores Umbridge shit.

There's a reason she's the most feared and despised character @jk_rowling ever created. Kids know Voldemort isn't real. "Well you see, it's not really kidnapping, their parents shouldn't have..."

You take a baby, you take a toddler, you take a seven year old, you drag him away from his mom, he doesn't know what bullshit you tell yourself to sleep at night. He knows he's being KIDNAPPED.
Feb 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Want to hear some serious nerd bullshit?

Monads, the hardest concept in all of computer science for anyone to understand

are just

the things between pipes

monad | monad | monad | monad | no --really

"But they're pipes with types!"
"Oh, that's always a mess."
"I KNOW!!!" Monads Are Just Pipes

This is like the Battlestar Galactica "It Was Angels All Along" of Computer Science