Disclaimer: I'm about to disclose some personal information so will probably burn this nick shortly.
I am slowly going blind (long, boring story; only relevance to the topic is during a discussion with the eye-guy consultant he mentioned that he had had a close personal friend of his kill himself the day after a night out and that he (the consultant) wished that he had been able to somehow sense that his friend was so close to the edge....
I looked at him softly and with compassion and said to him that there was no way in hell that he would have ever known or be able to sense something like that because the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).
My heart bled reading this article but having grown up in a life of violence (early start in Africa, a bit of a chequered past led me in to the world of I.T. (machines are better than humans... they can tell you why they are sick, what part(s) are broken and then either report a (1) Fixed or a (2) Not Fixed... any how, that's how I wandered into IT field mixed in with some ex military stuff including a lay-over in Dubai that lasted for two-weeks... the bloke at Heathrow customs glanced at my transit stamps and asked me where the fuck I had been for two weeks (10 day gap in departure from place {x} to arrival at LHR ....
I looked him in the eye and said simply ..... 'Good god, my arms are tired from all that flapping and those head-winds were a bitch!'
He muttered something along the lines of "f*ing smart-arses", stamped my passport and waved me through.
Whole point of the above? I dunno but nick & karma points burnt telling it.
If you take nothing else away from this – Please know that you likely would have had no way of knowing so please don’t feel guilt…. They made a decision and it was one that you (the loved one grieving) would have been unlikely to have changed even if you had have known. At best, you would be likely to have simply delayed it for a while.
I had someone I knew from two consecutive jobs commit suicide. We'd routinely cross paths through meetings, water cooler chats etc. Nice guy, smart engineer. Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid and spotting the shorted path to the best resolution. The kind of engineer you'd be lucky to have on your service team.
He grabbed me for a lunch time meal about a week before he committed suicide, wanted to chat about my faith. These conversations happen from time to time, especially working in tech which seems to bias towards atheism, so I didn't think anything of it. It was a type of conversation I've had dozens of times over.
In hindsight, of course, it was obvious he was looking for help. I can rationally tell myself over and over again that there was no possible way I could have known, but I highly doubt I'll ever convince myself of it.
> Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid...
A lot of anxiety-ridden people have a sort of "Hulk secret" that they seem to handle stressful situations well because they are always extremely stressed. If they couldn't maintain a calm exterior while freaking out inside they couldn't get through the line at the grocery, so when shit starts hitting the fan for real that mask makes other people think they don't feel it.
> the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).
While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there's a good chance that no one could see it coming), I would add something. It's, as I said, mostly true, but far from being the case 100% of the time. Ok, that was probably obvious, but the thing is: sometimes we interpret it as the contraposition (which is, after all, equivalent to the original statement): the ones who broadcast their intentions are not serious about it. And that's a huge mistake to make, when it happens to not be true. Someone who broadcasts that kind of intentions might be overdoing that kind of millenial "everything sucks" gallows humor you see a lot in Twitter... or they might be serious.
So, pay attention to people talking about that suicidal ideation. Many times, it's more than a joke.
BTW I also agree that in many cases an intervention can only delay the decision but not prevent it completely. I know it can be a hard pill to swallow for many people (and for good reason), but I strongly believe this to be true.
“If it’s made out of electrical components then you should be able to scale it down to a microchip,” he says. “I think that’s where they’re going with this.”
Mind.Blown. This could be a very interesting development.
Which would be best for this - ASIC,FPGA,VLSI? Something else? for a rapid prototype setup?
Actually you can do a lot of computation with filters but you’re completely incorrect about what a FPAA is.
The FPAA is a matrix of switched capacitors. Such a matrix can be used to design an analog computer. There’s a pretty huge body of literature on this subject.
I’d bet that the OP could have implemented this using FPAA.
You are correct. However I don't see anything on implementing exponentials or logarithms of signals thus i am confused how one would implement the product of time time continuous signals. I saw an screenshot in anadimgs software which suggested that a small number of such multipliers can be modelled but I am unsure how. If you have some explanation where inside the block diagram these analog multipliers would be implemented that would be helpful.
Anadigm is a bit shy about numbers one would care about as analog programmer. How many multipliers with constants, summers, multipliers of two signals and integrators are available on the chip?
Resource on that would be welcome.
Then your experience differs greatly from mine (EU based). My usual mix of 'fastest anycast' upstreams’ are reliably black-holing a lot of .ru domains right now
(Rightly or wrongly is a ‘nother question for a ‘nother day).
Interestingly enough, the 'academic network' (arnes) that covers schools etc., and also some government entities is not blocking it, but atleast two out of the three largest commercial ISP are (can't test the third, since it's locked to their customers' IPs only).
Because the russian media mafia (tacc, rt, sputnik and the like, which are all either directly state-owned or via the state-owned tv novosti) are about to be banned in all EU countries where they are still available, and the ISPs might have banned them pro-actively.
Thanks for that, appreciated. I'll be honest- I'm just a 'little guy' in the food chain so I always figured that doing something like that was for the ISP level folks <edit to clarify, I mean connecting to a Zone 1 Resolver. I wasn't aware that one could download the Root Hints File directly (Thanks!).
One quick question though - After taking a quick skim of it the list seems to be extremely 'Western-Centric' (reference link https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root)
The root servers are anycasted.
Each one of those root server IPs corresponds to N physical servers at diverse networks / locations all over the world.
> I'm just a 'little guy' in the food chain so I always figured that doing something like that was for the ISP level folks
A lot of people are running recursive resolvers at home (like pi-hole stuff, or most people running some custom openwrt router/modem). I'm running one on my laptop (my resolver is localhost) and it works great.
> After taking a quick skim of it the list seems to be extremely 'Western-Centric'
It is, but that's what the internet is. But by running your own recursive resolver you can control your cache and a lot of the data doesn't change often. If you're extra paranoid you can cache the record data (or even archive the history) for ccTLD (or even all TLDs). For stuff (domains) you're interested in you can also hard-code or otherwise program "non-standard" ways to resolve the ips (by somehow populating a local database that overrides recursive resolution), like pi-hole/safebrowsing blocklists, stuff from institutions or CDNs you trust.
They are western centric, and unfortunately, in this current state of the web they're still essentially the authority on DNS.
Alternatively, you can maintain the NSes for all the TLDs you are particularly interested in, and alert yourself if they change to something you don't recognize.
Finally, keep in mind that whatever you do, you need to have multiple vantage points to the internet. There's not a lot stopping your ISP from not delivering you to the right host when you try to talk to it. E.g. your ISP can fake the DNS responses.
Questioning why the distributed cluster runs on nodes 'a' and 'b' alone doesn't necessarily imply that nodes 'c', 'd' and 'e' are any better or worse, today or in future.
DNS[0] is only a decentralized hierarchy with caching, a class of system which pre-dates the digital era as the de-facto means of political and military organization in any human society larger than a village or town. DNS as a directory system for IP is could itself be viewed as a direct philosophical descendant of military insignia (perhaps via the then-popular branch-tangent of the telephone book, itself ex-telegraph, and postal system) and these could all be in effect traced back to at least Roman society[1], I don't think arguing this is a "western" invention is very convincing or useful. Any ancient army or polity of any size would have had an equivalent, which would then include ancient Egypt, China[2], India, Mesopotamia[3], Mesoamerica, etc. Actually, come to think of it, the comparative study of ancient postal systems would be pretty interesting.[4]
> I don't think arguing this is a "western" invention is very convincing or useful. Any ancient army or polity of any size would have had an equivalent, which would then include ancient Egypt, China[2], India, Mesopotamia[3], Mesoamerica, etc.
And yet, none of these other regions and cultures actually did invent it, and thus it remains a Western invention.
Of course. However, my point was the originality and claim to authorship is low, because if you look at store and forward networks with centrally agreed node identification and local caching using that for routing purposes, humans have literally done it globally for 3000+ years... that's clear prior art.
It's like "technology" being used to describe a bash script, or "invention" used to describe a standard algorithm.
By that same token the internet was invented by the first person to hand gesture to another one. You can’t dilute DNS down to a directory because there were/and are already other directory protocols.
In this case the vendor engineers were from Boeing - Ya know, the same company that brought us the 737MAX MCAS fiasco. I mean sure, hindsight is a wonderful thing but given the history of Boeing engineering culture since their merger with McDonnell Douglas I can see the possibility of someone gliding over something inconvenient
I am slowly going blind (long, boring story; only relevance to the topic is during a discussion with the eye-guy consultant he mentioned that he had had a close personal friend of his kill himself the day after a night out and that he (the consultant) wished that he had been able to somehow sense that his friend was so close to the edge....
I looked at him softly and with compassion and said to him that there was no way in hell that he would have ever known or be able to sense something like that because the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).
My heart bled reading this article but having grown up in a life of violence (early start in Africa, a bit of a chequered past led me in to the world of I.T. (machines are better than humans... they can tell you why they are sick, what part(s) are broken and then either report a (1) Fixed or a (2) Not Fixed... any how, that's how I wandered into IT field mixed in with some ex military stuff including a lay-over in Dubai that lasted for two-weeks... the bloke at Heathrow customs glanced at my transit stamps and asked me where the fuck I had been for two weeks (10 day gap in departure from place {x} to arrival at LHR ....
I looked him in the eye and said simply ..... 'Good god, my arms are tired from all that flapping and those head-winds were a bitch!'
He muttered something along the lines of "f*ing smart-arses", stamped my passport and waved me through.
Whole point of the above? I dunno but nick & karma points burnt telling it.
If you take nothing else away from this – Please know that you likely would have had no way of knowing so please don’t feel guilt…. They made a decision and it was one that you (the loved one grieving) would have been unlikely to have changed even if you had have known. At best, you would be likely to have simply delayed it for a while.
YMMV