CBHacking

• CBHackingMay 5, 2015, 6:58 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Ga­soline Gal looks un­der the hood (post 1 of 3)

  The hypothetical scenario stipulates that the illusion is perfect so long as you’re driving the car. That may be an unrealistically difficult goal to achieve, but if you take its success as given, it means that the illusion really is as good as the true thing… so long as the illusion is never pierced. The problem, of course, is that with a car the illusion would be all too easy to pierce; just pop the hood. Even if the actual goal is not to drive an internal combustion car but merely to *believe” you drive such a car, one glance beneath the hood (or having once been told the truth) still means a loss of value.

• CBHackingMay 5, 2015, 6:50 AM

  −2 points

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Ga­soline Gal looks un­der the hood (post 1 of 3)

  For the record: I’m not sold on “completely reasonable to prefer just that” at all. It may be simply because I experience almost no jealousy—the only “rules” in my relationship are about the things that could actually hurt me (whether I knew what she was up to or not) - but I really don’t see the cheating itself as a problem. Now, it does indicate that your partner is less trustworthy, less true to their promises, than you might have expected. That could be a problem. But in the hypothetical situation that my partner only breaks promises in ways that A) I won’t know, and B) won’t hurt me, I really don’t care. Who am I, to control my partner’s life that way? Of course, I’m highly unlikely to ever enter into an arrangement as described in the first place, so I’m not the hypothetical alternative Gal being discussed in any case.

  However, there’s another difference: with the car, Gal can—at need, or simply for fun—pop the hood and see the thing that pierces the illusion. In order for the illusion to persist, she needs to literally never look at the gasoline engine that she “thinks” powers the car. Whereas with the infidelity, so long as one doesn’t stalk one’s partner or compel them to tell the truth about their faithfulness, one would never be the wiser. The illusion of faithfulness really is as good as the real thing, and that’s just not true of the car unless you’re some weird sort of internal combustion fanatic who would never actually try to look upon their own engine.

• CBHackingApr 25, 2015, 7:35 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Meetup : MIRI pa­per read­ing group

  Either that or it was posted almost a year in advance...

• CBHackingApr 21, 2015, 8:20 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

  Not so much in response to your specific question, but when trying to figure out what I can afford, I actually take a pretty simple approach: my liquid assets (mostly in the bank) plus things I could easily liquidate (stocks, etc.) minus a “rainy day fund” (this has varied in size over the years, but tends to sit at between 2 and 10 thousand USD, based on how hard I think it would be to get a job or find housing in the event that I lost one or both). Things like 401K and HSA are omitted; they’re already earmarked for specific things and mean I don’t have to worry about keeping other funds back for those purposes. Assets that are technically resalable but either not worth the effort or of high utility to my daily life (my computer, my car, etc.) are also omitted, though in a pinch I would of course sell them too.

  The result is the money I can afford to spend. I can use it on video games, or vacations, or gifts for people, or a new car (at which point I would sell the old one), or fighting malaria. I can trickle it away on living expenses if I decide to quit my job and pursue hobbies or whatever (I would start looking for a new one once I got within “expected job hunt time * cash outflow rate” distance of the bottom of this wealth, though I could dip into the rainy day fund if needed).

  I can also invest it into riskier things than a savings account, like stocks… or into any other kind of betting.

• CBHackingApr 14, 2015, 8:26 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Username’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015

  For anybody reading this: save for one very lucky encounter at 18, I was too. It happens. Three years later, I’ve spent nearly all that time in sexual relationships, sometimes more than one at once. The turn-around can come really quickly. I’m not sure I have enough information to pinpoint the changes I need to make, though.

Meetup : Seat­tle Se­quences Group: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers 5

• CBHackingMar 30, 2015, 10:41 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Box­ing an AI?

  If you’re in a box, then the computational resources available are finite. They might change over time, as those outside the box add or upgrade hardware, but the AI can’t just say “I need some highly parallel computing hardware to solve this problem with” and re-invent the GPU, or rather, if it did that, it would be a GPU emulated in software and hence extremely slow. The entire simulation would, in effect, slow down due to the massively increased computational cost of simulating this world.

  Now, if you cut the AI off from any type of real-time clock, maybe it doesn’t notice that it’s running slower—in the same way that people generally wouldn’t notice if time dilation due to the Earth’s movement were to double, because all of our frames of reference would slow together—but I suspect that the AI would manage to find something useful for letting it know the box is there. Remember that you have to get this right the first time; if the AI finds itself in a box, you have to assume it will find its way out.

Meetup : Seat­tle Se­quences group: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers 4

• CBHackingMar 9, 2015, 8:31 AM

  8 points

  in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, March 2015, chap­ter 117

  Voldemort has an absolute truth oracle, or at least a sufficiently good approximation thereof, available too him. If Harry needs his wand to teach V one of his secrets, make him say so in Parseltongue. If H does demand his wand, make him state whether he intends to use it for anything but demonstrating a secret.

  The wonderful thing here is that this gives all kinds of opportunities for V to screw up without realizing he’s screwing up. PT is a secret for which H needs his wand. H is, in a sense, demonstrating PT. Unless V was very careful about making H state his exact and full intentions, we could have had a plausible reason for H to have his wand. There’s really no plausible reason for V to just let him have it, though; disarming him (there’s even a spell which does exactly that, and one would hope his followers know it...) costs nothing but a small amount of time, and gains V potential defense against “a power he knows not”… the existence of such things being the whole reason V didn’t just have H killed immediately!

• CBHackingMar 1, 2015, 9:57 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: l2718’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, Fe­bru­ary 2015, chap­ter 113

  Similarly, it would be seriously pushing it to rely on any scientific advances of the last (real-world) decade or so, unless there’s a reason Harry would be able to at least semi-plausibly pre-discover them himself. Not that I can think of any of those which would help anyhow, but it’s something to keep in mind.

  Future tech—even things we think we could perhaps do—is probably right out. Harry could conceivably transfigure something (his epidermis, for example; has anybody mentioned that yet?) into a material that we know exists or could exist, and can describe in atomic or sub-atomic detail, yet can’t synthesize; an arbitrary isotope of an arbitrary element should probably be possible, for example. He can’t use transfiguration to produce something with negative mass (http://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Negative_mass), though… at least, I would assume not, even if the science he knows suggests that such a thing is theoretically possible.

Meetup : Seat­tle Se­quences group: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers 3

Meetup : Seat­tle Se­quences group: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers 2

• CBHackingFeb 14, 2015, 11:43 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: CBHacking’s comment on: Weekly LW Meetups

  Huh, my comment shows as being 4 days older than the post itself. The actual upcoming session is https://​​www.facebook.com/​​events/​​1552575281693265/​​. Are comments on this post preserved week to week?

• CBHackingFeb 14, 2015, 11:37 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: faul_sname’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  Good to know. I hadn’t actually bothered to check; I just used a unique password and email address as a matter of course—but I’m glad anyhow. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee they’re storing the password verifier, but I certainly could go read the source myself and find out.

  Of course, if I was actually concerned about the security of my account here, I wouldn’t use the site at all because it’s only available unencrypted. Given how easy and cheap (even free) it is to enable TLS these days, I’m honestly surprised this site not only defaults to plaintext but doesn’t support encryption at all. Intercepting network traffic is easy (promiscuous mode on open WiFi, run your own hotspot with an expected SSID, ARP spoofing, etc.)

• CBHackingFeb 14, 2015, 11:34 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: The Truth About Math­e­mat­i­cal Ability

  It’s worth noting that the SAT2 (subject tests) are much more rarely taken; while all students who anticipate tertiary schooling in the US take the SAT, only a relative handful take the SAT2 (or did when I was looking at it). My 740 in math (SAT1) was substantially higher percentile than my 790 in the SAT2 math subject test

  I also thought that the College Board’s claim that the SAT 1 is not an IQ test was really odd. The test is (or was, in 2004/​2005) full of the following categories of problem: 1) Things a reasonably competent high school math student could solve, if they took the time, but the answers were widely spaced (say, by order of magnitude) and you could figure out the only possible one of those near-instantly if you knew to filter for it instead of for the exact solution. 2) Problems like the example given above, where no education past second grade (generously) is needed to actually solve the problem; it’s just a matter of how quickly you can figure out what it’s asking and how to best determine that. 3) Problems that could be solved, relatively easily but slowly, the “long” way, or that could be solved quickly if you knew the trick. 4) Problems that look complicated, but where getting the answers only requires solving a much simpler subset of the full problem.

  None of the three actually test your knowledge of math as a subject, really. #3 is the only type you might reasonably expect to have learned the optimal technique from a teacher, unless your teacher was specifically preparing you for the SAT. A common trend of all of them is that time is of the essence; while some people might genuinely be unable to solve a few of the problems, most of them would just take too long if done the simplest or most straightforward way, and you’d run out of time. The trick was to figure out how to solve each problem quickly, whether because the problem fit a pattern with a quickly-solvable solution, or because the solution required novel thought rather than merely plugging values into a formula, or because the test basically gives you the answer if you know how to spot it.

  The subject tests (I did math, physics, and writing) were much more like a classroom test, where actual knowledge of the subject was being tested. You still had to be quick, but the questions were much less likely to be “you can solve this in 10 seconds or 3 minutes, depending on what you do” and more likely to be “you hopefully know the formula for this, so solve it as fast as you can!”

  As other people have said, I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I’m surprised this isn’t a promoted post...

• CBHackingFeb 12, 2015, 9:47 AM

  10 points

  in reply to: Good_Burning_Plastic’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  It also raises worrying considerations about how passwords are stored in the database. Passwords should never be stored in plain text, nor with reversible encryption. Instead, each account should store a password verifier value (and a salt, unique to the user).

  A password verifier is the result of running a password, its salt, and possibly another input that isn’t kept in the DB all through a function that produces some deterministic value that is nigh-impossible to brute force. A property of password verifiers is that they produce output of a constant length, regardless of the input length. This makes it easy to allow arbitrary-length passwords because any actual limit you impose is artificial and exists for some reason other than your database schema.

  For those familiar with hash functions: a raw hash, even a long or fancy one like the new SHA3 family, is a bad password verifier function. However, it does exhibit the desired properties with regard to length. In fact, you can build a decent PVF out of cryptographic hash functions; see PBKDF2.

• CBHackingFeb 12, 2015, 9:25 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: ike’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  One possible solution is to use a proxy. There are a number of specialized HTTP[S] or SOCKS proxies, some of which may be ideally suited for this use or at least easily adaptable to it. The proxy I use most often is called Burp Suite, and is intended for web site testing and isn’t really ideal for your use, but it could technically be coerced into doing what you want.

  Preserving the actual TLS traffic including authentication and integrity is a bit of a weird/​tricky thing to do. You can record it easily enough using any tool capable of packet capture, but unless you store handshake, the traffic, the symmetric (bulk) encryption key, and the integrity metadata, it will be tricky to prove any given server sent that data.

Meetup : Seat­tle Se­quences group: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers 1

• CBHackingFeb 9, 2015, 10:45 AM

  20 points

  on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  Kind of a silly question, but it came up in our Sequences reading group yesterday: in EY’s An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, we found the following statement:

  It’s like the experiment in which you ask a second-grader: “If eighteen people get on a bus, and then seven more people get on the bus, how old is the bus driver?” Many second-graders will respond: “Twenty-five.”

  Anybody have any idea where this finding comes from initially? We found several people who referenced EY’s post, including one second-grade teacher who claimed that he’d been largely able to replicate it (a case of guessing the teacher’s password, presumably), plus a bunch of “jokes” where the reader is the driver (so the correct answer is the reader’s age), but I didn’t see an original source for the experimental result. Maybe my Google-fu is weak but I’m curious if anybody knows...

• CBHackingFeb 9, 2015, 12:01 AM

  1 point

  on: Weekly LW Meetups

  There’s a new weekly Sequences reading/​discussion group in Seattle (in addition to the ~monthly EA meetups). Currently every Monday evening at 6:30PM, UW CSE building (Paul G. Allen center). Upcoming one is https://​​www.facebook.com/​​events/​​342180419325773/​​?ref=4 or see the Seattle EA group on Facebook (https://​​www.facebook.com/​​groups/​​221612131358071) for posted future events. These Sequences-focused meetups are still getting started and don’t have a FB group (or similar) of their own yet..