I confess, AC, I don't even know who voted their comment up.

I did note the 'increasingly' bit in the summary. That's because, as you know, this isn't new. Malicious actors have been doing this for a long time. They use these IPs for things like spamming, DDoS attacks, hiding traditional hacking at scale, and things like that.

They're just doing this more often because finding reliable hosts to provide them with compromised addresses. Then again, those hosts were already using hacked residential IP addresses.

And, yes, it's more difficult these days. I've been trying to find a reputable company (at a reasonable price) to just do a simple DDoS for me.

No, not for anything illegal. I just want to test some of my own infrastructure. It has gone through a DDoS attack a couple of times and has been just fine. But, those were short-lived (under an hour) and not very impressive as far as the numbers go. I'd like to find the breaking point so that I can work on that.

I've been doing some retro-computing stuff. It hasn't reached the point of 'serious hobby'. I just already had some old stuff and wanted to experience some stuff Id' missed back in the day. Like, I never owned an Amiga.

But, I think it might be interesting to get an SGI to play with. I'd like to see what it'll run today but, and this is something some folks overlook, it'll still do the tasks it was designed to do in the era it was meant to do so.

That or it seems like a good case to fit a modern computer.

You were quite fortunate, I should think, to have used one of those SGI workstations at the time. Though, it must have made your home computer seem pretty slow.

Then again, if that was your home computer, you were doing quite well.

You're right. Those are interesting.

For reasons, namely that they helped sponsor my research in grad school by providing hardware, we had a lot of DEC gear back then.

Then, there was the writing on the wall and you could see the demise of DEC coming, so we had a lot of Sun gear after that. At the time, depending on your position in the company, you could use a Unix or Windows. Even if you chose Windows, you could install X (X11) to access the server in a graphical way.

We did have people with beefy workstations but none of those were SGI. My company modeled traffic which was really only graphically heavy when we needed to present something to a client. Then, we'd have large scale simulations that would let you zoom into a very narrow focus. This was useful to show things like our predictions that depended on the traffic decisions they made.

I did employ traffic engineers but that was a service add-on and for in-house expertise. We mainly modeled outcomes, eventually even modeling pedestrian traffic and doing things like optimizing fleet traffic. (For example, watch a UPS truck carefully as it moves through its daily deliveries. One of the first things you'll notice is that they'll go out of their way to avoid taking a left into traffic - especially in congested areaas.)

Hmm... I'm rambling mindlessly, at this point.

But, we did sometimes need to render some pretty heavy graphics - even animated graphics with a great degree of fidelity.

Something like SGI workstations would have been great for that. We rendered the graphics on 'big iron' for the longest time.

Yup. That's the one. I'm reasonably convinced (from pictures and Wikipedia) that was an SGI Octane.

I was impressed with the RAM that it had. At the time, there were still some servers that had less RAM and only expensive workstations had that much RAM.

Google is absolutely collecting your personal information.

They aren't really selling it, however. You can't go to Google and say, "Here's ten bucks. Let me see KGIII's information."

They're selling access to your metrics, however. You're profiled and assigned a market segment with pretty good accuracy. They know who you are, what your interests are, what your interests really are, all the pages you've gone to, etc.. (Royal you, not you specifically.)

The people paying Google are paying them to target people in X, Y, and Z categories for the purpose of promotion. They don't actually sell your personal information - at least not from what I can tell (and I have purchased ads before). They weren't very good ads. I wasn't even selling anything. I just wanted to see what buying ads did. (It did very little. My case should probably not be considered as data.)

I guess you could say that they sell access to a person's predicted behavior and not their actual information.

But, from behind the curtain, I didn't see any magic box to search for KGIII's data and then an option to buy said data. They sell that information in aggregate, seemingly keeping it pretty well protected. My own government has lost control of my data. Google appears to have not done so. It's kind of weird that way.

Yeah, it can be a pretty fun debate topic. I'm not sure that I'm willing to invest the energy into doing so, as there's no real benefit.

Even if we reached a point of agreement, or even enlightenment, there'd be little benefit. Few people are willing to change a firmly held belief, even when faced with conflicting information. It happens but we're rationalizing beings instead of rational beings.

That said, I think many people might (if properly coaxed) agree that we, from a view of pragmatism, should 'cull the herd'. The big difference will be who it is making those decisions. I'm not sure that I'd agree with that viewpoint when there are adequate resources. (We currently have adequate resources, they're just poorly distributed for so many complex reasons that can be summed up as 'we humans are kinda shitty'.)

In the long view, I'd not be even a wee bit surprised if we caused our own extinction. I also think it's hubris to believe that we're the evolutionary end-game and the true apex.

Man... I now kind of want to eat a bunch of mushrooms and then mull this one over for a bit.

You do know that you can buy insulin needles without a prescription, right?

If you're not mainlining your Tang, you're doing it wrong.

That sounds right. They worked for a very famous studio at the time, perhaps even a couple of them, doing things like CGI.

Said machine was a beast in its day. The specs and specifics have long been forgotten but I recall that performance levels were quite high. They worked on some pretty famous movies and were good enough that they did so via remote work even back then. He did have high speed internet to his home but I think it was just a T1 or maybe some ISDN line. I don't think he had a full T3 but he might have. It's not like he was paying for it out of his pocket. We're talking 25 years ago, or something like that. So, the details are quite fuzzy.

I've never been into video manipulation or creating graphics but he was quite skilled and worked on movies I'm sure you're familiar with. I guess it's not doxxing him to point out that he worked for Pixar for quite a while. So, whatever Pixar used might be what he was using. I haven't heard from him in decades. He would sometimes talk about making his nest egg and getting out. He may have done that.

Yeah, as I think about it, SGI sounds right to me. The case was blue-ish but I'm partially colorblind.

That's why we (jokingly) did a cadence of 'rape, murder, pillage, burn'.

Any order other than that is just barbaric!

NOTE: None of those things are really all that socially acceptable.

Yeah, not so many of those 'space race tech' things were really all that relative. We like to imagine so. People like to say so.

Here's NPR being optimistic and trying to explain all the great things that came from the Apollo missions:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2019%2F07%2F20...

There really isn't that much. For some reason, we remember history differently. We look at the grand accomplishment (which it was) and seem to have to believe that it had some great benefits for mankind as a whole. Maybe that's how we justify it for ourselves?

Once upon a time, I too believed that we'd gained much from the Apollo mission specifically. Then, many years ago, it was someone right here on this site who took their time to be pedantic and argumentative. They were correct, however. They were correct enough for me to change my views. (I'm not against changing my mind when learning new things. I also like a good grammar nazi.)

This can be a fun debate topic, and I've been a fan of formal debate for years. However, I'm not so sure that the person you're responding to is very good at it, and I'm not really going to do that whole formal debate thing.

The question you ask can be easily reversed. Why do humans deserve to live?

This can get pretty into the weeds with topics like assuming we're the peak of evolution and shit like that.

We can also point to history (and our ongoing treatment of other humans) as an example of why we should be stuck in our gravity well. We can't even treat our own environment with any level of responsibility.

I'm not sure that we should infest the universe with humans. Any other life we find that's less advanced than us will be killed, fucked, eaten, or fucked killed and then eaten. Any life that's more advanced than us should treat us like the invasive species we are and exterminate us on sight.

(I kid... I kid...)

Well, I mostly kid. We really are quite horrible as a whole. We can't even consistently treat other humans with respect, dignity, and kindness. I'm an optimist, however. This won't change much more in my lifetime, but it may someday change for the better.

For a while, we had some choice, depending on one's definition of PC. As I recall, the Micro, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad were all black.

If we only include IBM and clones, IBM had some models dressed in black from fairly early on.

But, yes You're still correct. I'm just remarking because they did exist, but were not so great in number. It was a sea of beige and the age of the cubical.

A video-editing friend of mine had some fancy computer dressed in blue. I forget the make/model and I guess it'd be a PC but was more like a workstation. I think that predated Apple's jump to offering a variety of colors.

Hmm... That's what they're doing. They encounter what's currently a fringe case and adapt for that. They'll then expand and repeat the process. As they grow, they'll learn more as they encounter more. They've already encountered all sorts of edge case experiences. They already have humans, animals, and cars darting into the road and a remarkably good safety record.

I did chuckle a bit at the 'exponential' bit. It may appear so, but it'll really be sigmoidal eventually (assuming they continue to grow).

But, that'd just be pedantry and nobody wants that.

I can't think of a single other country that claims to be civilised that has a tax code so complicated you need vast amounts of software and a high-power computer just to file what is properly owed.

TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.

Let's pretend for a moment that you've a tax system that taxes the nth dollar at the nth point along a particular curve. We can argue about which curve is approporiate some other time, my own opinion is that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay on what you earn. However, not everyone agrees with that, so let's keep it nice and generic and say that it's "some curve" (which Libertarians can define as a straight line if they absolutely want). You now don't have to adjust anything, ever. The employer notifies the IRS that $X was earned, the computer their end performs a definite integral between N (the top of the curve at the last point you paid tax) and N+X, and informs the employer that N+X is the money owed for that interval.

Nobody actually does it this way, at the moment, but that's beside the point. We need to be able to define what the minimum necessary level of complexity is before we can identify how far we are from it. The above amount has no exemptions, but honestly, trying to coerce people to spend money in particular ways isn't particuarly effective, especially if you then need a computer to work through the form because you can't understand what behaviours would actually influence the tax. If nobody (other than the very rich) have the time, energy, or motivation to find out how they're supposed to be being guided, then they're effectively unguided and you're better off with a simple system that simply taxes less in the early amounts.

This, then, is as simple as a tax system can get - one calculation per amount earned, with no forms and no tax software needed.

It does mean that, for middle-income and above, the paycheck will vary with time, but if you know how much you're going to earn in a year then you know what each paycheck will have in it. This requires a small Excel macro to calculate, not an expensive software package that mysteriously needs updating continuously, and if you're any good at money management, then it really really doesn't matter. If you aren't, then it still doesn't matter, because you'd still not cope with the existing system anyway.

In practice, it's not likely any country would actually implement a system this simple, because the rich would complain like anything and it's hard to win elections if the rich are paying your opponent and not you. But we now have a metric.

The UK system, which doesn't require the filling out of vast numbers of forms, is not quite this level of simple, but it's not horribly complicated. The difference between theoretical and actual is not great, but it's tolerable. If anyone wants to use the theoretical and derive an actual score for the UK system, they're welcome to do so. I'd be interested to see it.

The US, who left the UK for tax reasons (or was that Hotblack Desiato, I get them confused) has a much much more complex system. I'd say needlessly complicated, but it's fairly obvious it's complicated precisely to make those who are money-stressed and time-stressed pay more than they technically owe, and those who are rich and can afford accountants for other reasons pay less. Again, if anyone wants to produce a score, I'd be interested to see it.

/r/duck