Too many arguments become religious arguments. Seems to be a major flaw in our human operating system.

Found this article about Lake City, Florida (my hometown, incidentally) that paid after a ransomware attack.

They are now going to shell out $60,000 a year for proper backup.

I also wrote this post where I estimated the cost of said proper backup for a different but similar small town. This was my estimate.

Cost of decent backup, including labor: $60,690

I don’t know what their estimate includes, but I was pretty close. Been doing this a long time. The recurring yearly costs for my solution would be a bit less, and I kind of rolled those together in a first-year estimate. Looks like Lake City is going all cloud-based so you end up trading more costs on one side or the other vs. how I would do it but they usually end up being about the same (contrary to what you’ve read, cloud is NOT cheaper).

Really fucking annoyed with how horny leftist Twitter is for this “fact” that is completely misunderstood. 71% of emissions come from energy *produced by* 100 companies. There is NO UNIVERSE where those emissions don’t happen while consumer behavior stays the same. None. https://t.co/mspYIjcze6

— Miranda Ⓥ (@bunnysnack) July 5, 2019

Wow, this is powerful stupid. A lot of the left needs to study the more valid parts of economics. I know, it’s hard to tell which portions are worth anything. Right now, I don’t feel like writing something explaining how international demand works, but study substitution effects and income effects for greater understanding of at least parts of why this tweet is doofy.

There is also no universe where more than three billion consumers worldwide are going to spontaneously change their behavior while an entire phased array of propaganda and aspiration is aligned against them 24/7. Why would someone even think this, believe this? How can you be so clueless? Is it just misplaced hope? Because it would take about that many to make any substantial difference — see the economics I mentioned above for reference.

I do wonder how many people like this Miranda person are paid corporate shills. I haven’t researched this person specifically but a bet a whole lot of them are.

I’ve worked at huge companies, merely big companies, medium-size companies and small ones (where I work now).

There is in the popular mind more prestige in working for large companies with recognizable names. It’s particularly true in the tech industry — my industry — but somewhat the case in any field. Having worked, though, at companies of all sizes there’s much to be said for how working for a small company hones your skills and your approach to problem-solving.

When I worked for Transunion (a merely big company) there were dozens of people I could turn to for assistance with problems, experts in their fields, some of whom even did the same job as I did.

Where I currently work, here’s who I can turn to when I am stumped or at an impasse: no one. Either I figure it out or no one does. There just isn’t anyone else around with the necessary skills to bounce ideas off of, to ask for assistance, to turn to when I’ve hit a wall. Sure, I can hire consultants (and sometimes do) but they are expensive and unknown and often unreliable.

So I end up exploring many areas, learning diverse sub-fields, doing tasks and taking on responsibilities I’d never get to at large companies. I simply must understand many areas from the ground up to get my job done. At medium and large companies, often there are entire teams I can just outsource parts of important jobs to, that in fact I am not even permitted to venture into because the task is under other teams’ remit to take care of. At a small one, I outsource them to myself, just at a later time.

It might not be true for everyone, but I’ve certainly learned more and more deeply working for small companies than I have for large or medium-sized ones. I wish that experience were more valued in my field.

Because I enjoyed Annalise Basso so much in the “Safe and Sound” episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, today I peeked at her IMDB page to see what else she’d appeared in.

I found Cold, a show I’d never heard of. Turns out it was only on a short-lived network called Go90 that Verizon shut down last year sometime. The show didn’t appear to be available in any format at all anywhere — lost to history. Dammit.

I’ve had a few people say to me lately some variant of, “I wish I had your life.”

No. I have a great life, no doubt. Wonderful partner. Enough money to travel, to buy the things I want. I generally do what I want to do when I feel like doing it. But the thing is to get where I am and to be who I am, they would’ve had to endure the experiences I had to withstand prior to all this. All of those days of dread and fighting that made me the person I am, that gave me my ambition, my smarts, my outrageous stubbornness and perseverance in the face of vicious detractors.

You have to walk that path to make it here; there is not another way. Most people who say they want my life would have no interest at all in any of that. Sure, a lot of life is luck and circumstance. But another part is how you deal with those two vicissitudes as they arise.

I am capable of the things I am because I was forged in the fire of neglect and implacable bullying and hatred over many years, followed by five hard years as a paratrooper. I can be so carefree and bold and brave because of all that, not in spite of it.

Walk that path, you can be me. Trust me, you don’t want it that bad.

new business card:
FOONE TURING-
ANGRY AT PIXELS

— foone (@Foone) July 5, 2019

This could be my business card as well. I am angry at many, many pixels.

By the way, when you hear Quantum Trajectory Theory, the “trajectory” there is not a trajectory in normal space. This misleads many, I think. This trajectory is in Hilbert Space, which is an abstract vector space. The reason that QTT requires a Hilbert Space (good lord, I am simplifying a lot here) is that calculating anything superpositioned (before decoherence) is that it evolves through an abstract vector space that does not correspond to normal Euclidean space.

This is the trajectory to which QTT refers, a trajectory through Hilbert Space.

When magazines pay people to write articles like these about quantum mechanics, I wish they’d find people who know what they were talking about. That article is total, utter, worthless crap and you emerge from reading it less knowledgeable than you were before.

Read here for more information about the actual result.

In short, what the paper actually succeeded in doing was measuring and “observing” a quantum state transition occurring, which had never been done before. However, that such a state transition is not instantaneous and takes time is a standard part of QM, is nothing new had been known for 50+ years. This is just the first time it’d ever been measured and reversed.

Quantum trajectory theory does NOT makes predictions that are impossible to make with the standard formulation, contrary to what the Yale researcher claimed in the Quanta piece. Why a scientist claimed this, I have no idea. But nevertheless, he is 100% wrong. Perhaps he was misquoted.

The researchers did achieve something and that is notable. But they did not achieve what the Quanta article claimed, nor is the researcher correct about what exactly they discovered.

Also, that quantum state transitions are predictable once they start occurring has also been known for 50+ years — and that’s because the Schrödinger equation itself is completely deterministic. What is random and always will be is when and where a quantum transition will start — in other words, a specific uranium atom cannot ever be predicted to emit a photon, but when it starts to transition, we can predict its states and how long it will take.

As I said, the researchers did achieve something quite cool and that had never been done before. However, they did not discover anything new at all about QM and this changes that theory in no way at all. Quantum energy state transitions have always been deterministic once they start and have always been known to take time.