Hi there,
I talked with some cool people tonight. I wanted to just chat about some fun stuff. Rap is an interesting genre. There are plenty of good artists, but none of the famous artists are very good in my opinion. I mean, how is that even possible? It's something that has to do with the way that business and urban music happens. I'm not qualified to explain it.
I was made aware of a virus on a computer that I had access to. I looked around to see if it was simple enough to just remove. It was extremely well entrenched. It was impossible to remove and had installed so many other viruses that it was practically a complete destruction of the machine. I blame Microsoft, but you're probably thinking that I'm biased. I am biased, but I am also a quite authoritative source of information. Those who don't believe my opinion can explain away. Go right ahead. A technical user visits a website using IE6. They are immediately (without clicking) infected with dozens of viruses unremovable. All of these are the fault of Microsoft. The specific keywords that I found in my research of this virus are too numerous to display, but here's a few: C:\windows\system32\core.sys func.exe func.js. Avast seemed to understand a few of the viruses, but was not able to remove the virus. This is obviously past the limit of virus protection. It is a sign of the times that Microsoft is not secure against viruses.
Linux does not have many viruses because it is engineered much differently. It has been designed to avoid easy exploitation. I will write a virus for Linux in the next month to show how awfully difficult it will be. If you're interested, keep tuned in. I'll be using it at Defcon ACTF.
Read more »Greetings,
Enough has happened since my last blog that I decided to write a new one even though the only real thing I can say is that I have officially released my first product, Small Wide World. But I decided before I wrote this blog that I was only going to advertise it once or twice. This blog is about stuff that I think is cool. And there are a lot more cool things than my small project that does a few cool things and draws a few pretty graphs.
Entrepreneurship besides the whole hacking part is about selling stuff. It is a strange and interesting process that has a lot of issues. Issues like Paypal's IPN being non-trivial to secure. Issues like advertising taking way too much time and effort, but really being the only way to sell a product. Issues like hiring people being a massive money sink and being the way to earn large amounts of money. These issues I plan to figure out in the next year. And you're likely to hear about them in spades if you check back in a month or two.
What about things that are not related to my making money. Okay, lemme see.. Hanging out with friends has become a more important part of my life more recently. I would like to think that Dodgeball has helped with this, but a lot of factors have changed my normally non-social hours to social hours. I think that one thing that has caused it is my recent experiment with serotonin. (No, I haven't been injecting it.) I have been testing what things change my moods and hypothesizing that each time I have a mood swing, it's being caused by serotonin levels changing rapidly. What causes serotonin levels to change rapidly? If my experiment was done today and I had to turn in my results, I would say with a lot of qualifiers and maybes that the three things that increase serotonin levels are: caffeine, music, and exposure to friends. I haven't really found things that reduce serotonin levels specifically and reliably. But if you're me, you don't really want to decrease serotonin levels. Adjacent and related but not equal to moods are productivity, interest, and respect for life. While these things are obviously helped by better moods, there's certain factors that can change each of these. Stabilizing my mood is important to me, but often I want to play on the side of too good of a mood. How does one test whether they are in too good a mood? I went to the Infected Mushroom show (I didn't go in because I'm too poor) on Friday and took some interesting pills that made me really happy and I was really productive at Last Supper Club and for 6 hours when I got home.
Read more »Research and development in AI is an interesting concept. First off, there hasn't been much noticeable progress in AI since the 80s. Considering the fact that AI is an O(n^2) problem and computers have grown in computing power exponentially since then, one might think that progress would be outrageous. Growing up from a kid easily impressed into the harsh world where practicality and simplicity rules has taught me a bit of scepticism. When reading an article, I look for signs of flakiness, lies, and so on. When someone gives a plan that sounds too good to be true, I take a look at the numbers and I decide not to risk my reputation by supporting it vocally. But there's still something deep in my mind that doesn't want to give up on the idea that a solution to the big problems exists. It's happened before, it'll happen again. Maybe that's why I want to write video games: when I control the physics and the plot, I can just say: it is so, so let's do it. The reality of the world is that big breakthroughs come after massive investments of time and energy (including waste) on things that do and do not work. It simply will not happen if we aren't working on it. So I think it's a good thing that I have a nearly inexhaustible supply of curiosity into the cool and interesting. But simply researching things that are cool and interesting is not nearly enough. R&D into topics that are not giving results to other researchers where you might have some insight is a requirement of progress.
So I've been working on some simple AI. Really all I've written is just the infrastructure necessary for the code I really want to write. But once done the system should be pretty easy to work with. I was able to test a cops and robbers simulation at approx. realtime. That's useful. When I write an intelligent robber or cop, I'll know because they'll be more "clever" than their opponents. I wrote a short essay on how to reimplement that so that it would be more stable, so I'm slowing going to do that.
