Recent content on Bits, Bytes, Late Nights
The Gilded Age of content is nearly upon us, when generative AI models will create everything we consume. Everything will be perfectly curated to the viewer and generated on the fly right before your eyes. This post demonstrates how the pieces are nearly there and how easy it is to put an app like this together.
As it turns out, our best explanation of physics proves that I’m the only real thing in this universe.
With a new U.S. President looming on the horizon and the policies he’ll bring along, people are hoping for economic improvements, for some reason. Unfortunately, the harsh reality of modern economics suggests that prices must always go up.
A quick essay that’s a long time coming on how the economic system of our world makes me feel. In a word: demoralized.
Why did I pay $12 for a water bottle at a festival? Why did you buy Tylenol over the generic brand of acetaminophen? Did you know it’s really easy to cause liver damage with acetaminophen? In this post, I laugh at the bad economic decisions we make as humans every day.
A brief (by university standards) essay that ties together history, economics, philosophy, ethics, nutrition, and environmentalism to analyze the prosperity resulting from capitalism and industrialization in contrast to our hopes for a sustainable society.
This is just some basic Leetcode-esque stuff I needed to do at work recently. It shouldn’t surprise or impress anyone who has thought about this before, but it was mildly interesting to think and write about.
“Whataboutism” isn’t a logical fallacy if it’s in the context of a zero-sum game.
It’s not about ape avatars, basketball highlights, or other digital trinkets. It’s about authentic relationships.
Theres nothing inherently wrong with anecdotal evidence. Yes, the big picture matters, but that shouldnt make real stories less meaningful.
Conspiracy theory: Corporations dedicate some non-trivial part of their marketing budget to influencing pop culture into including their products (e.g. songs).
Conspiracy theory: Popular TV networks time their commercial breaks at the same time (give or take a minute for plausible deniability) to guarantee that viewers see at least some advertisements.
How do places whose local economy basically exists because of tourism have the gall to charge people extra money to visit there? Occupancy taxes are a joke.
If every brand of paper towels claims that 6 of their rolls is the same as 9 “regular” rolls, doesnt every brand then become a regular roll? Which means 6 rolls = 9 rolls = 13.5 rolls = … ad infinitum. Use this one weird trick to get infinite paper towels for life!
Machine “learning” is a misnomer: The modern black-box algorithms that show us things they think we want to see start by learning from our behavior but end by manipulating it. After all, isn’t it much more optimal (and ML just cares about optimality) to slowly convince 10 users that they all want to see 1 thing rather than to show them 10 uniquely-relevant things.
America is one of the only first-world countries out there that allows pharmaceuticals to advertise to the public directly. And then we wonder why we’re over-medicated…
Just learned about parallel construction , where the story that law enforcement tells the public is completely fabricated in order to keep the juicy details secret. It’s fascinating to think about this in the context of the recent Bitcoin ransomware bust .
Or: Stop trying to make everyone dumber, Outlook.
A cynical (or realistic) take on how a utopian dream–autonomous, self-driving vehicles–can turn into a dystopian nightmare: the global snitching fleet of the future.
Suppose you wanted to graffiti someone else’s fence without getting caught. The color of the graffiti isn’t important; it’s about sending a message. That means you can choose any color paint you want. Naturally, everyone in the neighborhood has access to the same colors (so no particular choice would draw suspicion) except for one : it’s a special, rare color that you are…
If you know why a rule exists, you know when it’s okay to break it.
Just realized that the pending ubiquity of self-driving cars will mean every road-accessible inch of our planet will be under a state of constant surveillance thanks to the dozens of high-resolution cameras that will be on every vehicle.
At what point did America’s materialistic superiority over the Soviet Union transition into a religion of consumerism?
Has anyone ever considered the fact that since Google is often the provider of free WiFi at most Starbucks, it can secretly man-in-the-middle all of the hotspot’s traffic since it’s also a trusted SSL certificate provider? Of course, this would be relatively easy to catch (for example, by noticing that Bing’s cert is verified by Google rather than Microsoft), but the potential is…
Isn’t it odd how more and more normalized it is to have a chemical buffer between our conscious mind and the real world? From the innocence of sipping on a work-day beer to dependence on caffeine consumption for productivity to the absurdity of same-hour marijuana delivery, it seems our grasp on the world around us slips deeper and deeper into the murky waters of substance-induced thought…
There are only two classes worth thinking about: worker and ruler.
A short blurb on an interesting (if not worrying) possible byproduct if Apple is forced to release their iron grip on the AppStore.
A simple explanation for a fundamental mathematical truth.
A guy who took two philosophy courses questions the premises of a 400-year-old argument for the necessity of believing in God.
Are we reaching the hardware limitations of our simulated universe?
An analysis of Apple’s novel contact tracing protocol for COVID-19 though the lens of a paranoid privacy enthusiast.
An overview of the Internet’s growth in the 2010s and some questions about what’s to come… With the current state of centralized content distribution, why aren’t we moving to a peer-to-peer model?
Welcome to my comprehensive note directory. These typeset works are the product of untold hours of study and synthesis of various graduate-level topics in computer science. They were created specifically for Georgia Tech’s graduate program, but most of them should be self-contained and well-structured enough to serve as a gentle introduction to many different topics: My notes on…
A collection of tasty pescetarian recipes that I’ve gathered over the years with my personal tweaks and suggestions included.
Or, arriving at the rationale behind the existence of JSON Web Tokens in an extremely roundabout fashion.
A memory-less solution that minimizes extra message duplication.
Or, abusing MAC addresses for fun and profit (well, no profit unless you’re a massive corporation or the government…).
I’m George. I study computer science and sometimes cook things . I’m a bit of a cypherpunk at heart, particularly interested in cryptography, peer-to-peer technologies, and applications of virtual and augmented reality. Fittingly, I work at the Stellar Development Foundation on the “Decentralization” team, creating (hopefully) useful abstractions to the underlying protocol…
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