A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor.
However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%.
And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention.
Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.
Some highlights:
- Vivaldi is suprisingly fast and has good ad blocking
- Kiwi plus the Ublock Origin extension (UBO) might be /even faster/
- Firefox also allows UBO, but sadly it is relatively slow
If 30% of your users hate the interface so much that they immediately leave your service, then sure, you can say "70% of our users have no problem with our strobing call to action". But that does not stop the problem - 30% of your potential revenue base is walking away, when you could retain them.
I recommend reading longer histories and reading them on audiobook. Those tell history in a nonlinear way, going events over and over and over from different perspectives, until you get the feeling of what it was like to live in that time. Your intuition about many rivers branching and merging is exactly what good history is written like. Once you have read some good histories, it's easy to fundamentally fall in love with all the stories and realities of the people travelling down these seemingly infinite rivers.
for example, read Adrian Goldsworthy's "Pax Romana" and "How Rome Fell" for a very entertaining and up to date view of rome at its height and decline, with hundreds of little nonlinear story details. The audiobooks are on the audiobook bay. Listen to them view a Smart Audiobook reader with auto-pause for if you fall asleep, and start listening during exercise, cleaning, cooking, and commuting.
If you start doing this, you'll start listening to about 2 histories a month. In a year you'll have a much deeper understanding of history and how it's written.
Unfortunately, audiobook is the best format I've found for overcoming the size of history texts. It really helps me with my reading difficulties and tendency to get stuck on boring passages. The history is much more engaging when someone is reading for me. Also, many passages are going to go over your head, and it may put you to sleep literally - that's also fine!
The goal is to start understanding and enjoying the small little stories that historians write. History is full of millions of them, and many of them are enjoyable!
Another thought is that the friction should be inherently enjoyable. Another person gives the example of an extension that adds 10 seconds to the load time of Youtube videos. This would be a great time to take a breath, clear the mind, think of priorities, and decide if the youtube video is worth watching.
If that 10 second moment of mental space and clarity becomes enjoyable, then you will not want to reverse the friction. The author's point here is that people often add /too much/ friction.
I propose that the right amount of friction requires an amount of self control that is enjoyable and refreshing - ie, only a /very small/ amount of self control can ever be sustainable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330900
Partnering with the incomprehensibly byzantine andcomplacent architect of the SEOpocalypse AND "late-to-the-ai-party" Google does not give faith that the solution will be more performant or private than Github's copilot.
This is just another in a series of terrible blunders in the last year that has wiped out any goodwill I had towards gitlab. WTF happened, did they get a new CEO or something?
Ironically, there is a school of thought on meditation which says that it's perfectly valid to meditate by picking a task or chore, then performing that task so that it engrosses the entire mind. According to this line of thought, this working meditation is even better than normal meditation, because it gets shit done.
Two Approaches: Grinding and Flow
One approach is to do the task with perfect awareness and focus. We dismiss extraneous thoughts when they arise. We and focus on doing the task perfectly and without unnecessary pain or suffering.
We could call this Grinding, since we still feel effort.
Another approach is to enter a stateless flow. In this state, your awareness and focus and identity are no longer present as you do the task. You neither feel effort nor make errors as you do the task.
Is ghidra safe to use if you consider the NSA an adversary?
Every person I've asked this question has had their noses so far up the NSA's pooper that they could not imagine considering the NSA an adversary.
But suppose you were running a malware honeypot operation for the CCP. Would you still use Ghidra? Why or why not?
And please don't pass the buck and say, "I probably wouldn't be allowed to use ghidra" or "I'd probably use whatever my CCP handler told me to use" or "I wouldn't be working for the CCP in the first place." That does not inform me about the security risks of using ghidra with the NSA as an adversary.
It's pretty dumb this continues to come up years later. You're the NSA delivering source code to the cyber security community. The exact community that: doesn't immediately trust NSA, knows how to find bugs, would love to find any sort of bug in their code (regardless if malicious), people you want to apply for your jobs, people you partner with (academia/other govt orgs/other country cyber security groups).
So your thinking is: yes, this is the crowd we'll attempt to insert backdoor java code.
Okay fine you still don't trust them? Run in a VM without network connection. What security risks/threat are you even talking about?
And yes people have heavily audited the source. You either trust the community catches thing or not. I'm the end of your still tin foil about it, don't use, nobody cares.
2. The audits I've seen don't evaluate the threats
3. Link me to the audits if you want to convince me
I. The risks - airgapping is not enough
1. If the software has zeroday beacons in it, it can communicate with zeroday beacon repeaters embedded in VM, OS, or hardware (see: cache side channels: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3133956.3136064 )
2. The beacons wouldn't have to look like exploit code, they could just be timing bugs sprinkled into the codebase at random. There are plenty of random little warnings and defects in the code that nobody is ever going to check or fix, see this audit:
https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/382
4. Low bitrate data leaks, like "ghidra is running in this org, decompiling files named....." may be accumulated by the NSA
This is just zero-day warehousing and passive signals collection with embedded zerodays. It would be hard for security researchers to detect this. I'd happily change my mind if you showed me an audit that looks for beacons and other side channels.
This audit tells us that the code is janky, but doesn't tell us if it's secure. It's just a dump of thousands upon thousands of static analysis errors.
There's no threat anaylsis in this audit. But it does suggest the code has so many defects that a serious audit would be very expensive.
III. Change my mind with evidence
Please link me to the heavy audits of the code. If you can.
tldr;; I think the code is less heavily audited than you can support
There's a difference between buzzwords and jargon. Buzzwords can start out as jargon, but have their technical meaning stripped by users who are just trying to sound persuasive. Examples include words like synergy, vertical, dynamic, cyber strategy, and NFT.
That's not what's happening in the parent comment. They're talking about projects like
Lora is just a way to re-train a network for less effort. Before we had to fiddle with all the weights, but with Lora we're only touching 1 in every 10,000 weights.
The parent comment says GPT4all doesn't give us a way to train the full size Llama model using the new lora technique. We'll have to build that ourselves. But it does give us a very huge and very clean dataset to work with, which will aid us in the quest to create an open source chatGPT killer.
Should jackasses on HN use plain language instead of jargon? Surely.
But AI workers mainly develop and use jargon because it is an easy and natural way to consolidate concepts.
Sure, there is a kind of conspiracy caused by publish or perish. Researchers may use jargon to make their work harder to reject on review; laborious speech and jargon can make statements sound more profound. However, no technical field is immune to this. We'll need to systematically change science before we can eliminate that problem.
Until we manage that, if you care about the concepts enough to want to understand them before there are good plain speech descriptions, just pop the jargon into google scholar and skim read a few papers, and you're good to go. If you don't care about the concepts that much, then don't worry about the jargon. The important concepts will get their own non-technical explanations in time.
As it stands, AI jargon is not that bad. It tends to be pretty fair and easy to understand, compared to jargon in, say, biochemistry or higher math.
However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%.
And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention.
Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.