I feel like my phone number and email have already been leaked a long time ago. These days I get spam emails almost every day, and random calls from different cities keep coming in. What I keep wondering is how all this data gets out there. Is there an entire underground business built around selling our information?
I don’t think being smart necessarily makes people unhappy. What’s tiring is seeing everything too clearly. When you understand too much, it becomes harder to care, to connect, or to feel joy and sometimes that clarity just feels lonely. Maybe happiness really needs a little bit of ignorance.
Morris’s program wasn’t meant to be malicious, but it accidentally became a turning point in cybersecurity history. Much of what we now know as security research, red teaming, and even the “gray hat” culture can be traced back to that moment.
I'll note that phrack magazine predates the worm by 3 years. Wargames, the movie, predates it by 5 years. 2600 by by 4 years. Mitnick started having fun around 9 years earlier.
I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.
What makes this analogy great is that nobody in the dial up days could imagine Google or YouTube. We’re in the same place now nobody knows who becomes “the Google of AI,” and that uncertainty usually means a new platform is being born.
Quanta’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t pretend to be clever. Many tech publications write as if they’re showing off, and you just end up feeling tired after reading them.
> Many tech publications write as if they’re showing off, and you just end up feeling tired after reading them.
I like this honestly because this shows that I learned something intelligent. On the other hand, if I don't feel exhausted after reading, it is a strong sign that the article was below my intellectual capacity, i.e. I would have loved it if I could have learned more.
Often, if the concept is presented in a more complex way the reason is that the author wants to emphasize and explain how the concept relates in a non-trivial way to some other deep concept; thus you learn a lot more than when the author explains things in the most simple (and shallow) way.
Also speaks to a lack of understanding on the author's part; people who truly understand some subject are generally much more adept at explaining it in simpler terms – ie without adding complexity beyond the subject's essential complexity
AI can definitely save time, but sometimes it hides the real problems. Most spreadsheet issues aren’t math errors they’re logic messes. Claude can fix your sheet, but it can’t fix your company culture.
If a company’s first reaction to a flaw is to sue instead of fix it, the problem probably goes beyond the lock itself. A real security company would appreciate someone pointing out a weakness rather than trying to take the video down. That kind of openness would actually make people trust them more.
The weird thing is, they actually had someone competent dealing with the issue:
> The strange thing about the whole situation is that Proven actually knew how to respond constructively to the first McNally video. Its own response video opened with a bit of humor (the presenter drinks a can of Liquid Death), acknowledged the issue (“we’ve had a little bit of controversy in the last couple days”), and made clear that Proven could handle criticism (“we aren’t afraid of a little bit of feedback”).
> The video went on to show how their locks work and provided some context on shimming attacks and their likelihood of real-world use. It ended by showing how users concerned about shimming attacks could choose more expensive but more secure lock cores that should resist the technique.
Sounds to me like someone professional in the company with a cooler head was on this and was handling it well, but someone else higher up got angry and aggressive and decided that revenge was more important.
Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.
This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.
That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine.
Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying
maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
>Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable.
Sadly, this current batch of graducates can't grab anything even with decent schools and grades. Some are putting a huge emphasis only on Tier 1 schools. Crazy how quickly everything changed.
There is a hiring problem for graduates absolutely, and there is no silver bullet. I will say that from my understanding and experience though having project experience (even personal projects) is still more important than grades at 90% of tech jobs. It doesn’t make it easy, just less hard though of course.
In addition to the Yang Mills theory, parity nonconservation, phase transition theory, and the Yang Baxter equation, these are also among Yang Zhenning’s important theoretical achievements. Moreover, he has made numerous academic contributions in areas such as the integral formulation of gauge fields and cold atom research.
