In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

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One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

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It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports

That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

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But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

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When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

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The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

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PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

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First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

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All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

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A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

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The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

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Google's interview system is not great but there are various reasons why it feels less than it is. Most candidates don't know what the goal of our interviews are. First rule, it is not about finding an optimal solution or any solution at all.

You are interviewed for multiple skills simultaneously. Cognitive skills, communication, leadership are a few to name. If the point is not finding a solution, then what is it? Let me explain.

Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. An interview question is just a tool in achieving that, it is not there to specifically measure your skills on a topic but a tool to understand the depth of your thinking.

Before the interview starts, ask them what they want to get out of this interview. Good interviewers should already have a plan and a set of expectations. Ask them what you should do. Don't start coding yet. Ask them you should produce. Discussion, diagrams, pseudo code, code?

Then, start cracking the question. List whatever questions you think it is important to solve this question, ask your edge cases. Get to a point where you are discussing about pros/cons of the solutions. These steps are critical. Don't just start coding. Have a consensus first.

A quick thread on intelligence analysis in the context of cyber threat intelligence. I see a number of CTI analysts get into near analysis paralysis phases for over thinking their assessments or over obsessing about if they might be wrong. (1/x)

Consider this scenario. A CTI analyst identifies new intrusions and based on the collection available and their expertise note that the victims are all banks. Their consumer wants to know when threats specifically target banks (not just that banks are victims).

The CTI analyst has, from their collection, at this time, and based on their expertise enough to make an activity group (leveraging the Diamond Model in this example) that meet's the requirement of their consumer. So what's the problem?

The CTI analyst begins to over think it. "What if I had more collection? Would my analysis change? I really don't *know* they aren't also targeting mining companies in Australia as I don't have collection there."

The analyst knows their analysis is going to be shared. Maybe even public. "What if another team or professional intelligence firm has more collection and ends up noting that it isn't banking specific at all. Banks are victims, not targets. Will my consumer distrust me later?"

Why was @LudwigAhgren's Twitch stream yesterday a masterpiece in creating live content?

Ludwig started off with a high energy intro with background music that sounded like an entrance theme to a WWE wrestler (or a Saturday morning TV show).

He then moved onto a segment where he attempted to break a 'world record' for speedrunning Unban Bingo.

(a trending piece of content right now, with in-jokes with the Twitch community and funny content that can be repurposed for YouTube).

Ludwig follows this up with a 20 slide presentation on 'how to make it big as a streamer'.

He engaged viewers into chat by asking them to vote directly in chat temporarily, which perfectly broke up what could have been a 'boring' presentation (spoiler, it wasn't boring).

He follows this with a Q&A and answers as many questions as he could, again, engaging chat.

THEN.... we get a PogChamp emote tier list of every PogChamp so far.