Joscha Bach's talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-self-models-of-loving-grace
I really liked this talk as well. One part that I'm not sure I can fully agree with, though, is the idea of fully re-conceptualizing the self. It is possible to self-author, and partially change...but I have never heard of nor met anyone who just became a totally different person. I'm willing to concede that he may have been speaking hypothetically, or that maybe the idea of changing the self will be more accessible to AGI rather than for humanity.
That was a mind-expanding 45-minute talk. Than you for highlighting it.
Seems crazy. I identify with my agency, id est, self = agency + few memories.
This is saying the opposite?
I would guess it comes from not knowing what you want. If you don't go through the Uberman process, then you end up saying things like that.
This talk was one of the best so far, highly recommended.
They are among the highlights for me every year. Just the right amount of brain melting information density.
If anybody that runs the website is here, may I suggest the ability to filter/sort the talks by language? Several of the talks are given in a language I'm not fluent in, and not all contain translations.
A lot of the talks are actually dubbed in English and French (and sometimes in other languages).
Edit: the dubbing (like everything at the conference) is done by volunteers.
You can also contribute the language filtering yourself: https://github.com/voc/voctoweb
Addition: At least last year, they would often reupload videos with more languages later on. So if the talk you are interested in is not available in a language you speak, check back later.
Are subtitled versions coming too, or perhaps just transcripts?
They do make subtitles, although some talks from 37C3 are still marked as TODO so I’m not sure what the timeline is. You can help! https://c3subtitles.de/
And by the way, here’s the language filter issue – not a lot of discussion since it was created in 2019, though: https://github.com/voc/voctoweb/issues/399
As a general rule, there should be translations DE <-> EN for all talks.
The team is working very hard to make this happen. Still, they are all volunteers.
The CCC conference is widely regarded in the US, and has significant relevance there.
It's a .de site, for a German conference.
As someone who went to CCC more than once, it's a very international conference. Everything official related to the conference is in English (or bilingual). Some talks are in German, but a large majority is in English (at least this is how I remember it). Anyway the point is that the organisers care about non- german speakers, so it's not an unreasonable request.
Though being able to filter out talks by language might still be useful, because there are enough non-German talks to make that worthwhile. (Also for people who only speak, say, German and Polish, and might not want to bother with the English talks.)
They have translation both from deutsch to English and English to Deutsch, therefore filtering would make no difference.
I don't see how this is related
US conferneces don't bother with that aspect. Why should we put the onus on everyone else?
It’s about the field (computers, software). Not about the country. As a non english nor german native speaker, I appreciate English text/audio as much as possible in any situation.
I am not sure which "we" you are referring to, but CCC puts quite some effort in dubbing and subtitles (while those can take more time to publish)
Racism has no place in CCC. You are not part of "we".
You are aware that a German hacker conference taking place in Germany wouldn't have to make anything at all in English if they didn't like to?
The fact they do that is nice, but I am not aware US hacker conferences offer translations into other languages.
Nobody mentioned translations, why are you talking about them?
This nationalistic spirit wouldn't fit in CCC anyway so I don't get why you feel so strongly about this.
I don't feel strong about this at all, I am teaching bilingual (German/English) at a German university myself.
Also, quote from the first comment in this discussion tree: not all contain translations then another person It's a .de site, for a German conference and then the post I responded to: I don't see how this is related.
My response was aimed at the anglosphere arrogance of assuming naturally that everyone has to do everything in their language.
Yeah, not all contain translations, and the lack of translations makes the feature that was suggested (the ability to filter by language) useful. I think you misunderstood what OP was saying.
Nobody assumed that "everyone has to do everything in their language", and please remember that english specifically is not used because of this but rather because it plays the role of a "lingua franka". The real arrogance is when there is an active attempt to exclude people by third parties in an event that explicitly attempting to be international, inclusive, antiracist, antinationalist, antiborder, etc.
Who is trying to exclude anybody? If German was the lingua franca, would you demand that a conference in the US or China offer translations on their recordings, and call them racist if they didn't?
> Who is trying to exclude anybody?
I invite you to look at this thread.
> would you demand that a conference in the US or China offer translations on their recordings, and call them racist if they didn't?
I am sure that an imaginary version of me would respond to this completely unrelated hypothetical question. But personally I really don't see how it fits into anything.
And how many articles are non-english exactly? One of a thousand? Just leave the page and move on with your life.
Talks, not articles, and it's a significant fraction (less than half, more than 10%, I'd guess). What doesn't help is that sometimes the title could be partially and completely in English even for talks that are in German (e.g. due to referencing technical terms or memes).
Yeah! How dare they suggest something that would make it easier for them to consume their media! Weirdos...
The video player makes my iPhone near scalding hot. It also lost charge while on a charger. How?
Buggy phone? Unsupported codecs? As far as i can tell (on mobile) the video player is a plain html5 video element, no frills.
Sounds like you're in a bind friend
The first talks had some audio issues, hope they got it fixed
What happened with the newag talk?
You can watch it here https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-...
FreeFire
I know that I am old-fashioned, but I find it slightly disturbing that there is this outstanding talk showing vulnerabilities of the German power grid, and on the other side they seem to encourage exactly this kind of attacks on the power infrastructure in the opening ceremony ( https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-opening-ceremony#t=1140 ).
What do you mean by "exactly these kinds of attacks"? Besides both mentioning power infrastructure, they are completely different things.
One is "hey, terrorists or enemy states could destroy our entire grid, we'd all be fucked if this happened, here's what needs to be done to protect ourselves", the other is "hey, these powerful groups are destroying the planet for personal gain, do you think it might be justified to sabotage the tools they use to do that?"
Mass outages harm the public, sabotaging fossil fuel infrastrusture protects it. Even if the methods of the grid talk were applicable to such sabotage, which they really aren't, I don't see how hosting both of these discussions is a bad thing.
Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions.
The second talk is especially ridiculous when the speaker suggests to sabotage datacenters, because they use a lot of resources. I guess it is part of the "degrowth" ideology, which I find deeply flawed.
> Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions.
It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful" (an inherently relative term depending on your personal belief system) action can speed this up, while non-peaceful action cannot, that this property is a necessary requirement.
Unless of course your definition of "peaceful" is "thing that speeds up this transition". Would be pretty different from the average definition of the word, though.
They didn't say anything about peacefulness being a requirement to speeding up a transition to clean energy.
They also didn't say that it's the peacefulness aspect of the ongoing peaceful changes that is accelerating transition.
You're trying to outreason an opinion, and not only that, but you're also attempting to do so by putting words into their mouth. Please reconsider.
Debating the unspecified nature of a word isn't exactly the most productive thing in the world either. The vast, vast majority of natural language is that way. Kind of a pivotal feature of natural languages really.
I think it's very reasonable to take "Sabotaging any infrastructure harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions." as arguing for the sole usage of peaceful actions. If you feel that's an unfair take, feel free to clarify, but that interpretation seems pretty average.
No, that is a fair take. It's just not what you seemed to have been discussing before.
> It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful" (an inherently relative term depending on your personal belief system) action can speed this up, while non-peaceful action cannot, that this property is a necessary requirement.
Do a mental experiment, flip around the sides. Is it OK to propose for oil executives to sabotage the lives of ecological activists with violence? Perhaps, burn their houses, deface the headquarters, that kind of thing?
What is the point of this experiment? Is it OK to propose for Ukrainians to sabotage the lives of Russian generals?
I'm trying to apply good faith, in which case I'm going to assume you're not arguing that there has never existed a set of circumstances under which such actions would be "OK". Could you explain directly what your PoV is instead? If it is that "It's OK if Ukrainians take such actions against Russian generals, but not if Tuvaluans/___ take them against oil executives", then why?
> What is the point of this experiment?
To see if your methods will actually result in anything good.
> Is it OK to propose for Ukrainians to sabotage the lives of Russian generals?
Of course. Top military personnel are a valid target in a war.
> I'm trying to apply good faith, in which case I'm going to assume you're not arguing that there has never existed a set of circumstances under which such actions would be "OK".
Pretty much. If you have to resort to terrorism, then your goal is probably indefensible.
Violence is defensible only as a response to violence.
If I turn up with a bulldozer and destroy your house, is that violence?
How about if I flood your entire state/region permanently, both destroying your living, as well as that of your friends and families, as well as forcing you to relocate to a region you have nothing in common with?
Someone throwing a punch in your face is violence. Is that more acceptable to counter with violence than the previous scenario? I haven't met a single person who genuinely believes that.
"violence" can express itself in many ways.
> Pretty much. If you have to resort to terrorism, then your goal is probably indefensible.
Terrorism is a meaningless tern used to appeal to emotion. One's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Nearly every colonizer was overthrown by such a group. In many places, slavery was overturned by such groups.
Peaceful actions also harm people. Any transition to clean energy harms at least some people (for example executives and share holders of oil companies). The more important question is if the benefit outweighs the harm, and if the harm stays below some threshold of "unjustifiable harm".
I don't see how infrastructure is somehow special in this.
This is true for change in general.
To that end, the obvious answer to the person in that opening ceremony is "if people had further picture of the impact" [1].
Justice is in the eye of the beholder. The way they can make people sympathize with their intents of sabotage is by providing a justification, and enabling people to provide themselves one of their own. Otherwise, people will work with what they have, and what they have is mostly just their moral standards.
Evidently, the thread starter's moral standards do not condone this. Mine don't either. The way one can change this is by providing more information that would enable us to change our minds. This isn't really what's happening so far (although neither sides are communicating in a way that would make an open ended discussion of this super viable).
[1] and have that picture be such that it supports their conclusion. Note how this doesn't mean that picture must be:
- truthful
- balanced
- reasonable
And provided all parties are aware of this, they'll be more critical and suspecting of the other. For good reasons, I'd say.
That's quite naive consequentialism.
It is a bit reductionist, but so is "don't harm infrastructure". Infrastructure can be harmful, just like anything else.
And in the end most criticisms about consequentialism are either about how to retroactively declare something moral or immoral (which is irrelevant for deciding the best path now without future knowledge) or are qualms with one particular way of weighing harm vs benefit. I'm perfectly fine with considering third order effects in the calculation, and an action that saves a life but errodes society is not necessarily "good" since the ultimate harm may outweigh the benefit. In fact it's this very kind of reasoning about higher-order-effects that would lead you to the conclusion that sabotage could be justified in some cases
> sabotaging fossil fuel infrastrusture protects it.
Oh, is it that simple, really? Or does it come with a lot of unintended consequences, fueling conflict and paving the way for a more suppressive government?
It’s very simple to take an absolutist moralistic stance like this if the people hit by those consequences are thousands of miles away.
You've probably realized, but this can be said the exact same way for both sides of the equation (see: location of worst victims of global warming).
CCC stands for “Chaos computer club” after all.
not really disturbing, but rather expected. The price of freedom is disobedience. Here a headline from 2018 by The Guardian about RisingUp and Extincion-Rebellion:
> 'We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over climate crisis This article is more than 6 years old
> Rowan Williams backs call for mass civil disobedience ‘to bypass the government’s inaction and defend life itself’
People here are more fond of the obedience side of things, it seems.
performative disobedience, particular in an age of mass social media is the opposite of a change agent, it's a spectacle and the other side of the coin of the status quo, both of which usually feed on each other. Deleuze saw that very early:
"The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential component of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the controversies they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate.[...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."
Its the old question, chaos or stability? The bird or the cage? Freedom and justified fear, or stifling safety? Usually the young and disaffected are more on the side of chaos, with more to gain and less to lose, while the old and powerful prefer stability for the opposite reason.
I am, personally. If everyone ignored the rules and laws, we wouldn't have much of a society.
If everyone had abided by rules and laws, the US would still have hard segregation laws, etc.
If everyone had abided by rules and laws, the US wouldn't exist as a country.
Yeah, and rules and laws are never just, just because of their nature. Like dictators have laws… incompetent governments have laws… so law itself is a bad argument to follow it and a lot of socio-legal literature actually recognizes that social processes and to some degree social contracts that can include the exact opposite of the law are often at least as important.
On it's own this doesn't justify neither the abolishment of law nor its disregarding at-scale. That said, nor do I think anyone was actually going for that angle here, so I think we're getting side-tracked.
Rules and laws made by whom?
How do you know that?
>Only a Sith deals in absolutes
Even cliche children stories know your reasoning is ridiculous at best.
I don't think they're "dealing in absolutes" nearly as much as you might be perceiving that they do.
It's further ironic for you to mention this in a thread that was kicked off with this:
> The price of freedom is disobedience.
(a statement heavily dealing in absolutes)
Not the case. Freedom is orthogonal to legality. To exercise freedom is to fundamentally admit the possibility of disobedience within any sort of rules based framework.
What is not the case?
You can disagree with him, but it's a good idea to have read Kant when forming an opinion on those types of things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHqDEMrqTjE ("DEF CON 32 - Counter Deception: Defending Yourself in a World Full of Lies - Tom Cross, Greg Conti")
"At their best, hackers lift their heads up above the masses to see how the world actually works, not how it purports to work, and then take action to make the world a better place."
https://paulgraham.com/founders.html
> 4. Naughtiness: Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...
> A chaotic good character does whatever is necessary to bring about change for the better, disdains bureaucratic organizations that get in the way of social improvement, and places a high value on personal freedom, not only for oneself but for others as well. Chaotic good characters usually intend to do the right thing, but their methods are generally disorganized and often out of sync with the rest of society.
If you're here, you're likely not just smart, but your brain likely works in a way where you can rapidly deconstruct a system or build a mental model of one up, understanding how and where all of the parts must operate for the system to function. Many rules matter, but some don't; you are outcome oriented while operating within the system you exist in. You are willing to operate outside of the system when the situation dictates.
"Hacker" is an interesting term, but overloaded from both a historical and persona perspective. I propose "Adaptive Strategist," "Outcome Engineer," or "Creative Resolver" to better describe this type of human. Someone highly capable, adaptable, and with the fortitude and grit to grind toward success in a morally directional manner.
> Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties.
That's how you end up with price-collusion-as-a-service for landlords to price-gouge. When you don't define "the big questions", every evil can just be something naughty and you can explain it away by saying that the person has "the big questions" in mind, and not these small ones. Is anyone surprised that most startups that "just ignore the small things" also ignore the big ones once they are big?
> Someone highly capable, adaptable, and with the fortitude and grit to grind toward success in a morally directional manner.
What do you mean by "morally directional"? What do you call a person with the same abilities and traits but concern for ethics? Are they not a hacker?
I would argue that your example of tech driven price collusion is unethical and a symptom of bad people implementing technology for bad purposes.
By “morally directional” I mean fundamentally a good person. Ethics are mostly easy imho although there are edge cases that are tricky or aggressively debatable due to nuance.
I agree that it's unethical, my point was that it's easy to say that it is the price for innovation and in the end if the innovation is large enough, the unethical action is fine ("they solved world hunger and brought us world peace, and you complain about a little bit of initial price gouging?"), and who knows what good intention they might have (probably none, but it's good PR to pretend).
Do you consider 'hacker' to be tied to some ethical concept? Makes it a difficult definition to work with because you and I will draw the line of "justified by the intentions" (e.g. invading privacy of 1, 100, 1m to draw attention to some big issue) in a different place, and on top of that a hacker will stop being a hacker when they overstep the line?
The below resources touch on some ethical considerations, but are certainly not all inclusive. It is, imho, a living concept and dynamic. Are there good or bad Hackers? Or Hackers (and how their brain operates) just humans who do good or bad things? Do you stop thinking and being such a way when you cross a line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics
https://archive.org/details/TheHackerEthicAndTheSpiritOfTheI...
Yes, I'm aware of these, but to me that's not a requirement of being "a hacker" (not that I've ever heard anyone discuss whether someone is a hacker). I've always understood that to be more of a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing that suggests some ideas you can use to figure out your position on the moral value of something (but explicitly not as in "you must adopt this line of thinking or you're not one of us").
We have several groups like that in Germany, one of which became quite prominent for repeatedly blocking roads and other actions like that. On balance, they have probably done more harm than good by infuriating people and turning their attention away from the actual issue of climate change towards a discussion of the actions of these groups which have found very little support overall.
that talk is being discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535622