To pile on to what another commenter said above, therapy is for you.
I know you dismissed it out of hand. You clearly have no faith that someone (specifically, a well-trained therapist) might have something valuable to contribute.
However, while your powers of observation might border on superhuman, they are still very much just yours. A therapist can help you build an emotional toolset you will not otherwise provide yourself, and which will make you a more complete person, not least of all in the area of building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Think of it like this: you can read music theory and memorize the entire western classical canon by heart and still be a terrible piano player, never improving if you don’t show up to practice at the keys with a talented teacher.
One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
CBT will help you change your behavior and how things feel, but, imho, psychodynamic psychotherapy can go much deeper and truly improve your emotional IQ.
> One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
Found the flaw in your argument. I am not driven by emotions. If therapy is all about that then all the more reason to not waste time with it.
My (accurate accounting of) history with building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships is fine. Why do you assume I need help with that?
In these comments I see a lot of imagining problems I supposedly have right now, when all I did was share the problems I used to suffer from, in the context of a discussion about the systemic, environmental deficiencies in how society is structured causing massive waste of human potential.
Therapy takes time and money. I don't use emotions to make decisions on how to invest my time and money. You're arguing in favor of investing my time and money into a questionably effective solution to an imagined problem.
“For example, another important default setting in LastPass is the number of “iterations,” or how many times your master password is run through the company’s encryption routines”
If you are complaining about the idea of iterating a hash multiple times, this is actually a fairly standard construction to increase the cpu cost of brute forcing hashes.
Ok I googled. I guess it makes sense as it helps to protect against pre-hashed rainbow tables or dictionary attacks by making them more computationally expensive.
Usually people use salt to protect against rainbow tables.
Iterating a hash function (e.g . PBKDF2) is most just a way to make hashing take longer. Since attackers have to make very many gueses (while legit users only have to hash the password once), increasing each guess by a few seconds can really slow things down.
However in modern apps they usually try to use more complex constructions like argon2 to make it so you cant use GPUs to do lots of guesses at once.
I can’t tell if this Max Berger quote is a lament or just unintentionally ironic: “Whatever you want to call my faction—the Bernie wing, the Warren wing, democratic-socialist, social democrat—we would have way less power if Leah didn’t exist.”
It wasn’t that they won; the article explains that plenty of people walk out with designer bags full of money. It’s that these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off. It’s usually just a matter of finding the smoking gun. Although it’s unpleasant that the casino and police assumed it was cheating and not a defect in the game itself (in what turns out to be a naive and self-delusional assumption), is that really that surprising or ridiculous a position to take? The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves without divulging their secrets.
Of course it was! If they had lost using the same method there would have been no issue.
> It’s that these folks won in a statistically hugely unlikely way, and that alone is pretty damning evidence that something is off.
That's the casino's problem though, not law enforcement. Statistically unlikely equates 'we haven't seen this before' and that should not be enough reason to arrest people. The police should not be in the business of protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation operators. There should be some symmetry here, if the casino is a-ok with making money on gamblers then they should take their lumps when the situation is - temporarily - reversed. LE has no business here, tough luck they should have run a business where the flow is one way by design instead of one with a pretend two way flow.
> The catch 22 is the accused cannot defend themselves without divulging their secrets.
Which is precisely why the police has no business doing this. The burden of proof with respect to cheating is on the casino, and until they have something solid nobody should be arrested. That's the police acting unilaterally on behalf of one party. A more balanced response would have been to help the players cash their checks, after all the casino did not object to the reverse when the funds were deposited. It's fraud by the casino until proven otherwise.
If I gamble once, and only once, with a lot of money at very high odds, I might get very lucky and win a fortune.
But despite small odds of a massive pay out, the odds would have been very low, but not infinitesimal.
Whereas, if I consistently win much more than I lose over many bets, across seversl visits, and a group of people can do this, the odds of that happening rapidly become virtually zero.
Or in mathematical or scientific terms, confidence that pure chance is being broken far, far, far exceeds a 6-sigma threshold. It’s proven.
But legal proofs, for making judicial decisions of guilt or culpability, usually require an explanation of how it was done.
If a gambler consistently loses much more than they win, in a way that the odds of it happening are almost zero, will police show up and arrest someone from the casino?
There may be an investigation, but I'd be surprised if anyone is arrested before hard evidence of rigging a game is found.
Ok that's pretty crazy, let's lower it a notch, throw out the sigmas, just talk about 1-in-hundreds-of-millions odds.
The article doesn't actually list the odds of their winning streak, but I'd wager a casino is gonna be suspicious well before the "one in a hundred million" level of streak.
So how many bets across how many visits does it actually take for it to be "proven"? Like, people can win powerball, someone may have had that 1-in-300-million casino run too. If they're independent events, you expect it to happen randomly eventually! Some poor lucky bastard will probably face a lot of questions one day.
I dunno, I guess if you want to win a fortune gambling, do it all in one bet, since getting lucky all at once vs getting less-lucky-but-for-a-longer-time is gonna attract a lot of scrutiny. ;)
(I kinda suspect, though, that a lot of people who were down the path of that 1-in-300M luck playing roulette would stop while they're ahead at some point. If you hit on 00 in roulette three times in a row do you go for a fourth?)
There was a lot suggestive about this group, but that includes a lot of subjective factors.
It's the pure math side I think is fun, because I find examples of people getting tricked by confidence intervals into developing blindspots to the randomness, and substituting "proof" for "very unlikely" fascinating. Comes from working in a lot of companies with ... sloppy ... methodology for their AB tests.
If you go to a casino and win 20 straight coin flips [or the equivalent in roulette or craps] don't you think they'd be pretty damn sure you cheated somehow?
> The police should not be in the business of protecting the revenue streams of gambling installation operators.
What about in something like betting on a boxing match and having the fighter throw the fight? Is that the casino's problem too?
If you're ok with someone cheating then it all makes complete sense what you're saying. If you're not then someone has to investigate. Do you really want the casino being law enforcement for anyone they find suspicious? I'm not on the casino's side at all but there's a big grey area here.
It's the casino here that's cheating, and the casino that doesn't know its own business well enough to spot the flaws that are exposed. Winners have no obligation to explain how they won just as the casino isn't going to tell the losers to stop losing.
And in this case, without proof, the winners did get paid. The police and internal investigation did not result in any definitive proof, thus the seizure of funds was unjustified and soon released.
As far as protecting casino revenue, casinos have a complicated arrangement with governments but in most jurisdictions the reason they are legal is to pay hefty taxes on gaming revenue (also normal income tax, separately). Thus the police are, when investigating similar claims, protecting government revenue. The casino is just the conduit to generating that revenue.
It's actually rather simple, just a bit of thinking outside of the box. Always good to predict where your positions in the endgame must be in order to comply with blocking pathway to disable further movement:
I know you dismissed it out of hand. You clearly have no faith that someone (specifically, a well-trained therapist) might have something valuable to contribute.
However, while your powers of observation might border on superhuman, they are still very much just yours. A therapist can help you build an emotional toolset you will not otherwise provide yourself, and which will make you a more complete person, not least of all in the area of building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Think of it like this: you can read music theory and memorize the entire western classical canon by heart and still be a terrible piano player, never improving if you don’t show up to practice at the keys with a talented teacher.
One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
CBT will help you change your behavior and how things feel, but, imho, psychodynamic psychotherapy can go much deeper and truly improve your emotional IQ.