There is an extension for PostGres, https://postgresql-anonymizer.readthedocs.io that allows you to mask data by user or group at the schema level with the options to return full mask, partial mask or dummy data.
Readit Newswombatpm commented on Top Secret: Automatically filter sensitive information thoughtbot.com/blog/top-s... · Posted by u/thunderbong
wombatpm commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
They had the Patriot Act ready to go prior to 9/11. Some minor text changes, and everyone is voting for it.
wombatpm commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
And for a specific example:
In my local neighbourhood there are a couple of commercial spaces that keep seeming to become new businesses, go through the expected few months of rebranding and outfitting, stay for a couple more months, then shut down. Only to become new businesses doing the same thing. Repeat ad nauseum.
Which would be fine, except it’s always the same owners. I’m not sure what the grift is, but I’m sure there’s one. Perhaps its simply taking advantage of business loans. Perhaps something more involved with contractors and business expenses charged differently on paper. I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m curious.
In the same way that buying a company and taking out business loans for expenses isn’t itself fraudulent, but can be done for that purpose, I can’t help but feel like there’s something going on.
Crappy contractors change business names like hats. I had one that was on his third name by the time I finished with him.
wombatpm commented on How does the US use water? construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/juliangamble
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
wombatpm commented on Illinois limits the use of AI in therapy and psychotherapy washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/reaperducer
In another comment I wondered whether a general chatbot producing text that was later determined in a courtroom to be "therapy" would be a violation. I can read the bill that way, but IANAL.
But that would be like needing a prescription for chicken soup because of its benefits in fighting the common cold.
wombatpm commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
I think you have this oversimplified. Stringing together inferences can take us in either direction. It really depends on how things are being done and this isn't always so obvious or simple. But just to show both directions I'll give two simple examples (real world holds many more complexities)
It is all about what is being modeled and how the inferences string together. If these are being multiplied, then yes, this is going to decreases as xy < x and xy < y for every x,y < 1.
But a good counter example is the classic Bayesian Inference example[0]. Suppose you have a test that detects vampirism with 95% accuracy (Pr(+|vampire) = 0.95) and has a false positive rate of 1% (Pr(+|mortal) = 0.01). But vampirism is rare, affecting only 0.1% of the population. This ends up meaning a positive test only gives us a 8.7% likelihood of a subject being a vampire (Pr(vampire|+). The solution here is that we repeat the testing. On our second test Pr(vampire) changes from 0.001 to 0.087 and Pr(vampire|+) goes to 89% and a third getting us to about 99%.
[0] Our equation is
Pr(+|vampire)Pr(vampire)
Pr(vampire|+) = ------------------------
Pr(+)
Can’t you improve thing if you can calibrate with a known good vampire? You’d think NIST or the CDC would have one locked in a basement somewhere.
wombatpm commented on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/hhs
The GI Bill fundamentally changed college.
The Vietnam draft with College deferments broke colleges and universities.
Now every white collar job requires a degree - because every boomer overseeing those roles thinks it’s necessary.
I wouldn’t worry about job safety when we have such utopian vision as the elimination of all human labor in our sight.
Not only will AI run the company, it will run the world. Remember: a product/service only costs money because somewhere down the assembly line or in some office, there are human workers who need to feed their family. If AI can help gradually reduce human involvement to 0, with good market competition (AI can help with this too - if AI can be capable CEOs, starting your business will be insanely easy,) and we’ll get near absolute abundance. Then humanity will be basically printing any product & service on demand at 0 cost like how we print money today.
I wouldn’t even worry about unequal distribution of wealth, because with absolute abundance, any piece of the pie is an infinitely large pie. Still think the world isn’t perfect in that future? Just one prompt, and the robot army will do whatever it takes to fix it for you.
With an AI workforce you can eliminate the need for a human workforce and share the wealth or you can eliminate the human workforce and not share.
wombatpm commented on I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class lithub.com/what-happened-... · Posted by u/lapcat
I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun
We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast.
He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.
It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.