It used to be (late 00's) that wikis had a big advantage in search results because backlinks were weighted heavily by the ranking algorithm and the dense connectivity of wikis meant that there were always a zillion backlinks to pages on a wiki.
Entirely possible that this is caught in a malfunctioning webspam filter. A wiki is largely indistinguishable in structure from an SEO link farm; indeed, any abandoned wiki can be and usually is turned into a link farm by bots. Maybe Google decided that its default was going to be to ban all wikis until a sufficient mass of evidence comes that it's trusted. Which, again, sucks for search quality, but the web and Google Search have both been pretty much dead for the last ~5 years anyway, we just rely on them anyway.
It's on the list. #34 out of 72, middle of the pack. Within the U.S. Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, LA, and DC are above it. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix are below it. They seem to weight heat-stress pretty highly in their rankings, hence why all the TX/AZ cities are at the bottom and are joined by South and Southeast Asia.
The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.
My guess is that Miami and Washington are there for essentially rhetorical reasons. Miami is often talked about as a city that's vulnerable to climate change, and Washington is the capital.
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
With Tor, you connect to a random Tor node (which may be another residential computer), which connects to a node in the middle, which connects to an exit node, which forwards your requests on to their final destination. All connections look like they come from the exit node, which might be someone's residential IP.
> With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider
That is not a requirement... anyone can run VPN server software on a computer they control, whether it's on a personal/residential connection or a VPS/VM you rent, or something else. Many privacy-conscious people do this regularly whether or not a commercial VPN provider is involved.
Everybody is saying that the Great Lakes region is a climate haven, but it's intensely vulnerable to both polar vortex events coming down from Canada and wet-bulb heat waves coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. The middle of America is flat; there is no natural barrier to stop a frigid or sweltering airmass from moving in. This has already happened multiple times within just the last few years.
In terms of death toll, a power outage during a severe deep freeze (with subzero temperatures and -50 wind chills) or a wet bulb event has a far greater lethality potential than wildfires. The most deadly wildfire in California history was the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise; it caused 85 deaths. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1989, immortalized in SimCity and several made-for-TV movies, only caused 25 deaths. By contrast, the 1995 Chicago heat wave caused 740 fatalities, and even the 2024 polar vortex event that barely made headlines killed more people (90) than the Camp Fire.
(Also note the low absolute numbers of even very severe, headline-grabbing natural disasters in developed countries. And that good construction can mitigate almost all of them. You are probably better off, in strict actuarial terms, by settling in a place where you can make a lot of money and then using it to prepare your home for disaster than by settling in a place that is cheaper but where you can't afford the latest building technology.)
It wasn't because of the adversarial link farms, though, which are usually handled by trying to identify fake links and take them out of the computation in a preprocessing step. (There are many others parts of Google's '00s ranking algorithm that relied upon backlinks as well). It was because the web scaled to the point where PageRank couldn't process it, because the exact matrix solution to it is O(N^3). They replaced it with an iterative graph traversal algorithm from a set of ~1000 seeds which were themselves chosen through the original PageRank algorithm. I suspect this is published somewhere, because Gemini alludes to it when I ask what's the algorithmic complexity of PageRank.
Interestingly this is a common pattern that Google uses. Come up with a heuristic algorithm that works well enough to get your first million users. Then, train a machine-learned algorithm on the actual behavior of your first million users to scale to your next billion. Assistant's NLP was similar, where the first version had all these linguists hand-inputting grammars for all the different ways you might say a command, and then they just trained a much simpler neural net mapping utterance -> command once they had enough users to get dense training data.
A minor comment: on a dense graph, one iteration of the power method would be O(N^2).
One would typically need many iterations for adequate convergence. If the number of iterations required is linear, then yes it would indeed take O(N^3). But it was never that bad.
However, the web-graph is very sparse, so per iteration cost is around O(N). That can still be quite a beast though.
Have fond memories of trying out Pagerank iterations on then new fangled infra called Mapreduce. Not for computing the pagerank for ranking pages, for experiments on some other large graph.
At that time (somewhere between 2004-07), computing Pagerank on the web, without preprocessing, got you all the porn sites at the top !
I've had a couple of reports that this applied to. It's incredibly disruptive. "I've got to fly back to India to renew my visa." "Okay, when will you be back?" "I have no idea, it depends when I can get an appointment. It could be next week, it might be in a month." "[State department] We're pausing all visa appointments." "Well fuck."
Meanwhile I've got a tech lead who is 12 hours away from the rest of the team. He was at least willing to work US-East hours while in India (basically staying up all night and sleeping during the day), but there was a huge amount of management overhead and inconvenience for the employee involved.
I've worked at companies where we transfer people to Canada during periods like this in the same time zone. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they don't want to transfer back to the US.
At least the procedure used to be that one would try to get an appointment at the US consulate in one's home country and then arrange the trip around it. Also, at least in my experience (but importantly, not with this administration) was that one was never required to leave the US.
The main constraint is re-entry into the US and being able to travel outside the US. If one stayed here, there was no problem switching schools, programs, jobs, adjusting status to permanent residency or naturalization. On the other hand, for re-entry, one needs a valid visa stamped on a passport which necessitated a trip to one's home country. This stamping visit could be unpredictable.
Ideally, one would like to travel freely to see family and friends but I see a lot of comments implying that one is forced to leave. It might be true now but a lot of comments here are conflating several issues together.
The first time it happened (2023) it was a non-issue; he did exactly as you said, appointment happened as planned, and then he was back on his scheduled plane trip a week later.
Everything post-2025 has been a shit-show. There's no predictability or clear guidance, either from our lawyers or from the state department.
Predictability matters a lot in business. If you know what the procedure is and how long it will take, you can plan around it. If the rules change in the middle of the game you're left scrambling to keep up.
Predictability flew out the window with the last election. I simply do not understand how any business leaders supported this, but I suppose the ability to bribe their way out of chaos was appealing.
It's beneficial for the largest firms, the ones that can forge personal relationships with the administration, because it's detrimental to all other businesses. Competitive advantage and all that.
Honestly, this is kind of the point. Making foreign labor so unbearably difficult to work with will force companies to hire domestically. At least, hire more domestic workers than they would have otherwise.
You are a great person. Thankfully you work at a non-profit and donate all of your money to charity, otherwise if you work for personal profit or company profit you may be a hypocrite.
Entirely possible that this is caught in a malfunctioning webspam filter. A wiki is largely indistinguishable in structure from an SEO link farm; indeed, any abandoned wiki can be and usually is turned into a link farm by bots. Maybe Google decided that its default was going to be to ban all wikis until a sufficient mass of evidence comes that it's trusted. Which, again, sucks for search quality, but the web and Google Search have both been pretty much dead for the last ~5 years anyway, we just rely on them anyway.
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