About

Who am I?

My name is Becker Polverini. I am an evangelistic disciple of Jesus, a joyful husband to Jordan, a proud father to Thea, and a mischievous hacker. I once heard it said that computer scientists are just frustrated mathematicians. This is absolutely true for me. Yet, more true still, I identify as a frustrated theologian.

I have spent most of my life convincing people I am actually half-Mexican (nobody doubts the Italian-German half). I speak SpanishUno llega a ser grande por lo que lee y no por lo que escribe. --Jorge Luis Borges and Mandarin.名不正，则言不顺；言不顺，则事不成。--论语·子路第十三 I grew up in Los Angeles, spent years in Beijing and some months in Amman. The most beautiful place I have ever been is the mountains above Beirut. The best motorcycle ride I ever had was to Raleigh through four hours of rain in the summer. I currently reside in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is pronounced app-uh-latch-uh.

I am the Founder/CEO of Hacktera, a cybersecurity consulting firm. While the opinions here are entirely my own, so is Hacktera. I hope these opinions influence how you view Hacktera. I did my undergrad at Princeton in Computer Science, dropped out of Columbia for my Ph.D. after one semester, toiled at Bridgewater Associates (a cult with a hedge fund), and worked at Microsoft Research in China. I started my first consulting business, PKC Security, in 2014 with two friends from college and two friends from China. We were written up in Wired for an attack we had on ApplePay. We sold the firm in 2019. We are still friends to this day. Entrepreneurship requires incredible amounts of brainI first took the MBTI at 22 and was an ENFP. More recently, at 33, I was an INTP. I am a 4w3 on the Enneagram. My top 5 strengths from StrengthsFinders are context, strategic, activator, futuristic, and ideation. My Insights Discovery is Red/Yellow. These assessments are maddening and roughly equivalent to an astrology birth chart. My zodiac sign is asparagus rising, which is why I work well with flerpios and often fight with jolteons. damage to be fun. We succeeded in having fun. Caveat emptor.

I have received a US National Science Foundation grant, was awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Stars of Tomorrow Award, and tied for first place at DEFCON29 in the cryptography capture-the-flag. I was formerly the Chair of the Computer Science Advisory Council at CalState Dominguez Hills and an Adjunct Professor for programming language theory at San Francisco State. I currently serve as Treasurer of Dreams InDeed International, a non-profit helping indigenous social entrepreneurs in warzones.

I am profoundly skeptical of the promises technologists often make. I am a luddite personally. God has a wonderful sense of humor.

What is Finite Demand?

A friend of mine once said that the primary fallacy of modern economic theory is "finite supply, infinite demand": scarcity and addiction. The God of The Bible calls us to "infinite supply, finite demand": abundance and contentment.

This site exists for me to explore abundance and contentment and to share ideas I have in a manner of my choosing. I value your feedback face-to-face and have no desire whatsoever for disembodied, pseudoanonymous, online debate. If any opinions seem invalid or offensive, I covet your disagreement in-person.

Why not use social media or a platform for this?

Social Media is poison designed by some of the most gifted engineers in the world to spread propaganda, manufacture envy, and destroy discourse. It is the worst invention of the twenty-first century. It is the new smoking. We will look back on it the way we view cosmetics with arsenic, leaded gasoline, or thalidomide. Like newspeak from 1984, it is killing language, the ability to reason, and opportunities for reasonable disagreements. If Upton Sinclair were alive, he would have written The Jungle about Social Media. I hope it dies violently in a fire.

Modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning—and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda, or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus… The scientist should know that he lives in a world in which his discoveries will be utilized.

Facebook delenda est.