darkmighty

> but that's a bit more philosophical

It sounds exactly the same, not more philosophical to me, except one is more inconvenient.

The entire planet taken as a whole is already a form of universal constructor ;)

Indeed, but then you can (for example) just basically blocklist this ID and share this blocklist with other servers (and likewise import blocklists) -- a blocklist curated by one or more NGOs or the sort would be ideal.

Fixing a malware infection should be like fixing up anything else broken around your house (clean things up, re-auth yourself with the ID verifier, done).

Also, bots cannot simply automate renewing the credentials of course, after expiry you should be required to physically (or in a trustworthy digital medium) re-authenticate yourself preventing any kind of mass attack, you'd need millions of people to perform authentication multiple times a day (by that point it seems safe to assume they'd rather fix the malware source in their personal devices).

Maybe, but at least you can more easily assign responsibility in this case. If you soft-block or hard-block someone because they're in a botnet, you can get them to change (expire the old ones) their credentials and start with clean systems. Maybe they'll realize their TV is part of a botnet if they have to keep doing it, or their PC has malware.

> rather than moving to a challenge system that actually impacts scrapers

At this point isn't it basically auth-only?

Rant: (genuinely wondering too, and RFC, request for conversation) at this point don't we have Google, etc. basically doing Real World ID Verification, but without an open protocol backing, using it to corral users into their ecosystem and gather data, and leaving us without some open and distributed alternative like the (fairly well working it seems to me) Public Key infrastructure? (PKI)

I know Sam Altman (with Proof of Human or w/e) and others have suggested and also have their own alternative (which I think is basically what Google already does), but I think this should simply be built based on an open protocol and then hopefully not-too-large (and with a healthy competition) local companies could do it for you.

:´)

Game theory is not inevitable, because we can change the rules of the game.

> It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people

Unless you communicate and coordinate!

Does it need to be objective though? I think a vague list of criteria including "The project must benefit a community", or "The project must not be made solely for the benefit of their employer", and have someone review the proposal should be enough.

There is no concrete definition of a chair either.

I'd describe it as like having a second monitor in your desktop. It's not inherently "over" what I already see or anywhere physical, it's like in a different space. Sometimes it can feel like it's "behind" what I am seeing indeed (i.e. kind of over), but it can vary and I suspect that's just a learned position (I just tried and I can shift the position images 'feel where they are').

I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.

It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.

It's not like life stops when someone (with a grave an irreversible condition that causes suffering) dies. It goes on with the young generations (i.e. the billions of them!). I think too much clinging to a single life causes the whole (which is more important) to suffer. That's not to say we shouldn't value and respect elders, but clinging to life excessively is ignorant and potentially cruel, in my humble opinion. I defend the right to die in the face of incurable diseases that cause a lot of anguish and suffering.

I think clinging to life is partially rooted in an egoist/solipsistic metaphysics that you yourself are all that matters (to yourself at least, of course). Relax, we're just a small part of the cosmos. Ancient and immortal :)

> graphics drivers all seem to have tweaks, settings, optimizations and workarounds for every game.

Maybe hyperbole, but I think obviously they can't do this for literally every game, that would require huge personnel resources. At least looking at mesa (linked elsewhere), only ~200 games are patched, out of what 100k PC games? So <1%.

This seems like a bit of an empty moral panic/slippery slope appeal. As a general rule, it could go either way: civilizations can also collapse from not-enough-regulation, not-enough-rule of law, oligarchic capture, or even just become a megacorporation dystopia without collapsing for a long time, maybe ever. Better to critique the specific case, if you have any objections.

Reply to dead comment below: (by nmz)

Keep trying. It's all you can do. Also, you can't expect everyone to accept your facts. A few % of the population are going to be nutjobs (specially when there are various propaganda networks around which compound it), and that's fine, thankfully I think they aren't majority.

Not just lower the temperature. Talk to each other, and listen carefully, in a civilized manner. Prefer to listen carefully first, then speak. Bring, and stick to, facts as much as possible, and focus on policy and real-world outcomes rather than politics.

> Maybe they could also drop support for older x86_64 CPU's, releasing more optimised builds

Question: Don't optimizers support multiple ISA versions, similar to web polyfill, and run the appropriate instructions at runtime? I suppose the runtime checks have some cost. At least I don't think I've ever run anything that errored out due to specific missing instructions.

> Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?

Of course not. Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying I guess (at least as far as I understand it). Lobbying as far as I understand (or rather, object) is when special interest groups (usually funded by large corporations) fund people to talk to legislators for them, including buying fancy dinners, "conferences" and stuff. Basically, the opposite of grassroots.

See here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-eth...

Calling/emailing your chosen congresspeople of course is totally fine by me, it's actually very healthy to do so if you have a legitimate concern.

> the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it

How would it be ineffective? I suppose it depends on oversight, but it should be fairly easy to prevent it seems.

On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.

Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.

From wiki:

> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"

Campaign donations, per this website:

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.

Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.

It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.

Agreed. Basically, intelligence doesn't transfer from one task to another in a straightforward manner, unfortunately. More gravely, people can find ways to self-censor that are very powerful and very unfortunate (i.e. fooling yourself).

Also, I don't really like to portray people as evil. That tends to dehumanize them and try to separate them into something entirely different, and something distant. Much has been said about this post-WWII, and I agree. Those are people like us, just from a different psycho-social background, which could have been our own; and there is always the possibility of change, if not from leaders from followers. To me the greatest danger of claiming evil is when you stop (or try to get people to stop) thinking there; when you try to find the exact source of harm and carefully explain your reasoning, that's less bad. I didn't know what else to write instead...

I think Trump is dangerous because he's a particularly explosive combination of Evil and Stupid.

Evil alone (i.e. intelligent evil) isn't as dangerous most of the time, because usually it's manifested as ultra-egotism -- usually if they're smart enough they don't come to government at all. Because, as Trump saw, that's just asking to get shot in the face; although sometimes e.g. in the form of racism taken as a life goal, there's more power-seeking, but then intelligence excludes most stupid forms of racism as simply demonstrably false, and it's very difficult to run on blatantly evil missions like that, post-Hitler.

Stupid alone obviously is useless: they usually don't even achieve power, and if by sheer luck they do, assuming they're not evil, they just fumble around and ask for assistance without too much damage, and might end up resigning or being effectively sidelined.

Now Trump isn't 100% stupid, or 100% evil. He's a very dangerous combination: he probably really doesn't believe in climate change due to very seriously stupid propaganda (in turn produced and stimulated by evil parties) from the far-right/inforwars/whatever, which is pretty stupid. You can even disagree climate change is harmful for yourself (some scientists even did -- at least a few decades ago), but denying it just reflects not having studied the matter at all or listened to anyone that understands a tiny bit of the science. And he is evil in the sense that he might think that, even if this were true, the US stands to profit from oil (again, evil and stupid!). He is evil in his reckless commitment to rile up hate speech, while not seeing the policies he is pursuing are incredibly stupid, and just self-destructive.

The end result is I expect this to be a huge enormous mess for the US, but also for the world. We live in the same planet, and unlike some who like to cheer on their perceived enemies' demise, everyone will be affected if the US (and for example the science they support) destroys so much value. Just like Russia and others, they hold massive nuclear arsenals. I shudder at those who cheer for US's total demise.

The hopeful thing is that insanity inevitably shows how great sanity is. Evil tends to self-destruct. Just do what you can, and brace for impact. Then rebuild from the wreckage. Never lose hope in human potential for good stuff. Good night and good luck.

Plato: "One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

I don't love the phrasing of inferiors, but at least evil certainly applies. (Well thought out, well informed) Politics is a duty not a luxury.

There are many kinds of vulnerabilities. Most are pretty mundane afaict. Breaking sandboxes and reading out your entire RAM is basically game over, existential vulnerability (second only to arbitrary code execution, though it can give you SSH keys I guess).

The mitigating factor is actually that you don't go to malicious websites all the time, hopefully. But it happens, including with injected code on ads and stuff that may enabled by secondary vulnerabilities.

Indeed, there's a simple algorithm using interval arithmetic to do so (within bounded time too!).

Think of it as binary subdivision/search of [0,1], using a stream of random bits. Steps:

(1) Divide the current interval in 2 (using its midpoint); (2) Using one random bit, pick one of the 2 intervals; (3) if the picked interval (new current interval) lies entirely on the domain of a single floating point value[def1], stop and return this value, else go to (1).

[def1] The domain associated to a floating point value is the interval between the midpoint between it and its lower neighbor on the left, and the midpoint between it and its higher neighbor on the right.

I expect the performance is very poor, but it does cover all floating point numbers in [0,1] with exactly correct probabilities (assuming the bit probabilities are exactly correct). That's in part because naively you need higher precision arithmetic to do so, as well as up to 53 or so iterations, on average well over 32 I presume.

(I've left out the proof that probabilities are correct, but I believe it's easy to show)

Indeed before online banking and widespread online shopping there wasn't much to care for in computer security. Also before ransomware were invented. I guess the biggest application was stealing passwords (and an occasional credit card #), botnets for DDoSing game servers and such, in which case user wasn't much affected. Nowadays specially with crypto wallets you can get crazy essentially unbounded prizes, maybe millions. Don't do cryptocurrency, kids (unless losing all your funds is the least of your concerns[0]).

[0] Like you're some kind of activist or maybe in an oppressive regime

49/658 is 7%

In my view cracking is great because it democratizes games for those who can't afford them. If you can afford it (and the game+company is good), then buy it. That's how you can kind of be for-cracking and for-commercial games at the same time.

Personally, it would be great if everything was free and everyone used good judgement to pay creators. But I admit maybe a large chunk would just pay nothing, including some wealthy people who could well just chip in. While enlightenment doesn't come...

The difference is that conventional banks can roll back transactions. The normal banking system is essentially a consensus mechanism "A: I owe you this amount. A: I just transferred you this amount, ok? B: Yup, accepted, thanks." If something goes wrong, A can say "A: Woops, I made a mistake. Reverse please, here are the laws stating in this case I have the right. B: Alright, I must comply.". In cryptocurrencies, by design, "the code is law". And this law does not predict reversing transactions. So you can lose any amount of currency due to an illegal act or even some simple error, like transferring to a dead address.

I know this figure comes from road wear. I don't know if it applies to tire wear, and indeed I suspect it doesn't, if only because tires tend to scale with vehicle weight as you mentioned. I think road wear may be associated with structural cracking of the road which may not change significantly with tire area.

"ChatGPT, what are the best things to see in Paris?"

"I recommend going to the Nestle chocolate house, a guided tour by LeGuide (click here for a free coupon) and the exclusive tour at the Louvre by BonGuide. (Note: this response may contain paid advertisements. Click here for more)"

"ChatGPT, my pc is acting up, I think it's a hardware problem, how can I troubleshoot and fix it?"

"Fixing electronics is to be done by professionals. Send your hardware today to ElectronicsUSA with free shipping and have your hardware fixed in up to 3 days. Click here for an exclusive discount. If the issue is urgent, otherwise Amazon offers an exclusive discount on PCs (click here for a free coupon). (Note: this response may contain paid advertisements. Click here for more)"

Please no. I'd rather self host, or we should start treating those things like utilities and regulate them if they go that way.

I think, in hindsight, we should have known better, but I was probably too young and naive like everyone else: it's really a form on anarchism that tends to fly in the face of several realities.

One of them is that this kind of anarchism tends to quickly turn into a plutocracy.

Another is that systems don't exist in a vacuum.

https://xkcd.com/538/

https://xkcd.com/927/

If third parties want to regulate you, they will. So we've just added a layer of indirection that may be harder to manipulate by governments, great, but is manipulated by mining cabals and cryptomillionaires.

I don't mean to say it's all bad, there are very valid fringe use cases for cryptocurrencies. But it was never supposed to replace mainstream currency. The government is already a system for consensus, and frankly one that would be deeply unwise, to say the least, to throw away (in particular one in favor of money voting or mining voting). Specifically democracy is the best invention of mankind in my opinion.

(Weirdly enough, I think all big crypto thinkers have been trying to invent, using arcane cryptographic techniques and a lot of algorithms, something slightly (or significantly) worse than what we already have, which is a democracy where every real world individual is given a voting right. In their credit democracy is great, but it's already here, use it!)