karpierz

> Not 9 years ago when the snowden/NSA revelations came out?

What were you worried about looking up/messaging when those revelations came out?

> https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs

I really appreciated this video, thanks for sharing it.

> i'm not sure i follow this. what is an entity? how are they disrupting the network?

It's answered in the article:

> They argue this reduces the threshold for a so-called 51 percent attack. "If a node operator's self-interest is to be dishonest, then there is no explicit penalty for doing so. Moreover, the number of entities necessary to execute a 51 percent attack on Bitcoin was reduced from 51 percent of the entire network (which we estimate at approximately 59,000 nodes) to only the four most popular mining pool nodes (less than 0.004 percent of the network)," the study found.

Again, I'm not very bright. I don't understand what this:

>That's an extremely strong statement. It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say. Is what you say true, or do you just lack the imagination or empathy to think of one?

was trying to do, and this comment hasn't really made it any clearer. Can you explain it explicitly?

It's the job of the court to interpret the consequences of the existing laws.

At one point, the court determined that access to abortion was a right, according to the 14th amendment. Meaning, that the 14th amendment was, among other things, a law that granted the right to access abortion services.

Later, the court decided to override their precedent, and declare that the 14th amendment did not grant the right to access abortion services.

I think you need to define what a "real law" is, and how the 14th amendment doesn't qualify in this context.

There was no need to codify it into law, as it was already law! That's the whole point of a court ruling!

Roe v. Wade determined that the Constitution itself implied abortion as a right, meaning that there already was a law on the books which protected abortion.

Sorry, I'm not very bright. Why don't you try explaining things explicitly, so simpler folk like me can understand?

> That's an extremely strong statement. It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say. Is what you say true, or do you just lack the imagination or empathy to think of one?

All this says is: "What you are saying could or could not be true."

Why write so much to say so little?

If you think they're "ensconced in a bubble", say it. If you think they "lack ... imagination" or empathy", then say it.

Don't do this motte and bailey stuff of: "have you considered that you sounds like someone who's wrong?"

By your same logic, a broken leg doesn't stop you from jumping. It just makes it "very very very hard." It's incorrect to say jumping on your broken leg is not a choice. But you might find your health outcomes far worse if you jump with it vs. rest.

Specifically, the problem is it produces _almost_ correct code, which is worse than incorrect code because it might fool you into trusting it.

I'm not making an empirical claim here. I am trying to explain why their results do not imply that "training to balance on one leg" causes good health outcomes.

I'm saying that this experiment:

1. Does not define 'balance'

2. Does not show that the test they applied predicts or correlates with 'balance'

3. Does not show that 'balance' causes good health outcomes.

I think what GP is saying is that this test correlates with things like 'fitness' and 'balance', which themselves are causally related to health outcomes. But training to balance on one leg doesn't mean that your 'balance' or 'fitness' overall improve.

It might be that one legged balance doesn't improve 'balance' and so doesn't improve your health outcomes. Or 'balance' is irrelevant, and it's just that 'fitness' means you're less winded at the top of the steps, and so you're less likely to fall down at the top.

1) Yes, much like if someone finds your credit card number, they can't use it without your name, CVC code, and zip code.

2) It doesn't matter how secure you make it, because if your payment system is impenetrable, I'll just steal your account on some site where you've already enabled payments.

> But the point here is that crypto can enable a whole lot of other businesses that don't exist today because of merchant risk.

This doesn't address the primary risk that merchants take on: fraud. Either crypto or credit card, if you end up taking a payment via stolen credentials, you will refund the money.

The risk that the middleman in a two-sided takes on is fraud. The scam is pretty simple: steal credit card/crypto key, set up fake seller account, buy stuff from yourself using stolen credit card/crypto key, cash out. The middleman pays the money out to the scammer, and eventually has to pay back the person that was stolen from, credit card or no.

Micro transactions are a huge merchant risk not because angry customers can chargeback, but because one stolen account can undo 1000/X legitimate transaction (where X is your profit per transaction). If your margin is slim, you've just amplified your fraud risk.

And before you say that it's easier to steal credit cards than crypto keys: 1) wait until crypto becomes common and 2) it doesn't matter. If you secure your keys, then scammer finds some user's account credentials and cleans their account out.

If credentials are stolen, crypto or otherwise, a scammer can then use those stolen credentials to make a payment.

All non-reversible transactions do is put the risk of fraud on the consumer. IE, if you buy anything with crypto and it turns out to be defective, or just not arrive, you have no recourse. You're just out the money.

2) this assumes there aren't any third parties on your friend's machine. You're trusting not only your friend, but likely Apple/Microsoft, Chrome/Firefox, and any browser extensions they might be running, which would definitely become more aggressive and pervasive if this scheme became common practice.

The DMV experience sucks because of political motivations, not technical limitations.

> The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.

You can also predict how most magic tricks will end: they'll make the dove reappear, they'll escape the water tank, they'll guess your card. It's the journey that's interesting, not the destination.

If winning the lottery is so great, why don't you just become a lotto winner?

> For anyone who thinks this wealth shouldn't appear, let me ask this: if someone could discover a cure for all cancers — how much should they be allowed to earn for it?

Say 50 million?

> I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers?

100 billion?

You've asked two separate questions there, but you're implying that the answer to one is the same as the other.

Just because you are capable of extracting a certain amount of wealth in exchange for something, does not mean that you should be able to.

Lots of hidden assumptions here:

1. The objective of public policy is to maximize the efficiency of capital allocation.

2. Who is efficient at capital allocation is independent of public policy.

3. Efficiency of capital allocation is measured by stock market capitalization.

1) would assume that building a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster is a better allocation of capital than building 10 homes. Or treating 100,000 cases of malaria.

2) would assume that someone who benefits from government subsidies is intrinsically better at capital allocation than someone who doesn't.

3) would assume that tulips sellers were really, really, good capital allocators for a while, and then suddenly were terrible capital allocators. Or that the number of cars produced isn't really a relevant metric for an auto company.

I can't tell if this is cutting sarcasm or not; brilliant.

> Ok but let's be real- buying a stock is not really "creating value". The stock already exists. Company A has issued 100 shares. People are buying/selling it in the market.. no one is creating value there. Sure they may be arbitrarily driving the value up, but that's not creating real value.

If it wasn't possible to resell stocks, capital acquired via stock issuance would be much more expensive. The stock market allows stocks to function as a means of seeding capital.

It's like saying "paying back your mortgage doesn't get buy you a house." The mortgage only exists because it gets paid back.

> Also, I would say the people sitting here buying and selling stocks are most of the time 99% pure speculation. They have zero control over what actually happens in the company. Sure they can do "research" and guess what might happen.. but it's still nearly all gambling.

Yes, which general advice is to spread your capital across the whole market. It used to be that you had to spend your capital building up your own business, which is even worse than trying to pick your own stocks. Now you can diversify your risk world-wide, as to avoid any sort of local calamities.

Two key issues with a rule like that:

1. What forces me to comply with this rule?

2. What does "able to be implemented" mean? In theory, you can re-implement my entire codebase. In practice, you'll find it very difficult to maintain feature parity with me if I repeatedly extend the protocol faster than you can implement it. Especially if I don't publish my code or document the extension or if I simply have more resources available to me (either in terms of server-bandwidth or programmers).

Extend? How do you address it?

I don't see how this approach stops a centralized service from taking over via the standard approach of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish [1]:

- Embrace: BigTech implements the protocol. For example, say text messaging.

- Extend: BigTech implements some custom additions to the protocol, that only work for their service. For example, add support for sending photos, but only ones stored on BigTech's servers.

- Extinguish: Once people get hooked on your custom features, make it hard for competitors to replicate. For example, stop competitors from being able to load photos from BigTech's servers.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Before you do anything, talk to a lawyer.

I'm not sure how that's a disproof?

The claim is: if "international trade" then "war less likely".

The example you've proposed is: "Europe couldn't effectively trade with China, and so waged war on China." The issue from the outset is the lack of international trade?

> 2. Secondly, I dare you to explain to me exactly, down to the very activation of cells and synapses in your mind, how you came to understand these words as having meaning. You can't do it, but an AI that did this would do this implicitly. So it will do a much better job of explaining how this happens than you will.

I think you're working with a very different definition of "explainable" than is commonly used in the machine learning literature.

Sure, and people make performative pledges all the time. See EULAs, and any other document which says "sign here to get the thing you actually want".