pontifier

I always felt that this "wall" must have been composed of charged gas ions in a potential well. This would make it sort of a capacitor, and would explain why no large sparks or discharge were happening, even when the voltages involved must have been extremely high.

Insurance is such a crutch for some people, but it shouldn't be.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing whether you have insurance or not.

In my opinion, the amount of resources spent on buying insurance would, in almost every case, be better spent on prevention rather than after the fact mitigation.

Set layer mode to "difference" and everything that overlaps exactly fades to black.

On a stereo image sliding the top image is very interesting as areas at different distances fade at different positions.

Here is an example video I made many years ago with the colors inverted as well for visibility: https://youtu.be/k2-ZZz5rwQE?si=UaKcidDRbNZOftbd

I've been looking at ways to fix things, and I believe I'm close.

[Blank] doesn't kill people, people kill people.

Lethal action will occur when seen as a solution regardless of the tools available. It's happened throughout human history, and will likely keep happening until we can solve our problems without it.

I remember seeing one of these for Bitcoin addresses a long time ago... Very funny :)

Anything held in Bitcoin is one misplaced key, or hacked wallet, or broken algorithm away from being worth precisely zero.

Money isn't power. Power is power. Money can sometimes be used like power, but not knowing the difference is a recipe for the situation we find ourselves in now.

Money is only powerful as long as it's useful. When the pitchforks come out, dollar bills won't stop them.

I've thought a lot about this, and realized that there is no continuation in our normal life anyway. What we experience is a huge and omnipresent blind spot because we cannot see the future.

Even 5 minutes from now, you don't know where you'll be, and you will be a completely different person based on the events of that 5 minutes.

Every moment that passes, the you of the moment dies.

What you can have, is a you in the future that remembers and understands the past you. That only happens if you preserve your memories either by not dying, or by preserving your internal memories in some other way.

That's all you get. A copy in the future that remembers, or nothing at all.

I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but reading this thread overwhelmed me with possibility and I just had to drop my fusion reactor patent into notebook LM. The podcast was nice, but there was nothing inventive about it. The world is moving so fast right now, but it's not quite there... it will be soon, but not yet. There is still so much we humans still have to do.

I considered saying bearish. Maybe I could have been clearer.

I have a low opinion about the usefulness of cryptocurrencies because true security is so difficult. It's basically impossible, even if you don't make any mistakes.

I really enjoy this kind of stuff, and loved reading about the z-cash ceremony. I'm not going to those lengths to protect my secrets, so I feel it's better if I don't hold a lot of wealth in such a fragile way.

I used to like it, but now I don't. It's still neat, but it's too prone to costly mistakes.

I like it. Seems like it might be useful for mice and keyboards as well.

Have a few ports on it: This device can only be a mouse -> USB This device can only be a keyboard -> USB

Then it filters everything coming in to ensure that it matches the desired type of activity.

For USB drives, I'm tempted to say it should read the USB drive once, and copy all information to internal storage in order to prevent data being sent to the usb via timed or coordinated reads. This would allow a truly read only thumbdrive.

The first time I tried to type a long public key it took me like 10 minutes, and was a pain in the butt. If it's something you're doing a lot, using QR codes can make it much faster and easier.

For longer term storage use an analog camera to take pictures of the QR codes, then develop the film and store them in an airtight climate controlled vault. Bonus points if the film is designed to be very stable after developing. Maybe platinum prints with lots of error correction.

For many years I've just viewed all of my devices as possibly compromised. It's one of the reasons I've been very down on cryptocurrencies in general. I don't actually see USB as something that can maintain a true, robust airgap, because the amount of data transferred is not inspectable.

In my view, the best use of an airgapped machine would be for storage of extremely dense and sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Signing or encryption should be accomplished through an inspectable data channel requiring manual interaction such as QR codes. When every bit in and out of a machine serves a purpose, it's much less likely to leak.

Example: show a qr code to a camera on the airgapped machine and get a qr code on the screen containing the signature of the data presented to it. There is very little room for nefarious code execution or data transmission.

The biggest problem with this is that it doesn't work every time in real life. Sometimes you just have a table with one short leg.

I'm living in a corrupt town, fighting them about buildings, being thwarted by the city government at every turn. I've been working on a revolutionary invention (in my case a fusion reactor), and strive to create a just society where everyone can thrive. Along the way I'm dealing with politicians that don't care about evidence, had a gun put to my head, had income sources blocked, and I'm painted as a villain by many because I haven't completed all the things I've been trying to do. The city I'm in even built a casino recently.

Generally, I came away with the distinct sense that I was seeing an alternate reality version of myself.

I feel like the Internet Archive and Murfie are opposite sides of the same coin with our efforts for digitization and access. But Murfie has a completely different approach from a copyright and financial perspective.

So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.

I saw it today and enjoyed it. There were so many similarities between this story and the life I'm living that it was a little uncanny.

It took me quite a while to understand exactly what was happening with a Newtons Cradle toy. You know the one with the clacky balls that swing...

If you hold 2 balls up, and let them fall, 2 balls swing up on the other side. How does it know how many you swung??? It boggled my mind for the longest time. Then I got to playing with one, and found something interesting. It doesn't always seem to work!

If the balls are perfectly aligned, and touching each other, the effect is dampened by the multi-body collision. It's strongest when the balls are just barely not touching.

What we see as multiple balls swinging and hitting is really a whole bunch of individual 2 body collisions that are close enough in time to seem like they are a single event.

I could be wrong about the reason, but this was my observation.

If I had to articulate why I feel the need to do certain things my way, against all advice by people who think they know a better way, I'd boil it down like this: There are things that I see as important to the core idea of the company that nobody else understands. If they did, they'd have seen the need for the company and done it themselves. Its more than just a vision. It's like a hologram. Anyone can see the image, but the founders see the fringe pattern.

I see why all the hidden elements need to be just so or the whole thing is meaningless.

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it's rare to find someone that truly gets things rather than just going through the motions. If you do, its likely they have their own idea.

It feels like every decision I make gets resistance from people who live their lives in mediocrity. If they really knew the best course of action they'd be the one in charge and I'd be the one trying to give the mediocre advice.

I'm so tired, but nobody else is going to do it right.

I triggered a coloring bug as well during that stage.

I was thinking recently about the inverse of this attack. I have many thieves coming to my warehouse, and was thinking I could broadcast bunch of local ssids to try to see which ones their phones try to autoconnect to.

I could then use that info to figure out where they are likely to hang out, and either give it to police or take matters into my own hands.

I organized a huge game of capture the flag for the dorms at the University of Utah back in 1999. We had 3 teams, one for each dorm building. The RAs were given special powers to free people from jail and couldn't be tagged, but weren't allowed to carry a flag. I think most people had a great time. It really helped people get to know their neighbors and the RAs for the year.

By that logic, computers are a dead end because Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1 never really worked properly... Or that space travel is impossible because a lot of early rockets blew up on the pad.

I don't understand this kind of pessimism at all.

Well said! If anything, I'd say the money spent on traditional funerals is more of a scam but nobody seems to talk about that.

Expensive coffins, elaborate headstones, burial plot sales, etc.

As soon as somebody tries to spend their money in a way that might actually benefit them, people get defensive or try to justify death as noble or natural.

I doubt either site would be updated with info about an ongoing cryopreservation.

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

Interesting. I've been very interested lately in autonomous mapping and localization. It looks like many of the base implementation problems have been solved in a way that is extensible enough that I'll be able to use the solutions.

looks like a high voltage generator using capacitor plates similar to a Wimhurst machine.