rdl

Agree, but my "country" is population 1.

I first discovered John Walker through The Hacker's Diet and other writings, and corresponded with him back when I was doing an offshore datahaven 25 years ago. He was an amazing person -- curious, intelligent, and willing to share what he'd learned with the world. He supported many worthwhile projects behind the scenes as well. Sad I never got to meet him in person.

It's mostly with liquor bought from offsite and drunk in rooms/private parties, not via Caesar's venues or catering (there's a lot of that too, and this is summer dead period, so it still may be good).

They do sell extra batteries. $199.

Lynch’s Dune is up there with Apocalypse Now as my favorite movie. It got the feel of Dune correct, even if it made weird changes, and inspired me to start reading sci fi (I think I first saw the movie on TV in the late 80s, and would watch it whenever broadcast).

(not an expert, but based on my research to date:) 50' is borderline (one competent captain, potentially the owner, and one of the passengers helping out at times; of course if you're doing passages, etc you need multiple humans for 24x7 watchkeeping, even if one of the watches is held by someone only competent enough to wake the master. i.e. it's just at the limit of what a couple can probably manage themselves. 40-45 is probably better for that, but for passagemaking across the Pacific you might want bigger, and for group charter use bigger is somewhat better, especially since when you charter you almost certainly will have 2+ crew)

80' is absolutely full time paid captain, full time paid mate (potentially engineering or water toy support), and a steward/also mate-when-needed. If it's being used fully, probably need 2-3 other crew for rotation, and potentially would go 3+1 for a heavily chartered 80'. The paid captain at 80' is not merely for driving the boat but also the management of staff, maintenance scheduling, charter management, etc.

80'/24m is also where the commercial regs come into play (which I'd probably be trying to meet anyway), and 80' cat is already going to have a hard time with marinas in a lot of places (due to being wide, as well as long), but due to solar + good watermatermakers + excellent tenders, could probably operate at anchor far more than otherwise.

I'd probably do the "Boat DAO" model with the 80' and have 4-6 rentable cabins (not true retail, but within friend network, etc, and more particular when I'm using it). This is the specific boat I want: https://sunreef-yachts.com/en/launched/sunreef-80-eco-141/ (although by the time I'm in a position to order, and wait 2-3 years for production, there may be something better, and I'm hoping Starlink, lithium-ion batteries, etc. continue to improve -- mainly from a cost and maintainability perspective.)

Part of my motivation is that some of my friends are doing a lot of Seasteading related stuff and I'd want a boat to be able to visit/stay during some of those events using fixed platforms.

Would probably run Caribbean (where I live) from mid-NOV to mid-MAY (hurricane season avoidance), and then summer in Med, for at least a year or two, then do 2-3 year RTW journey once or twice. My plan would be to personally occupy it ~3 months out of the year at least, and to be able to charter entire boat or individual cabins for enough to defray most of the operating costs if successful. Spending the next couple years getting familiar with sailing around the Caribbean as well as obviously earning more money to be able to afford this ($3-10mm capex, 10-20%/yr of that also total operating budget, although some fraction comes back as earnings). I think I could realistically crowdfund/investment contract ~50-75% of this as well if the business model works out, maybe through prepaid/discounted use. I might get a ~30' powerboat here in Puerto Rico since <41.5' can be lifted out of the water and put into a warehouse rack during hurricane season, and powerboats are far more useful for day and 1-3 day trips around here due to currents/winds. Something able to get to Vieques/Culebra/Culebrita and maybe to USVI or even BVI.

Start with finding hundreds/thousands/hundreds of thousands of people who will follow you to arbitrary places and adventures. I'm sure Elon Musk could do something; Taylor Swift could too.

Once you have a large enough following for some reason (and ideally a fairly committed one; IDK if "follows someone on YouTube, like MrBeast" is enough -- has to be more like "my favorite musician/artist" or "business idol" or something), the rest is comparatively easy. You could pay people for all the stuff.

Basically the five routes today are: 1) Network State (stuff less than a state at start, ground up) 2) Negotiating with an existing state (free trade zone with more autonomy) 3) Seasteading (mostly an engineering and capital problem) 4) Space (also an engineering and capital problem) 5) Military conquest. Over the past ~70 years the last option didn't really exist, but increasingly it probably could work in some very specific locations, especially if you can find a fig leaf of "this local guy actually needs to be in power, not the guy in power now".

Huge life hack for early career if you are living condition and location independent is to work at direction of employer in some location they pay for; saves a lot of money. Might be a compound in Saudi Arabia with a villa and driver, might be a corp apartment in Mexico City, etc.

I think I did some talks about it ~15 years ago which are probably online. A quick search brings up some stuff but I don't remember which were about Sealand which were about the business. Overall, not horrible; water for showering was limited (rain and a watermaker which often clogged), food/cooking were intermittent (we got grocery deliveries from Tesco to a nearby dock and brought them out every 1-2 weeks)

I've discovered I can tolerate almost any local conditions (tiny dorm room, Sealand, sleeping in a car, trailer in Iraq, tent in Afghanistan, random tiny apartment, hotel, airport lounge, 5 star hotel suite, villa, etc. are all not that different) as long as I have Internet.

I'm currently looking at getting a (50-80', solar, nice) sailing catamaran in a few years and doing RTW trips on it.

When I was living in Sealand >20 years ago (another micronation project), was fun tracking the other projects -- this one was one of the most successful. Liberland and a few maritime efforts were as well. Surprisingly few attempts, really.

The new "network state" theories are a lot more interesting overall, though -- creating new groups of people FIRST, then building out progressively more solid physical infrastructure (potentially in different places), then networking them.

This person appears to have been a Cloudflare account exec who was terminated as part of a layoff (which was communicated as individual cut), by HR, and not by manager. She recorded the process and posted it.

Didn't the US basically tech-transfer most of ASML's tech to it for some reason?

A lot of them -- the whole "phishing" thing happens to crypto users with regularity, and often for surprisingly large amounts. Usually not the single-victim/cause $100mm+ hacks, but lots of $1-5mm losses. The "new" fun thing is creating spoofed addresses where first 4 and last 4 characters match a target, but are controlled by attacker, but variations on getting users to initiate transfers to the wrong address are pretty common.

Crypto gets a few things really right, and can do some things which can't be done by tradfi, but has a huge number of problems which need to be solved (some are "open problems" which don't really have solutions yet; some are taking what the top 0.1% of people or what people do some amount less than 100% of the time and making it universal, which is mostly what I am doing now as CSO at a crypto insurance company.)

I live ~10m away from my territory's biggest airport so I guess I'm spoiled on local rentals that way. But I was mainly thinking about the long-distance road trip use case for a vehicle, in which case an hour+ trip to the airport to pick up the vehicle isn't necessarily unreasonable, either -- I've rented for weeks at a time, and if you're putting 300+ miles/day on a car, makes sense even if you own a comparable vehicle. If the 1-4 road trips/yr which exceed your EV's capabilities require an hour to set up for a road trip, might still be worth it, especially if the EV saves you time with HOV lane access every day.

(My favorite rental car option of all time was Silvercar -- they had a fleet of identical Audi A4 sedans, no-hassle app based rental, good for the time prices ($50-60/day), and zero hassle overall. Something happened and they became audiondemand and became vastly more expensive, though.)

Lockdown prevents new enrollment in MDM/adding profiles, but you can use an MDM you're already enrolled in. It's pretty good from a security perspective.

What I dislike is that it applies to all devices in your iCloud profile, and is overall pretty intrusive/annoying. Best practice if you're going to use it is probably to have multiple iCloud accounts (maybe in a "family" for license sharing), and Lockdown Mode one of them for the more secure devices. I tried using it for all of my devices last year and it was pretty unusable.

(Main pain point was how it handles unsecure wifi networks; I consider ~all networks insecure regardless of wifi encryption, but not being able to save or otherwise autoconnect to a hotel network with an iPad with nothing on it, etc. was the last straw. With a decent travel router it's fine.)

I rent cars approximately all the time (I live on an island, so when I go anywhere, it's by air, and except for NYC, I always get a car wherever I go). Maybe 20 rentals/yr, a few years it was 50+ rentals.

Any of the big company "frequent renter" programs, like National Emerald Aisle/Executive, Hertz #1, etc., gives all the stuff you want. Usually I'm at airport locations (which do have extra taxes/fees), but it's "walk up to car, walk around one time just to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong, get in, adjust mirrors, configure usbc/carplay, stop at booth where they take my drivers license and credit card, drive off". With National I get my pick of any car on the lot (and with a corp discount code, usually around $30-40/day all-in).

The local branches suck a little more due to limited selection and lack of cannelized check out, but they're pretty close. Also way worse at most non-US locations (with the exception of big gateway airports).

I've returned cars and aside from one time where I drove over a concrete curb at CDG which I couldn't see (sigh, at the airport itself, returning the car), and had to pay for damages, it's always been painless. One time I returned a car where thieves at Stanford had broken the rear glass, and at SFO they just said "oh, another one", and checked a box on the return form; everything was handled via email after that.

There are also day-rate car rentals through Uber and some other programs like that where you use an app, find car, and drive off.

I would have no problem relying on rental for the last 5% of car needs (e.g. if I had a 2 seater or something, or didn't want to get snow tires to go into the mountains, etc. The "get to the rental location" is the biggest friction, and in true emergency cases where I absolutely need a car right then, which is why I usually rent for the whole trip.

I just got my "configure your Cybertruck" email. Unfortunately, I have an outdoor parking spot in a rented apartment and running power to charge there would be difficult/impossible. Yet, I would like a cybertruck.

I am going to try to buy a house in 2024-2026 so I can have a charging spot/garage so I can buy the EV, although not in a huge rush given the local real estate market (Puerto Rico), hassle of moving, etc (and relatively few miles/yr on my present car, although it's a 2006 and gets about 10-12mpg).

I wonder how many people are in similar situations. A PHEV would actually be the optimal new vehicle for me -- no need to charge, exempt from 40% import duty, and highly efficient in stop and go traffic -- but I want the Tesla. (I've also never owned a new vehicle, and kind of enjoy owning an old/cheap enough truck that if anything happened to it I'd be relatively unconcerned.)

Screwed up thing is the hiring conditions today are almost the opposite of 2020, so it would work great now (lots of entry to mid level jobs open, more comfort with remote than in <2020, etc.)

I know a fair number of people who have had no problem after (old) drug or DUI or violence convictions, but I usually hear about them in the context of "15 years ago I...". I don't know more current who isn't just a corp to corp contractor. I know people who have pled and haven't been sentenced, or who have had relatively recent convictions, who are working as single member LLCs for clients who know details.

If it's old or minor, I don't think I'd care as a hiring manager. It's annoying in some regulated industries since felony complicates checkbox compliance, but in "normal" industries enh.

The complexity of deployed identification/auth chain/secrets management/ec. is pretty terrifying; even if you can somehow understand it for one OS and hardware platform, if your service needs to support multiple OSes plus web plus multiple auth technologies plus a recovery path and everything else, dragons.

This is one of the few things cryptocurrency gets right in one specific way better than most other applications -- in most cases, everything is explicitly about operations with a key, and you build up protections on both sides of that. Unfortunately those protections themselves are often inadequate (hence billions of dollars in losses), but it's at least conceptually simpler and potentially could be fixed.

Device bound is to a specific piece of hardware (whether it supports reinstallation at some level is debatable but I wouldn't use the term for it; Signal is essentially single-concurrent-device-limited even though it has migration capability, but since it can be exported, it's not truly device bound. Apple, Google keychain lock-in is vendor or maybe account lock-in, not device lock-in. "Non-exportable" keys from a secure enclave make it device bound, although a sufficiently functional reprovisioning process might make that only a technical distinction.

Passwords are "legacy" security technology at this point (in the sense of being outdated and bordering on obsolete, and yet still needing to be supported) -- password managers are tools to manage that legacy technology.

Don't they work pretty portably within Apple iCloud keychain or Google equivalent (but only one)? I think some of the legacy password managers are supporting this as well, although my preferred self-hosted vaultwarden option doesn't yet (bitwarden has support, but I don't think it is in the self hosted version yet, let alone in vaultwarden)

There are ways to set passkeys as non-exportable from device I think but that is not the default.

Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?

Working at a tech giant for 1-4 years and then going off to do your own startup (or jump to another startup) doesn't seem bad in anyway. Different from spending a 20-40 year career at one place, but...

Or piracy.

Main thing induction seems actually worse for is being able to lift the pan above cooking surface and differentially heat different parts of the pan, particularly useful for Chinese/wok cooking.

I was at ACM Copenhagen although more downstairs at ASHES (which my company sponsored) and DeFi. Ryan Hurst who was there is probably the best person to ask about the specific certification use cases.

But overall -- I work for an insurer. Having to document how something was done a year+ after it was done to convince auditors/insurers/large clients is a LOT easier if you can point to a specific piece of hardware vs. a bespoke process. The downside of not having tamper-evidence or tamper-response (ideally) at the hw level is you need to build a lot of other controls around it, and that is expensive, impractical, and difficult to document in a lot of environments. e.g. in a datacenter it's unlikely you can enforce "two man from security/senior executive team in the cage"; it's probably going to be (at best) two ops staff, often contractors, and two-man rule isn't actually that widely used outside CAs themselves. The use cases I'd like for this are application logic, not traditional CAs (who do need FIPS). Add to this lifecycle management of the hardware from production to pickup/delivery to provisioning, pre-deployment storage, deployment, operation, routine audit, replacement, audit, and decommissioning, and it's way easier to put protection into the module. Most of the time I've just seen hardware protection inherited from single-chip vs. module-level protection created, but if there's no certified IC available, module protection it is.

Actual FIPS certification would be nice (or a better standard), but challenging in deployment because almost every vendor FIPS certifies with a specific application load and as soon as you run custom applications (which is badly supported in the HSM world), you lose certification anyway. "FIPS rated hardware running a non-FIPS load, audited in appendix A" is insurable, but ideally there would be something better. 99+% of HSM deployments are just used as dumb key signers which are trivially exploitable when you pop the host, though, so I'd certainly take the non-FIPS option.

(Today, the state of the art is pretty much SGX or another TEE on the host running custom application logic to evaluate and instruct signing which talks to the FIPS HSM to do key control and actual signing, e.g. what Anchorage does.)

Qty 1, $80 seems tolerable for a dev device. They should explicitly list 10 for $500 and 100 for $3000 or something though.

This is competing with $5-30K HSMs as well as $30-400 "hardware wallets" or second factor keys, as well as (free) embedded secure enclaves.

I'd put a key inside my app which then talks out of band to multiple devices (including maybe a trusted one?) -- e.g. "run app on the device, request input using the directly-connected PC, message tunneled out to my phone for confirmation")

A screen and 2-3 buttons would be nice, though; also a tamper-evident/tamper-responding package. But my main desired use case for this is a lightweight app-specific HSM so I'd just need to validate integrity of device before connecting it to host. USB Armory II is the main alternative.

If they could add some hardware tamper-evidence/tamper-response (design-to-meet FIPS 140-3 level 3 or EAL whatever, although no need to actually get certified), this could be super useful as a cheap application-specific HSM (which can run app logic inside, rather than the lobotomized/zombie signing oracle PKCS "HSM" use which is common.)

Obviously can prototype without this functionality, and can build out the toolchain/etc. I'm a lot more excited about Tropic Square than most alternatives, but this is shipping now.