topynate

Shortwave with plenty of spare batteries. Disregard solar power – you won't be going outside or even near the windows for some time.

Diehl's argument is that the PV is zero, and the post to which you are replying is a response to that. So while you are quite correct that the arguments introduced are political, they are still convincing arguments to some degree, and that is publicly observable, so people will value these assets in the knowledge that there are a hardcore of 'strong hands'. You seem to be saying that these political arguments are more true in 'regimes' than in 'the western world'. This is even better. If the political thesis is true in some countries then the connected assets will be valued based on that, and even those of us who are blessed to live in managerial states will be able to hold assets with those prices – all thanks to Erdoğan, al-Sisi et al.

But this is not Diehl's argument. He's saying that crypto isn't worth anything no matter how many journalists MBS cuts into little pieces. His line (which appears to be a dumbed-down, unattributed version of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says) is that an asset with no cash flow has zero present value. NNT's version is that an asset with no cash flow must be valued based on the price "at infinity". Diehl wants this to mean that any self-licking ice-cream cone has zero PV, but that is simply false, in that a self-sustaining process which never ceases really does have that "price at infinity". Most of gold's value comes from this, i.e. from the reasonable expectation that humans will value gold for as long as there are humans. There's a respectable theory of money which says that moneys arise in this way – a feedback loop of belief about others' beliefs about value, that ends up creating the common knowledge that something is valuable. To this extent Diehl is simply begging the question, by assuming that something isn't a potential money and valuing it as if it can never be one.

The Road goes ever on and on…

I had to check I hadn't accidentally pasted in a link to Alain de Benoist or someone like that. No, Kopnina's centring of the individual, whether human or non-human, places her firmly in the liberal tradition, broadly considered.

I can do no better than to ask anyone who makes it this far down the thread to read a few lines from her article and consider what counts for an ecofascist vibe in some circles. Or here is more Kopnina, this time a blog: https://blog.ecologicalcitizen.net/2020/11/09/reversing-ecof...

McLemore's claim, "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against", is false. Moreover, the fact that no such thing as a statistically default human exists (which has been known since at least the '40s – see https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...) has nothing to do with the normal distribution as such. The default human body fails to exist despite the normal distribution of many of the measures that can be made of a human body. The paper McLemore linked, of which I have read as much as I can endure, does not, to its credit, make any such claim about the normal distribution or any other distribution. McLemore, in her article but not in her paper, is simply using amphiboly to confuse the different meanings of 'normal' as part of the phrase "normal distribution" and as a synonym for 'default' sensu 'basis of comparision'. This makes no sense – hence, "nonsense".

And she doesn't even use that confusion to make any sensible point. The rest of that paragraph is just a rehash of the paper's argument. I don't "understand" why McLemore inserted this guff about normal distributions, but if I had to guess, she might have done it to strengthen the link between what Wilson wrote about and what the paper is criticising – not by reasoning, but by wordplay.

The open letter makes one central point: that the SA article is a nearly pure ad hominem, i.e. that Lemore attacks E.O. Wilson himself, not any particular thing which he actually did or said. She simply does not establish anything that could be on any list (secret or otherwise) of things for which one could attack Wilson. (Just to be clear, the open letter does not make the point you impute to it – that the article makes supportable claims, but that those claims shouldn't be made against Wilson because he's a "prominent dead scientist".)

Given that, it's not as if there's any real charge of racism laid that would require a defence, and in fact the open letter does not use Wilson's environmentalism as a defence of this sort. Why then do you mention it in this connexion? Perhaps to introduce the 'motif' you mention, which despite being in quotation marks does not appear to be a direct quote.

What then, seeing as you have raised it, was the ideological content of Wilson's views on ecology and overpopulation? That population growth drives overexploitation of nature, with disastrous ecological consequences. This is opposed by those who view industry, not people, as the prime cause of overexploitation. The debate is roughly between those who would set aside and protect part of the Earth and those who see the Earth as already unnatural. Or "Half-Earth" vs. "the Anthropocene", to use each side's slogans. To be sure, some of the side opposed to Wilson have been known to attempt to racialise the views of the set-asiders. For an eloquent defence of Half-Earth against these and other ideological attacks, see "Half the earth for people (or more)? Addressing ethical questions in conservation" by Helen Kopnina. (PDF: https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/i...)

I suppose it took you five minutes or less to write your comment. That it took me half an hour to compose a sufficient reply is a fine demonstration of Brandolini's law, should any more such be needed. Just one more thing. E.O. Wilson's own words on whether population control should be imposed by anyone, on anyone:

"Should nations have a population policy? Should religions have a population policy? It seems to me that one is scurrying on the edge of fascistic ideas if one tells people how many children they can have, altering the entire nature of the society." From his interview at http://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/09/e-o-wilson-runaway-popu...

That would contradict "even if she wanted to, France couldn't". If she wanted to, France could make nuclear engineering a highly-paid profession with strong job security. It would just cost more money.

That's 28 years away. People not yet born will be trained nuclear engineers by then. On what basis does RTE regard the loss of knowledge as already locked-in?

Footnote #1 suggests the author is concerned with solutions to the availability of CSAM. In this light the ownership of the NFT is actually irrelevant. Anyone can read the data in the NFT. That data will either point to CSAM or it won't. The problem, if there is one, would be with anyone with a copy of the blockchain's ledger – it would have nothing to do with the ability of anyone to update the ledger.

Looks like the account has just been unsuspended. That or it's a caching issue.

Very woke, great threads about investigations into technical curiosities (example: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54025997), has been known, if I recall correctly, to delete threads when they're linked on this site.

Just in case someone in a position to do something about it is reading this, there's a graceful way out for Youtube. Leave dislike counts publicly available via the API. That way people who use the ratio to evaluate videos (very useful for reviews) can install a browser extension, but dislike mobbing will be minimized, seeing as most casual users will not bother installing such extensions.

The phrase "offers certain end-to-end customer experiences" could be applied to anything that happens while you're using Windows – so it doesn't mean anything.

For Microsoft to label what Firefox and Edge are doing "improper redirection" is just rubbing it in. A problem of propriety is just one of failing to meet some conventional standard. But there's no community here whose mores are being violated, the convention is no more than whatever some VP wants.

I make it as (100%-3.5%)^15 ~= 58.6% retained.

If the reasons don't leak (they usually do) then it will still be possible to see what Gilmore was blocking by watching what the EFF does over the next six months that it hasn't done before.

I don't have any Sanskrit, so can't personally vouch for this, but here is an explicitly LLPSI- inspired online Sanskrit resource: https://en.amarahasa.com/

This explains the link to LLPSI: https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/knuc4h/a_sanskrit_pr...

I believe you have misread that table. The prices (which depend on size) are all per package of 100 sheets. So you can reduce that $1000 to $10 as an order of magnitude estimate.

That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book to that sort of standard.

For the record, the poor lady suffered 6% third-degree burns. The "over ten percent" includes more minor burns. A small detail, but it raised my suspicion that the author was putting his thumb on the scales to make his point stronger.

And it was a terrible verdict, by the way. It's common knowledge that coffee is brewed with boiling water and very often served immediately thereafter. The supposed "moral panic" story only had legs precisely because every reasonable person knew that the jury had been buffaloed by some (apparently, very good) lawyers in the unfamiliar context of a courtroom. One does not need to hold a brief for McDonald's to understand that.

I like IPFS for making Libgen faster (with a little help from Cloudflare). If it also manages to solve hard problems of decentralization and content-addressable storage, that's just a bonus.

It should be possible for the jammer to subtract off its own signal rather more effectively than anything which doesn't have access to the pRNG it uses to generate the interference.

Yes for string theory and all related topics, with the exception of interpretation of quantum mechanics. In which his adoption of the Copenhagen interpretation is very reasonable as praxis, but doesn't make sense to me as metaphysics.

> it’s dishonest and disrespectful the Jewish people

Is it? Bari Weiss, who I think is Jewish, seems not to think so. I happen to be Jewish, and I don't think so. An inopportune comparison, yes, but not malicious. A lot of otherwise highly educated people in STEM lack a broad knowledge of politics and history. The Nazi comparison is quite often literally the only one they have available! Certainly Abbot and his co-author would have been better served by an example that didn't directly precede a genocide – in my opinion, the most apt is what went on in the Soviet Union.

These controls seem to be making use of the account-tagging Twitter already does, some of the particulars of which leaked out last year: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-panel-blacklist-search-tre...

The current filtering is crude enough. There is no common agreement on who should be filtered and in what way, but everyone using the site is subject to one undifferentiated unremovable filter, whether they're in the naughty box or just trying to read some tweets. So now you'll get to invoke The Filter yourself at will. Big deal.

I don't rate the chances that Twitter will stop making more of this lazy dumb-AI, and put the effort into filter options that treat users as responsible enough actually to control their own feed. I do hope that people developing alternative microblogging tools can learn from Twitter's example.

Smells like an unpatched critical vulnerability.

She has a very empirical way of looking at things which is somewhat uncommon in theoretical physicists and appeals to interested outsiders who haven't been "inducted" into string theory or what have you. E.g. we might be able to do without dark energy, so why put so much emphasis on dark energy? We don't even see one superparticle at LHC, but grad students are still being pushed into stringy shit – why not cut our losses? Or on the flip side, here's a 6 sigma result!!! – why don't her peers seem to care?

The other side would be someone like Luboš Motl, who used to be quite popular too. His main point is that the mathematical completeness and coherence of string theory means it's the only game in town. Which, that might be a fair point, for all I know, but I'm a maths grad and I can only vaguely appreciate what he's going on about most of the time. It just needs a lot of study to get to grips with these theories well enough to judge them in the absence of confirmatory empirical evidence.

So what? It's unmanned. Worst case it sinks and the shipment is lost. By default it surfaces and waits for someone to come fix it.

Yes, it's encrypted, but part of this anti-CSAM strategy is a threshold encryption scheme that allows Apple to decrypt photos if a certain number of them have suspicious hashes.

On reflection, yes, there must be warrants involved. I'm raising my estimate of how likely it is that innocent people get raided due to this. The warrant would properly only be to search iCloud, not some guy's house, but I can easily see overly-broad warrants being issued.

This could happen with a perturbed image, but I doubt it. Apple will send the suspicious images to the relevant authorities. Those authorities will then look at the images. The chances are low that they will then seek a search, even though the images are innocent upon visual inspection. But maybe in some places a ping from Apple is good enough for a search and seizure.

Second preimage attacks are trivial because of how the algorithm works. The image goes through a neural network (one to which everyone has access), the output vector is put through a linear transformation, and that vector is binarized, then cryptographically hashed. It's trivial to perturb any image you might wish so as to be close to the original output vector. This will result in it having the same binarization, hence the same hash. I believe the neural network is a pretty conventional convolutional one, so adversarial perturbations will exist that are invisible to the naked eye.

This is useful for two purposes I can think of. One, you can randomize all the vectors on all of your images. Two, you can make problems for others by giving them harmless-looking images that have been cooked to give particular hashes. I'm not sure how bad those problems would be – at some point a police officer does have to look at the image in order to get probable cause. Perhaps it could lead to your Apple account being suspended, however.