986aignan

I ran into the same problem with Firefox, except viewing it directly works.

It turns out the server is using referer checking and I've got referer disabled. Compare the following curl invocations:

    curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' \
  -H 'Referer: https://fabiensanglard.net/'

    curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp'

There's an issue on the FluxEngine git repo that may be related to this: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75

At the end of the thread, David Given reports that some PC floppy drives drop pulses when trying to read 800k Mac disks: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75#issuecomm...

So the Cambridge page might be saying "use an Applesauce controller" as a sort of shorthand for "use a drive from an actual Apple computer".

It's difficult to say anything about experiential/first-person consciousness as we don't know what it is. Some say it doesn't exist and everybody is a p-zombie. That aside...

As you mention, there's a problem where if you want to know yourself fully - including observability of your mind - you need to be aware of the thing that is aware, and aware of the thing that is aware of the thing that is aware, etc, down to infinite regress.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible. It would suggest that such a being works by moving along a set of fixed point. Suppose x is the state of the physical mind (whether that's a brain, a set of chips, or something else). Suppose f(x) returns the updated state after this mind takes into account what it knows (i.e. f(first-order aware) = first- and second-order aware). Then if the mind-state always changes so that x is a fixed point of f, then the mind already knows all there is to know about itself.

So the question, on the mind side, is whether there exists a sufficiently generally intelligent type of mind for which moving along fixed points is computationally easy. I don't know. It could be possible, it could be impossible. Finding fixed points is hard in general, though.

There's also the problem of sensors, which may seem simpler but hides a similar difficulty. What happens if whatever thing that measures blood sugar fails? Or if the immune system goes auto-immune due to an immune cell defect that makes it report benign cells as foreign? Then you need an integrity sensor for the sensors - then you need an integrity sensor for the integrity sensor... At least this fixed-point problem for sensors should be easier than the one for general minds.

The consciousness:complexity ratio would probably express itself in that a mind of a certain complexity with the fixed-point-of-f constraint would be less intelligent on average than a mind of the same complexity without such a constraint.

There's a hard problem in either case, I think.

If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?

If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"

From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).

For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."

You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...

From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.

But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.

Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.

Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.

They get blocked by Recaptcha, I think.

I think SV was asking what onion services, which can't really use recaptcha, do to prevent the DDoS storm.

And I would imagine the answer is obscurity, since the dark web isn't nearly as well-mapped as the public web. That and some Anubis or other PoW would probably go far.

If it's just a contact form on some random site that isn't particularly valuable to spammers, a bespoke solution like hidden input fields, obfuscation, or some kind of token calculated client-side by JS will probably work just as well.

Certain esters have been found to be much safer (in mice, at least):

The glutathione hepatic values in mice obtained by intraperitoneal injection of the ester are superimposable on controls and the oral LD50 was found to be greater than 2000 mg kg^-1 and the intraperitoneal LD50 was 1900 mg kg^-1 ...

That's for pyroglutamic and glutamic acid esters of paracetamol: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8799871/

and more general analogs apparently can also be designed to not produce NAPQI:

Thus, in 2020, N-sulpharyl-APAP prodrugs 39–40 (Fig. 11) were developed. [...] They are not hepatotoxic because they do not generate toxic metabolite NAPQI, even in concentrations equal to a toxic dose of APAP (600 mg kg^−1 in mice).

https://pubs.rsc.org/zh-tw/content/articlepdf/2024/ra/d4ra00... p. 9702.

These would probably require trials, though.

There's a broader law: If it needs to insist on what it is, it probably isn't. E.g. "People's Democratic Republic of Foo".

The code lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a lot more ways than a spec does, though. Few people would make specs that include buffer overflows or SQL injection.

That sounds like a good way to get extreme short-term optimization.

Say a particular finetune prioritizes profits right now and makes recommendations like "cut down on maintenance, you can make up for it later with your increased profits and their interest". It produces more profits, and wins the AB test. Later the chickens come home to roost.

You can reduce the problem by using long-term indicators, but then each AB test is very slow.

The Rivest methods in the CSR13 paper - ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin - seem to be relatively simple. Not directly applicable to online voting, though, but perhaps they would be simple enough to prove to the people that regular voting has no voter fraud?

Not all answers are conducive to such subtle manipulation, though. If the user asks for an algorithm to solve the knapsack problem, it's kind of hard to stealthily go "now let's see how many Coca Colas will fit in the knapsack". If the user asks for a cyberpunk story, "the decker prepared his Microsoft Cyberdeck" would sound off, too.

Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.

I wish there were some kind of file search for the Wayback Machine. Like "list all .S3M files on members.aol.com before 1998". It would've made looking for obscure nostalgia much easier.

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention the peroxidase hypothesis[1]. Has it been disproven?

[1] https://tmedweb.tulane.edu/pharmwiki/doku.php/acetaminophen

The problem is that if what "really counts" is too vaguely defined, then it's hard to pin down and argue the point.

Virtual memory probably isn't what you meant, but take something like user privilege separation. It's usually considered a good idea to not run software as root. To interpret the statement generously, privilege separation does restrict immediate freedom: you have to escalate whenever you want to do system-level changes. But I think josephg's statement:

Sandboxing gives users more control. Not less. Even if they use that control to turn off sandboxing, they still have more freedom because they get to decide if sandboxing is enabled or disabled.

can be directly transposed to user privilege separation. While it's true that escalating to root is more of a hassle than just running everything as root, in another sense it does provide more control because the user can run arbitrary code without being afraid that it will nuke their OS; and more freedom because you could always just run everything as root anyway.

Maybe josephg's sense of freedom and control is what you're saying there is a trade-off between. But the case of privilege separation shows that some trade-offs are such that they provide a lot of security for only a little bit of inconvenience, and that's a trade-off most people are willing to make.

Sometimes the trade-off may seem unacceptable because OS or software support isn't there yet. Like Vista's constant UAC annoyances in the case of privilege separation/escalation. But that doesn't mean that the fundamental idea of privilege levels is bad or that it must necessarily trade off too much convenience for control.

I think that's also what josephg is suggesting about sandboxing. He says that the clipboard problem could probably be fixed; then you say, "but there are other examples". What remains to be shown is whether the examples are inherent to sandboxing and must degrade a capabilities/sandbox approach to a level where the trade-off is unacceptable to most.

IIRC, you could use asymmetric cryptography to derive a site-specific pseudonymous token from the service and your government ID without the service knowing what your government ID is or the government provider knowing what service you are using.

The service then links the token to your account and uses ordinary detection measures to see if you're spamming, flooding, phishing, whatever. If you do, the token gets blacklisted and you can no longer sign on to that service.

This isn't foolproof - you could still bribe random people on the street to be men/mules in the middle and do your flooding through them - but it's much harder than just spinning up ten thousand bots on a residential proxy.

It is possible to take this too far, though - consider the OpenAI IMO proofs[1], for instance, and compare them to Gemini's.[2]

[1] https://github.com/aw31/openai-imo-2025-proofs

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15855 Appendix A

At some point, I would imagine the distinction between capital and land becomes blurry, though. Economic rent can be had from either if the barrier to competition is high enough.

Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.

Even if that is true (and I'm not saying it is), practical limits on handling the combinatorial complexity, or variety if you will, severely limits its use. No realistic fist-fighter has the information required or the processing capabilities to do the "biomechanical optimization problem" to anywhere near optimality.

In city planning and building design, the problem is even more severe. The planner doesn't know what people are going to settle where, what their desired needs are (or are going to be), and so on. That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as an awful solution, nor that you can't say anything at all. (A house probably needs windows, and you probably shouldn't stick a polluting industrial zone right next to a bunch of them.) It just means that trying to "micromanage" a city or complex building fails - for the same reason that micromanaging an organization fails.

(This is a requisite variety or "seeing like a state" argument.)

Monte Carlo simulations would be the obvious example.

Couldn't you replace the CCD with an adapter, connect the adapter to the video out of a computer, and then use the camera to "take a picture" of your already edited picture?

It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.

The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the US.

You might need some kind of MMP part if you want it to be truly proportional. If the voters can only rank about ten candidates before it gets unwieldy, that would give an effective 9% absolute threshold. A party that gains 8% support everywhere would get no candidates elected.

Here's a paper by Markus Schulze proposing such a method: https://aso.icann.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/schulze4.pd... He uses some very large districts, but it should work for smaller districts too.

And even that notwithstanding, they could use a solar foci telescope. It's kind of a pain to orient, but it /does/ give you extreme magnification.

But wouldn't that kind of reasoning also say that helicopters are impossible because no flying animal works that way?

For a more reasoning-adjacent example, "conventional" chess AIs don't really work like brains do, either, but they're pretty good at playing chess.

A modern version of "Computers Don't Argue".

In some cases there's an inherent tradeoff.

A scam might, for instance, say "If you don't go to phishingpage.xyz RIGHT NOW your account will be DELETED!" to capitalize on urgency. That appeal to urgency can be detected. The scammers could of course just choose not to appeal to urgency, but then that would reduce the number of people who'd fall for their scam.

On the other hand, proofs sometimes give you more than you'd expect. A proof that the implementation of a function always returns some value automatically proves that there's no arbitrary code execution, for instance.