esotericn

It depends how rationally the market responds, I guess.

A reorg attack and a DoS are equivalent in my mind - anyone who's capable of pulling off a lengthy DoS is also capable of performing a reorg attack, whether they actually do or not is kind of irrelevant.

In the general case I don't think that majority miner attacks can be defended against without changing the hash algorithm.

Specific cases like "empty blocks" could be addressed via a hard fork.

But there's nothing stopping miners from faking transactions in blocks, sending amounts to themselves, filling the block with OP_RETURNs, or just doing the minimum possible to get around your "fix".

PoW absolutely relies on >50% of miners being honest, always has done.

Everything you can do now could have been done in Feb 2020.

I'm happy for you and hope that when the world returns to normality, you are able to apply the lessons you have learned.

We don't need a new protocol, we just need people to reject centralized services.

The weak link is the legal entity of the corporation.

If you're happy existing with one other person and video calls indefinitely, then I consider you to be an obvious troll.

Nah.

That's lovely for you. I hope you enjoy your video chats.

Yes, indefinite restrictions will mean that eventually everyone develops severe mental issues.

Change the 5% to whatever you like, it doesn't matter.

I suppose there was that time when the US had >15% unemployment (now around 7%).

The X60s is magnificent. I love mine and may also buy more in the future.

Just a fantastic piece of kit. If only the mainboard were upgradable...

The lack of webcam is a bonus as far as I'm concerned; "Zoom culture" can burn.

Potentially - but I think that part of the author's point is that this shouldn't be necessary. Binning an entire keyboard for the sake of a few keys breaking?

We're almost at 100 days since it was last legal for me to interact with another person in my own home - https://esotericnonsense.com for references.

The UK will have vaccinated at least 20 million of the most vulnerable on March 1, providing a high level of protection three weeks later.

From then, the virus becomes simply less relevant than our collective mental health.

Mourning together is better than just being in solitary confinement forever; it's a 100% chance of a mental illness vs. a ~1-5% chance of a physical illness.

March 23, one year since the beginning of restrictions in the UK, I'm done.

Social distancing indefinitely (until Autumn? 2022? 2023? ...) is something other people can do.

Here in the UK borrowing to buy a car is a minority thing.

The majority of people throw a few grand at an old banger and drive it until it stops working.

Whenever I read about this sort of thing, I just think - hey, guess I became old (I'm not even middle aged).

I've been playing emulated retro games for the last ten years, there's enough of them to last a lifetime.

Literally no-one I know wants to hotdesk. It's the proletarian option for junior staff; it's a very clear form of cost-cutting.

A fair few people I know do want to visit the office 3 of 5 days, sure.

Reading this sort of thing is just bizarre. It's like that special brand of American "fake smile".

Open offices cut costs too. Are they better?

"Everything is fine".

Is there something more important than not being under house arrest whilst people die?

Couldn't give a single fuck. Have my money. :waves about:

If we had paid 1000 GBP per vaccine in the UK, I struggle to see how it would have not been the greatest value for money purchase that will have been made within my entire lifetime.

We're in the middle of a three month period of it being illegal for anyone to visit my home...

"Getting rich" literally does mean owning capital.

You are not rich if you have ten billion Zimbabwean dollars.

Taking a top-level view though, we've pulled about a billion different levers.

In the UK we've restricted the activity of healthy individuals for about 11 months now - the latest episode being an approximately 3 month period within which it's illegal to meet anyone else within your own home.

Psychological trials, even trivial things like filling in surveys or taking reaction speed tests are carefully monitored for ethical concerns, lockdown we just went all in on with no cost-benefit analysis.

It seems bizarre to me that in that context we should be worrying about the ethics of a challenge study with a few hundred or few thousand volunteers.

Loads of people I know have _already_ volunteered themselves for it in the outside world with no compensation and with no benefit to science because they're not able to mentally handle indefinite restrictions.

As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to the statement that "refrigerating beer causes the ozone layer to fail".

There was a time that it did, and then we banned CFCs, and now it doesn't.

Shouting at people about CO2 is simply never ever ever going to fix the problem. It needs to be incentivised or it won't happen.

My employer has killed off office perks during lockdown; it doesn't seem intentional, more of a bureaucratic thing. People are still in the office, but the management aren't, so things don't get done.

I've told them that this is an issue for morale - the old "buying the cheap toilet paper" adage comes to mind - but I'm not holding out much hope that anything will happen.

Is it a significant hardship for me to buy lunch? No. It wouldn't be a significant hardship for them to give it either.

To be brutally honest - we all need _more_ support during lockdown and restrictions, not less. In the UK, work and the supermarket are pretty much the only legal reasons for most to be outside at the moment.

So your point here is that... we should ignore his views on free speech (e.g. he should be 'cancelled') because you don't like his other views?

You do realise that ~40% of Brits are Tories?

What does his brother have to do with anything? I don't know what my siblings' political leanings are at all!

"Pretty good" isn't good enough for this sort of thing though.

If you care about contracting coronavirus, if for you infection is a death sentence, then you need something daft like a 99.9999% certainty that people and things you interact with aren't carrying the virus, and that doesn't just include their nasal passages; it means them not having it on their hands, or on their clothes, or whatever else.

In the real world, outside of these hyper corporate events, most people I know who aren't vulnerable just take basic measures because if we get the virus it'll probably be fine.

But that's not good enough if you're selling snake oil.

Well, I don't know about where you are, but over in the UK the Government isn't doing us any favours on this front.

We've just been through a year of businesses being forced to close whilst their landlords continue to collect rent, and everyone seems to think the latter is just an amusing oversight.

In that sort of environment, it's far more logical for me to just buy hard assets and sit on them; it's been made very clear that we're going to just force that to be the winning side of the trade via legislation.

The issue is lockdown and how the UK government chooses to proceed, not coronavirus spread or science.

I'm opening up from March 23, they can do whatever they want.

I don't know why you're waffling on about this.

The topic in question is an attempt to stage an event with zero coronavirus. I am simply saying that you cannot test your way into a 100% safe event in a country that has high prevalence.

You seem to be talking about how to reduce prevalence in the country and shoe horning in your own opinions about people for the sake of feeling good about yourself.

Two different topics.

Stop signs are fairly common out in rural areas without much traffic in the UK.

The US just has a lot more of that.

We also just have roundabouts all over the place and Americans seem to be allergic to them for whatever reason.

Meeting indoors has been illegal in London since December 2 and based on current communication will be illegal until at least March 2, so that'll be four months of it being illegal to meet any person from outside your household indoors.

I actually had to look this up in order to make sure I had the dates right, but it's absolutely correct.

It is also illegal to meet a single person in your garden or outside unless you're exercising. I don't have exact timings on that, because in order to protect my mental health I've stopped following the news.

"A tad excessive" is understating it a bit. It's inhuman. Writing it down makes me feel ill. When people talk about it as if it's normal and okay, I get an intense feeling of anger and a desire to cause them pain.

So if you want your perspective on why people are acting like "covidiots" or whatever offensive name we're applying to our brothers now - this is why.

I am done with bureaucratic despots telling me what to do, I am not a guinea pig to be experimented on.

Your second paragraph is of course true.

But right now, we're eleven months in and it's illegal for me to have a single friend over for a cup of tea.

Not advised against; not something we should limit; illegal, punishable by law.

I'm at the point at which I've been told by medical health practitioners to ignore this nonsense and see people for my own wellbeing.

We have a vaccination program running in the UK and it's going fairly well. The thing that is keeping me clinging to sanity is the fact that once the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, I'm just getting on with life.

Without that; well the news is saying 'social distancing until 2022' and the Government are telling us that maybe in a month it'll be legal to sit on a park bench with a coffee.

This is not me being hyperbolic. It is currently illegal for me to leave my house and sit on a park bench.

If I followed that stuff to the letter, I'd have already gone postal or just thrown myself in front of a train.

This is a policy that, if it works at all, works for specific types of people; nuclear families, introverts, etc.

Those might even be a majority.

But it's not viable at a population level because a significant percentage of people are either in situations whereby they need to mix households in order to function, or have brain chemistry which means that avoiding social mixing for prolonged periods (months or more) causes them to become depressed, anxious, or in extreme cases psychotic.

We're doing all of this stuff in an attempt to reduce coronavirus cases prior to vaccination, because we care about public health, not purely for the sake of it. That would be "clown world".

We are eleven months in.

I voluntarily restricted myself for a long while. Far, far longer than I should have, to the point that I may have given myself brain damage.

Now I am visiting my family because I'm not willing to do it indefinitely. The UK government is waffling on about restrictions until 2022 despite the fact we'll have vaccinated most of the vulnerable in a month or two.

Everyone has their breaking point, and I've reached mine.

Two weeks to flatten the curve, yo.