hedgedoops2

Excellent point

You should still be able to confirm it with calorimetry though I guess?

I'm confused about this.

Okay thats wrong they didnt find that. Looks like just did some ml and it suggested that such a reaction exists and what the two species are.

Also its unclear whether during the phase transition there really is two seperate macroscopic regions as opposed to a mixture (maybe like a suspension)

Nah.

If I understand the article correctly, they found a phase transition reaction, a chemical reaction that occurs in liquid water below 0 C that splits the body of liquid water into one continuous region of high density and one of low, so its no longer a uniform liquid.

This would also release heat, like the freezing reaction (and unlike random rearrangements of molecules in the liquid).

Pretty sure that debit chargebacks lead to an instant credit (by regulation).

I'm almost tempted to test it right now but I am pretty sure I did this once and it took under 1 day

Ok now I asked a chatbot for how this is regulated. The answer was wrong as expected but it happened to mention the applicable regulation which can be looked up at gesezte-im-internet.de

§ 675u BGB - requires immediate credit for unauthorized card payments

§ 675x BGB - chargeback in 10 days for direct debit transactions (lastschrift)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__675x.html

I guess this is just germany but I vagely remember a payment processor eu directive that this is probably implementing (PSD)

-> Yes. It is article 73 and 76 of PSD

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

So this holds EU wide for all banks.

This was literally 15 mins of googling (well duckduck ing) on the train.

Now there still could be counterveiling evidence and ianal etc, so use grain of salt. Gotta get off now.

You dont block either.

The factory does decent software engineering - for which it can also use the same llm - so that when an attacker does either, a sota llm does not find bugs to exploit.

Ding ding ding

This is one of the things a comprehensive interoperability mandate could enable.

Require monopolistic companies that have a frontend/backend architecture to publish the interface docs and to not obstruct third party commercial alt backends/frontends.

Its a bit like carving up monopolistic firms along the joints (interfaces) defined by the software architecture, and team structure. Just less extreme; the firm isnt actually split, it's just required to allow "fair competition by third party architecture components"

This would really improve googles software, we might get e2ee google keep or gmail with pgp.

(I have not worked out the details of this, it might not be feasible)

People will pressure peers to not care about theatre?

I mean opera I would get :p. Kidding.

I'm not a theatre expert but I feel like recommending the play "The Lifespan of a Fact":

https://www.newcitystage.com/2023/11/21/truth-lies-and-every...

It's based on a true story; the details are unreliably narrated here:

https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Fact-John-DAgata/dp/03933407...

Lol, yes, subsidiarity.

HOAs, the lowest level of US government.

My reading of [1] is that Palantir does data fusion. Their software, when installed on an organization's peripheral systems by their FDEs, centralizes all the org's data (within the org - not at palantir), and allows the org's management to do analyses on the pool.

I'm guessing that people are scared that the state will install one big palantir instance on all its systems. So that anything any part of the state learns about you, in any context or interaction, can be effortlessly used against you in every other context (perhaps via parallel construction in a lawsuit).

Basically, the fear would be that palantir makes mass surveillance data actionable, fuses surveillance programs, and incorporates most IT into mass surveillance programs.

The government would become less like a series of seperate agencies, more like a big consciousness that knows things (knows centrally, everything it was told anywhere).

Note this is just my interpretation of the fear.

Its fuzzy. Others may know more about palantir than me and thus have a more precise and grounded concern.

[1] https://archive.ph/6ljwy#selection-2539.194-2539.400

See also: https://redlib.privadency.com/r/Futurology/comments/4o02p3/o...

For me the idea of "people piloting mech suits" brings up lost kids, like Shinji from nge.

You're saying maybe people have mistakenly accepted incorrect proofs now and again, so some theorems that people think are proven are unproven. I agree that this seems very likely.

In practice when proofs of research mathematics are checked, they go out to like 4 grad students. This isn't a very glamorous job for those grad students. If they agree then it's considered correct...

But note this is just the bleeding edge stuff. The basic stuff is checked and reproven by every math undergrad that learns math. Literally millions of people have checked all the proofs. As long as something is taught in university somewhere, all the people who are learning it (well, all the ones who do it well) are proving / checking the theory.

Anyway, when the scientific community accepts a bad proof what effectively happens is that we've just added an extra axiom.

Like when you deliberately add new axioms, there are 3 cases

- Axiom is redundant: it can be proven from the other axioms. (this is ... relatively fine? we tricked ourselves into believing something that is true is true, the reason is just bad.)

This can get discovered when people try to adapt the bad proof to prove other things and fail.

Also people find and publish and "more interesting", "different" proofs for old theorems all the time. Now you have redundancy.

- Axiom contradicts other axioms: We can now prove p and not p.

I wonder if this has ever happened? I.e. people proving contradictions, leading them to discover that a generally accepted theorem's proof is incorrect. It must have happened a few times in history, no?

o/c maybe the reason this hasn't happened is that the whole logical foundation of mathematics is new, dating back to the hilbert program (1920s).

There are well known instances of "proofs" being overturned before that, but they're not strictly logically proofs in the hilbert-program sense, just arguments. (Of course they contain most of the work and ideas that would go into a correct proof, and if you understand them you can do a modern proof)

e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/a/35558

Cauchys proof that, if a sequence of continuous functions converges [pointwise] to a function, the limit function is also continuous (cauchys proof only holds for uniform convergence, not pointwise convergence - but people didnt really know the difference at the time)

- Axiom is independent of other axioms: You can't prove or disprove the theorem.

English doesn't have a "I'm just hypothesizing all of this" voice, if it did exist this post should be in it. I didn't do enough research to answer your question. Some of the above may be wrong, e.g. the part about the 4 grad students. One should probably look for historical examples.

https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/optimalism/posts/shock-c...

Maybe not individual warrants (at least not warrants to do non-scalable collections like hardware bugs in one's phone - I.e. warrants that, most users, with high probability, are not subject to). But mass surveillance, e.g. NSA, even with 'mass warrants' (e.g. Verizon-FISA warrant), that everyone is subject to, is probably in most people's attacker model. I don't have a study handy, but it seems reasonable that most users use signal to protect against mass surveillance and signal advertises itself as being good for this.

Also Marlinspike and Whittaker are quite outspoken about mass surveillance.

If cloudflare can compile a big part of the "who chats with whom" graph, that is a system design defect.

Doesn't matter. As long as the code is open source and e2ee, Signal staff could be official NSA employees, it wouldn't matter (in the short term - in the long term, you would see these things to change, of course.)

I'd change my mind on Signal if you can demonstrate an attack that assumes an evil signal operator, or evil signal servers.

Signal know they just need to keep themselves open to the possibility of this kind of demonstration. Then any mistrust, combined with the fact that there is no exploit at the next CCC or defcon, becomes evidence that it's secure. More mistrust -> More attempts to prove its insecure + no demonstration of insecurity -> better argument that its secure. It's a negative feedback loop. It's also honest - you could actually break it. Did I miss how you can break it? Link to the demo.

Signal the program doesn't trust signal the organization, as it should be. That's the core idea. It's what lets them not get fucked by the government. They cooperate fully and ensure they have nothing to tell (privacy by design. data minimization. self blinding). And by having a lot of users they make themselves impossible to ban and thereby protect the whole concept.

Whittaker is very smart politically. The software isnt perfect, sure. It's polished and reliable and secure. Make a better one... it is fine.

Also, are you reading what she's saying? This is not what compromise looks like. Here is how compromise looks like: When you see them starting to talk about protecting people by establishing police control to fight the bogeyman. When they start talking about the threats here, threats there, enemies here, enemies there... When they say, because of big tech, we need things like DSA (enforcement regimes, access for police) [1]. Whittakter says because of big tech, we need a lot of open source projects backed by nonprofit organizations that dont advertise, dont surveill, and have no incentive to start doing it... and that build stuff that has no backdoors and makes no affordances for state or anyone else in power to compromise it.

[1] and then plugins like E-Evidence, and finally rules like in England that prohibit privacy by design... which would prohibit: Signal... but which the english are not enforcing because of protests by: Signal.

Here you go:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-20/ty-article/wh...

Note that abolishing the common law reasonableness standard isn't the only change Netanjahu had planned originally. He's been forced to backtrack a lot.

The original proposals intended to allow the government to override supreme court decisions generally (not just ones based on the reasonableness doctrine). I dont see how this wouldn't have eliminated all legal limits to government power in Israel.

In a sense there already aren't any limits: 50% of parliament is enough to change the basic laws.

Parent is only asking for eternal youth, not a way to massively decrease the net amount of entropy of the universe.

Biggest threat to democracy is moral panics about fake enemies instigated by politicians (specifically, demagogues). This helps with that by replacing politicians with direct democracy. It's more feasible than full-on direct democracy since it avoids the need for everyone to become an expert on every legal area. You can delegate your vote to a non-politician expert you know personally - and to different people depending on the proposal.

Heat pumps can't be more efficient than the theoretical Carnot heat engine running in reverse, whose efficiency is T_outside / delta_T. In this case it's (273-28)K/98K = 2.5.

I guess being 2x as efficient (cheap) as electric resistive heating isn't super-terrible, but it's not great either.

Compare this to a favorable groundwater heat pump configuration with good radiators and insulation where the 'outside' (groundwater) is maybe 10°C and the target temp 30°C (close to room temp): (273+10)K/20K = ~14.

and it sickens me to see that my privacy depends on countries and electorates on which I have no say

The problem isn't "foreign rule".

The Swiss, famously independent, have one of the worst surveillance laws.

Doesn't chat control require unanimity in the EU council? If yes, if it happens, it will be because of 'your own' politicians.

Also, the EU parliament votes on this, and small countries have more power than large ones there, more votes per citizen

Lots of these laws are being independently adopted all around the world.

I will believe this is a foreign rule issue once you can show me one democratic country that consistently opposes internet surveillance and defends privacy and rejects 4-horseman based bogeyman politics. And where big countries pressure it to change that.

All countries are susceptible to this brand of demagoguery.

I will grant that the size of the EU enables it to pass surveillance laws that would otherwise not happen - any single EU member state would not be able to suggest change to global law the way the EU can. But then theres China, the US.

Education

Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)

I guess OP is looking for real life stories, of 'nightmares', caused by excessively complex or opaque kubernetes configurations.

AKA "Tell us about how your boss/team has shot themselves in the foot by using kubernetes [needlessly or wrong]".

It's astrology.

Your argument kind of falls on itself there --> We can surveil them in person, but not digitally? Why?

Because, before the internet, when surveillance was a lot of work, this prevented the abuse that is mass surveillance.

Only now do we see how much democracy relied on this natural limitation of state power for civil rights. It was never just the need for warrants that maintained civil rights. Remember the Verizon FISA court order authorized surveillance of millions, and that was just one order of hundreds.

Power corrupts. State power should be sufficient, but minimal. Being allowed to do physical surveillance only is sufficient to reduce crime rates to the point where most people can safely neglect that crime exists at all, and it is less power because it does not scale.

You mention proportionality yourself. Proportionality means that something is not done if the same objective (finding a given murderer) can be achieved in a less rights-infringing way. Proportionality at the policy level, means that a surveillance power may not exist, if its objective (such as safety from murder, i.e. low rates of murder, high chance of finding murderers etc.) can be achieved without the power or with a power that is less likely to be abused or that infringes rights of suspects less. (I admit this is somewhat of an editorialization; the technical meaning of proportionality is in [1]. To be clear the existing legal proportionality principle does not try to directly minimize power; but it does usually present an obstacle whenever new powers are created by law)

Limiting power is simpler and less error-prone than allowing power and adding control structures like warrant requirements for the power. It is thus better, if the outcome is the same.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...

Selective prosecution

The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient.

I tried to take extra credit from Udacity / MIT OCW once as a brick-and-mortar student.

The main problem with MIT OCW is that it is incomplete. What you really need as a student is for all courses in a degree program to be available, and for every course to be complete. Scientific knowledge has a dependency tree, and every degree program tacitly relies on its students to have certain knowledge at certain times.

Individual OCW Courses themselves are often incomplete. For example, in the problem set discussion sessions there is often a second lecture, which is critical to understand the main lecture, but this sort of thing is often missing from the OCW. In brick and mortar, students with partial attendance often fail, so it's unsuprising that OCW takers fail.

Students actually going through a degree program is a form of testing.

Asynchronous online courses generated during Coronavirus are probably more reliable than OCW/Udacity because these were actually used by degree seekers.

A law should mandate perpetual open access to the complete content of all asynchronous online courses that were held during the pandemic.

It's important that outsiders can access content, not only registered students. The main users would be students registered elsewhere, who want to compensate for their university having a bad course in some subject, or who want to take extra courses from a different department (often these can't be taken locally due to timing collision / travel distance).

Switching everything to online while maintaining gatekeeping would be the worst-case scenario.

Every node operator can log their node's mempool, but the protocol does not ensure that mempools are consistent across nodes.

That said, logging this might violate GDPR :)

If our mindset had been "zero covid", we'd not have gotten the mutants and the v1 vaccine would have driven it extinct.

Please dont abuse the name of a strategy that was never implemented.

What governments did was 'keep incidence below X by means of lockdowns', and 'relax restrictions if incidence is below X'.

This is a simple control system that keeps the incidence at X. Not below X.

Unfortunately X was chosen via hospital bed capacity, so it was quite high, about 500 cases / 100k per week. High enough to generate mutants. With X=5, the same lockdown measures would have been in effect for much the same time (they'd have been started a few weeks earlier). Also, for very low values of X, you might have been able to get away with just contact tracing or travel controls instead of lockdowns, so the average lockdown intensity over time, under zero covid, could have been lower than what we had. The point of zero covid is to have less lockdown!

Anyway, the idea was to buy time until you get the vaccine. Zero covid was never intended to be an indefinite duration program.

This is what zero covid really means (low X). I agree with everything else you said.

CCC has a longstanding policy demand called the "Datenbrief" ('data letter'). Under this proposal, every corporation that keeps personal information about a natural person would be obligated to, once a year, mail the subject a letter containing their information, with instructions how to exercise their existing statutory deletion/correction rights.

If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply an obligation to inform the subject about it.

I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure.

[1] https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief

Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it.

One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding).

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)