manytree's comments

Pethaps a more relevant example is the assertion that it’s absurd to believe non-ionizing radiation at the levels produced by cellphones could be harmful. Dismissed by the same line of reasoning, but now an assertion increasingly being taken as a serious matter worthy of research in Europe.

The issue with this argument is that it’s trying to assert that “science says” something isn’t true (generally one of the most valuable things laypeople derive from science, but not the spirit of reasoning that is responsible for its original determinations) rather than observing the actual phenomena and creating falsifiable hypotheses which may be tested.

As a thought experiment, this line of reasoning appears akin to past epochs of scientific understanding that were not enriched with more nuanced understandings developed by looking carefully into the threshholds of prior understanding. I.e. “it’s absurd to say that a particle can be both a wave and a particle, since science says nothing about this” or for that matter suggestig that light may be be quantized at all.

I actually think the “placebo effect” is actually quite fascinating and worthy of deeper understanding, yet in conversations like this the phrase appears as a dismissal like “just the placebo effect”. Which is rather a lot like saying “just this small corner of our medical understanding which, due to its apparently small scope, can have no significant impact on our broader theory but rather will be reduced to 0 at some point”. Which of course was the same response to black body radiation at the onset of early development in the theory of quantum mechanics.

The placebo effect is of course a grouping of unknown mechanisms of healing, and at the very least is the very standard against which new pharmaceuticals are tested (and which is often only barely exceeded by trials of medecine that go to market).

Second carbon steel. Excellent pans, I don’t worry about seasoning too much - hit with steel wool and hit water when necessary.

Still very little sticks if you use them enough.

I’d say it’s both: GPS are great but you should be well practiced in wayfinding with a compass in case the GPS fails. I’ve never taken a GPS on long hikes anyhow seems overkill as long as you have a good topo.

> At press time, representatives from the world’s leading economies had signaled that they would continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels until they had something more than an overwhelming scientific consensus to go on.

Lol

What a lovely article and piece. Tremendous. I don’t think I will make such a commitment to this film as did the author, but in a way I feel it is perhaps the only way to understand it: at the speed of undilated time.

I can think of 0 reasons why the “police should investigate that”

Why?

I agree. Especially given the recent development of consiousness theory bestowing the likelihood of consiousness upon all animals and even perhaps inanimate objects. I.e., if you can answer the question “what would it be like to exist as...” a tree, a dog, a river, a GAN? Then the case may be made that existence as such a thing must involve consiousness. If consiousness is a product of (or a phenomena within) material reality, why not say computers and computer programs are conscious?

Perhaps the question here is whether it’s conscious in a similar way to the experince of human consciousness, and that would explain why the issue is contentious.

Defendents didn’t pay for the cotton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffles_v_Wichelhaus

Wow yeah I missed this. Read through most if it and was looking to see if anyone else had already commented my thinking:

“And the new design is WAY worse in every way!”

Honestly it’s hard to tell what it even is with the new design: SaaS product? Contract agency? Flight tracker?

I found the first design to be significantly clearer. I wonder how the author distinguished between revenue increase coming from natural growth vs. the redesign.

Thanks for this link. Had me remember that excellent movie.

And an excellent illustration of the perils of “selling out” rights to depict a fictional character.

Yeah it’s a pretty glib answer. Not clear at all how you kick them off the network.

Perhaps he’s conflating some kind of protocol exploit that could be patched against with a 51% attack.

Honestly there’s a lot of valid points to be made here but the actual report reads as if their intention was to prove blockchains are insecure and centralized.

That is true for a lot of them, but true Nakamoto consensus is not quite as fragile as they suggest it is.

They don’t provide an analysis of the true cost of launching a 51% attack.

Their assertions about the security risk of “altering the software that nodes run” fail to mention how this is a voluntary process which all node operators choose to undergo. If a consensus emerges on the network or a subset of the network that the changes are problematic, these dissenting node operators can choose to hard fork. There will be few supporters of an obviously malicious attack in the network, so it would be unable to gain traction.

Their point about the number of entities in control of Bitcoin is technically correct, because of the way that pooling works in Bitcoin: many nodes send any propfs they find to one node, and that one node writes to the blockchain. So, there is a definite concentration of power. There are some in depth game theoretical analyses of why this is unlikely to become a problem but in general it is easy to imagine that, for instance, the US treasury would not want to destroy trust in the USD.

Interestingly, Chia, a new proof of work blockchain which launched a year ago, developed by Bram Cohen, has a unique and innovative solution to pooling which does not result in concentration of power: individual node operators submit proofs to the network, not to the pool, and the pool receives a fraction of the reward for minting a new block. Chia also has more full nodes than any oher blockchain, including Bitcoin. At this point it’s relatively unknown however.

Vitalik says:

> While there are plenty of automated stablecoin designs that are fundamentally flawed and doomed to collapse eventually, and plenty more that can survive theoretically but are highly risky, there are also many stablecoins that are highly robust in theory, and have survived extreme tests of crypto market conditions in practice. Hence, what we need is not stablecoin boosterism or stablecoin doomerism, but rather a return to principles-based thinking.

A lot of finacial theory jargon here but not a very clear explanation.

Definitely not a “proof” in the logical sense.

Likely the Vitalik post linked in this article will have some insight.

Be careful throwing around the word quack.

Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions:

> [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness.

> Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish.

Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.

Yeah, the DID you receive from the attestation service can be used multiple times, and is assumed to be immutable, so you sign messages with your private key to prove ownership of the DID but generally reveal no other information. One concern would be that a backend integration might exist between the Australian government’s attestation service and Google’s system, in which case there might be benefit to the existence of an alternative public institution that is committed to privacy which has the demonstrated authority to verify age.

Sounds like exact quandary that the emerging DID spec (Decentralized Identifiers) [https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/] is hoping to solve. I.e. you can submit your proof of age to an attestation service (in this case, perhaps the australian government itself) and receive an anonymous DID from which you can issue proofs of age without revealing other aspects of your identity.

One of the most successful implementations of VDFs in crypto right now is Chia, which uses proof of storage space interleaved with proofs of time from VDF servers. There is not an incentive created by the consensus algorithm to have many VDF servers, since only the fastest VDF server participates in block creation.

Also, it alters the PoW economics somewhat by utilizing already-existing general purpose hardware (storage) and has an implementation which does not yet seem susceptible to special purpose hardware attacks (i.e., increasing storage density / decreasing TCO already has a huge bounty)