someguy7250's comments

Plot twist: The replies were written by an AI

(Edit: Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and is based on information before 2015)

China is good at controlling public opinions like this. I grew up in a "third line" city and we were always told if we don't have good grades, we end up having to clean the streets. But we were also told there is "social safety" for medicine.

In reality, you need a job and need to pay a monthly fee for "social safety". And in reality, people with low grades can end up in gangs or prison. Only the obedient type can get a hard labor job.

Many of these lucky ones would sleep where they work or stay with families or sleep at "migrant worker hotel/camps". It's not a life anyone would want to live.

In terms of quality of health care, even though all workers pay into "social safety", most cannot be seen by good doctors. For surgeries, they often had to travel to bigger cities and pay out of pocket. And " social safety" mostly covers visits to clinics (baiscally a consultation at a third world version of your Walgreen pharmacy counter).

I know people tend to hate the USA but it's not worse than China.

And then there are people like me, I only have hard skills and not enough soft skills. People end up not trusting me because they find out I'm hiding skills. And I end up not using them, and not even trying to convince people what's the right thing to do

IMO, the meat of this paper is in section 4.3 and 4.4.

And I cannot say for sure, but the formal proof of 4.4 basically summarizes the same points pointed out in 4.3.

Most of these are not inherently mathematical problems but a social one.

> Verifying sentience is a fuzzy concept. While they can be bound together momentarily as we see in [66 ], the binding is very easily decoupled.The verified user might choose to sell off their uniqueness identifier at time period 𝑡 + 1 if the verification which binds sentience with uniqueness ends at 𝑡.

Basically, people can sell identities

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What really concerns me though, is how much and how often this paper discusses DRM, or in their own words, a "trust anchor"

> With the assumed threat model in our case, the lack of inherent trust in the user only compounds the unreliability of the model without any trust anchor.

> Assuming a proof of location is for a mobile device, rather than a particular human being, then associating the proof of uniqueness obtained under such a condition, i.e., without the involvement of a trust anchor, is unreliable.

I know that the authors aren't directly calling for more centralized trust. But given recent development at Google, we all know how the readers would think

> "consent extraction"... can only be used when the device passcode is known or not set.

I doubt it'll be used like that.

Does a legitimate user really need this? Apple already backs most local data (basically photos) to cloud anyways.

Frankly I was wishing for a jailbreak. Haven't used iPhones in years because rooting is hard, and no custom ROMs to provide future updates. (Btw custom Read Only Memory is such a weird oxymoron lol)

I know. But I don't know where to start reading if I want to learn more about what's really going on

> Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper unofficial ink. Etc.

Exactly! I believe this issue is becoming a very political one because some companies even lock people out of developer tools with a paywall. And when we are forbidding people from learning that they are being suppressed, very bad things happen.

I learnt programming by rooting my phone and then installing a compiler. Android 12 almost killed it alongwith Termux. Are you telling me that if I was born today, I'll simply give up? (Edit: To answer this quesiton myself, No. Today's kids are probably installing customized apk/ipa instead of rooting. Frida is also interesting. But if history repeats itself, even these tools will be banned (self signing dev packages, and using ptrace as a modding tool). And that affects more than just kids..)

Honestly companies have too much control through DRM and copyright. The public needs a way to fight back. If the laws were to be changed, I hope that companies are not immune from lawsuits through TOS, and I hope to see a few class-action lawsuits causing a company to lose some of its copyrights to the public domain.

I don't really know where it went wrong with the real theories. But, when I imagine quantized gravity in my head, I don't imagine having a carrier particle (graviton).

Rather, it feels like gravity is special and the chunks of spacetime themselves are carrying information about the gravitational field.

My imagination is odd because it's based on how I would write a distributed game server. (It doesn't make sense to simulate gravity pairs between every single pair of particles. This isn't just slow, it doesn't scale if the universe expands. But it makes sense to precalculate gravity field as a chunked map and then update one chunk at a time.) (You can ask the same about light/EM but light hits only some of the things and can cause complex local interactions at the scale of electron orbits. When gravity changes, it's very macroscopic instead. So I wanted to treat them differently)

When I learnt programming as a hobby, before I went to college, before my jobs,

I was hoping the future is that we build highly specialized, and customizable tools through open source code, not too small that they are just another programming language, and not too large that they cannot be connected to each other to create more values.

And I was hoping we'd stop joining big companies, and instead open up local consulting firms to help people configure existing open source components for their specific needs. And the work (the configurations) should be done once per project and never reused.

Yeah. This is all just basically me talking nonsense. I'm not educated enough and further discussions would only yield nonsense.

(But if you are curious, the idea is that space is divided into chunks. Crossing chunks or propogating EM/gravitational fields through a chunk causes a delay, which means the particle's inertial frame loses time. And even if particles are traveling at infinite speed inside a chunk, that delay causes an effective speed limit. That's the speed of light. Similarly, there could be other ideas that also "backport" the entire spacetime theory onto quantum.)

> Theories of Quantum Gravity are way more unintuitive

Hence my desire for an intuitive one.

> Isn't this already the case in America with Section 230?

IMO, Section 230 is too relaxed for large scale social media, but not relaxed enough for some other applications. It basically allowed big tech to mod the public square like modding a game, for it to be much larger, to move people around into biased groups, and to keep a record of all conversations, and train autocomplete bots on them..

I do not want more restrictions on existing apps. My point was that I wanted every local community to have their own online forum that's only accessible locally (through a RSA cert that rotates monthly, perhaps). They can even build minigames and cute events for themselves, and that would boost local morals and economy.

I think your thoughts on real online identities are interesting but I do not believe in either Censorship or total free speech. It's like the halting problem: I don't think there is a fixed list of rules that can always tell you the correct answer (To censor or not).

That's also why it's important for local communities to make their own decisions.

Quantum is not the most intuitive thing to discuss. And frankly a quantum theory without complex, solid maths behind it might as well be a fairy tale.

In the context of how atoms work without having electrons that lose charge and fall into nuclei, how different atoms absorb / emit different colors/wavelengths of light:

The simplest theory is that they just are this way. Just fix up the existing "codebase" to accommodate for this observed fact. So they just said electrons has discrete energy states and orbits to choose from.

It's literally the simplest way to accommodate the observed fact that electrons do not fall into nuclei.

It led to super complex Maths and predictions about black holes, and seemingly conflicts with general relativity. But, Can you think of anything more intuitive?

I recently found my old HTC phone and it had a "fastboot" feature. The boot time is just 4 seconds.

I hope old tech gets a comeback. I hope it creates more local jobs for phone repairs and software customizations. But it's probably just me being stupid.

I feel there is a lack of "local" apps to emulate the old town sqaure, exactly because nobody wants to moderate and track users when a legal issue happens.

If we could make an exception in the law, then it might help create more small tech companies in small towns.

I could be daydreaming here, but: What if we make it legal to run unmoderated social media apps as long as (1) they are operated by a local company with their own software (instead of saas) (2) they function with the same kinds of limitations as a physical town notice board?

I'm still hoping for a quantum gravity theory that can basically explain Einstein's spacetime using intuitive languages. (I'm probably stupid, but I'm hoping it's all just chunks like a game server, with delays between chunks)

I've been using third party ROMs on Pixel 3. They receive monthly security updates to some extent, but obviously the hardware specific "vendor binaries" are still outdated. Frankly, I cared more about the open nature of the ROM than about security/privacy. These days, I assume all my data is available for sale everywhere anyways.