Weird Tweet by Patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Weird Tweet by Patio11

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39 pointsobiefernandez12 comments

If you're living in another country and you don't want to get deported for embarrassing that government with observations about how they're catastrophically screwing up, but you still want people to know you recognized the catastrophic screw-up as it was happening, then you might publish a cryptographic hash of your observations.

But since many lives are at stake, you'd only do that if you believed the government was so impervious to public exposure of their screw-up that nothing you publish could get them to change course or mitigate the severity of the impending catastrophe.

That's a good guess but why even do it? The idea of pointing out the government faults is to either help them correct their policies or rally up people. If it comes later it kinda defeats the purpose.

eh, he does this once in a while. He did it for his own amusement of predicting things. He did a prediction about a Bitcoin scam or something at the end of last year. He maybe predicting something about COVID. or something else. Socially constrained maybe his way to say "I'm predicting something on my own grounds. If I say it in plain, people will argue and I don't have time for that. I just want to put as proof that I have formulated this prediction by this point in time.".

He's tweeted another clue:

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241553311024603140

The main problem with this "prediction" is that nothing stops him from simply not revealing the file after 1 month.

Perhaps he was shocked in to studying the situation further after being surprised by his credit drying up. Other people saw that coming. https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/124135212329342156...

Well, what are your guesses?

I'm going with :

1) He is materially wrong about the most consequential thing he's "had to" have a view on in 15 years. We should probably degrade our estimate of his ability to think through complex problems.

This is one of the most unnerving things I saw on the internet today.

I don’t get it. He posts some SHA of a file and says to come back in 1 month because he’s “socially constrained” from publishing a file which perhaps proves we saw “something” coming? Such as the covid pandemic?

This guy is some engineer at stripe by the looks of it. Not sure how he’d have access to any interesting files related to covid19.

He’s also considered a heavy-weight commentator in a variety of fields.

The ‘social constraint’ aspect could be inciting panic or some such.

Edit to add: currently third in the top ten here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Classic Clickbait.

Let's all post a 128 hex char string. Somebody out there must know the true meaning of life.

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