HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Xen9

195 karma · joined May 31, 2023

submissionscomments
Xen9··on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
It's also useful for making ads more effective & manipulation overall. As long as you can connect the data you track & buy, you can use Thompson sampling. In fact, why would we think knowing the name of a person is anything but bad business?
Xen9··on Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
I believe weed should be subsidized and sold so that you really must not be tricked onto buying it & cannot buy it when addicted solely for reason of getting more addicted without any other reason. Otherwise though, why restrict people from being dumb?

What's the opposite drug in the "South Park," senae? I would say methylphenidate+LSD makes one, not in simultaneous use, more acutely aware of need to do things.

LSD probably improves intelligence by increasing the fidelity of one's experience, which makes your subconscious dreams more capable of tying many dreams to a single place you have experienced, though childhood home is hard to beat. Made-up places and places one passed by but didn't feel with senses & are generic too much, DO NOT have as many edges in the directed causal graphs that are the associations through which our subconscious dreams switch from one to another, travelling on granular level one time every edge as we dream single time, "repetitive" dreams's loops actually also having subtle differences in betweenxt.

Re your correlation, if poor areas may have more accessible weed & lower education & more crime, and the exact causal mechanisms indeed require care.

Xen9··on Majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech
You can't trust anyone. No even yourself, since whether you are insane or not may not be solvable, though you can aim to remember that you couldn't know & stress less.

It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!

Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.

Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.

Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.

On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.

Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.

Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?

Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.

The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.

To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.

Xen9··on The protester's guide to smartphone security
Most antennas require desoldering to disable, but mmWave & possibly NFC can be removed without it. Lining the case thoroughly with EMI tape edge-to-edge and adding another layer over any gaps blocks RF signal emission & reception. The screen side doesn't need shielding since antennas aren't directed through it. If you set & use USB-C for charging only and your installation passed PGP & attestation, then the OS disabling wireless components will also eliminate active remote attack surface & reduce passive remote attack surface at least remarkably.
Xen9··on The protester's guide to smartphone security
Absolutely best idea is to make an encrypted PDA & play forensic scientist by recording everything.

1. Get a Google Pixel 9, 9 Pro, or 9 Pro XL smartphone (Cellebrite-proofn at time of writing). 2. Verify images & GOS. 3. Disable biometrics & wireless connections. 4. Memorize with Anki or your own head a new, NIST-compliant passphrase with ≥ 8+ words. 3. Get a cover for the smartphone. 4. Buy EMI tape and electrically insulating waterproof tape. 5. Tape the insides of the cover with EMI, layering it & govering the inner walls as well, no gaps (overlay two adjacent layer always, say ≥ 1 cm, if possible) 6. Add one layer of the other tape to insides of the cover 7. Story inside your underpants 24/7 powered off when you don't use it.

My setup is more secure than not having phone, a Qubes laptop, a 2G burner, or not having phone.

Xen9··on Agentarium: Creating social simulations with AI Agents
What I mean is that we want something like set theory merged with weak computability theory (e.g. Kolmogorov complexity) but set means environment, embdded agent means element inside set, and then everything else gets built on top of that theory. This may be a an infinitely large -feeling work because there are many rules & interactions & games, but you are essentially answer what does it mean to be a rational embdded agent that's part of an environment, that probably doesn't have the exact same wants, in the abstract & formal sense of the inquiry.

Once you start examining scenarios where there are multiple clones of you that you perhaps cannot tell apart, your memory has been limited, you are facing larger amounts of pain & pleasure that you can handle without going insane, everyone wants the same thing but you also want something different, or someone gets mind-reading powers that might be partial and only work when they reveal their thoughts... then you are analytically working towards the end goal of building a larger catalogue of "everything" & making a theory & terminology out of that.

I would dedicate 2-20 years on the formal work but there's no funding I could get I know of & besides couldn't promise to yield results since foundations yields no results until it does if it ever does.

---

A related note: Kolmogorov complexity & finitism go along beautifully but the bit-lifting to calculate memory computational process takes insofar is out of my capacity. Nevertheless you can define a maximum number to ever allowed to exist in a system as Church number & have then perhaps the minimum amount of logical operations required to get there to be the maximum amount of memory your operations can take, closing the system since you lose memory in say substraction to a, b, the process initial size (hello, Kolmogorov) & process memory consumed at most (in any procedure, the smallest procedure being the number itself).

Xen9··on Agentarium: Creating social simulations with AI Agents
A. Demski's illustrated, more blog-style (rather than papers) works online.
Xen9··on ShredOS – Secure disk erasure/wipe
Startup idea: Industrial portable just drill-holes-to-you-device-if-needed & then just-add-water data-erasure bags (single-use, safe to throw away). Would save lots of equipment weight.
Xen9··on Apple Vision Pro May Now Be Out of Production
If Cook was Jobs, and 2025 was 2035, it would have jacked into the nervous system. Why release semi-lame product when you can do the ultimate experience?
Xen9··on Agentarium: Creating social simulations with AI Agents
Ypu would need mathematical theory of embedded agency to dig yourself up from the terminological hellhole.
Xen9··on 38C3: Illegal Instructions
Seems crazy. I identify with my agency, id est, self = agency + few memories.

This is saying the opposite?

I would guess it comes from not knowing what you want. If you don't go through the Uberman process, then you end up saying things like that.

Xen9··on America in Two Headlines
Historically the people have usually sooner or later stabbed the king or kings, or at least the kings stabbed each other. In five years, I predict, either US goes through something like that or robotics cause this option no longer being possible, since no one wants the risk their own life versus superhuman drone & killerbot militia (probably going to be called something to direction: "safe automated guards") even when fighting against a CEO. The actual cruelty will be visible only once there's nothing you can do.

Aren't the government cuts sort of consistent with this? I would also be cutting, since in theory public servants or military who aren't bribed could step in, so you want as few of those who could still do something once they see the "bad" things done to the public. I'm uncertain about this and don't vother digging up though, could be that they are not cutting from everything.

Xen9··on PixLens: A lens that turns the scenery you see into pixel art
How do the results of such lenses compare to various compression algorhitms?
Xen9··on Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes
The non-optimistic reality seems to be that AI will be the next step in evolution, but not in human one. It's far more complex to create smart AI from human than to create smart AI.
Xen9··on The paper passport's days are numbered
In case I did, I would make sure I don't get pinpointed to, but in the US perhaps look at CFR / state department veterans & advertising corporations' stockholders & Google.

In Europe traditional news sources there got economically slaughtered & replaced by few big online 1995-2005. This qas a consequence 1970s & 1980s academic networks working closely with US on web, and US then doing what it did with Google.

If you can influence what ends up in the social media feed of those deciding about university curriculums and/or most politicians, that's quite powerful also.

In Russia & China, there seems to be less hidden, less culture of valuing "free media."

---

That public opinion "matters" but gets shaped is very plausible if you consider that most of history it didn't matter unless the public got very angry.

Century of Self describes the process before Zuboff.

One might argue that control of public opinion was originally more psychoanalytic idea, and then became more Skinnerian with computers.

Xen9··on The paper passport's days are numbered
Most comment here are not related to the problem, which is your interest & my interest & interest of 98% of HN others at least conflicting with the interest of those who control how humans vote. We know how things ought to be if everyone wanted them to be good for most humans. None of this discussion will however convince anyone to work more altruistically in reality.

Those who control the public opinion know that there's some opposition who confuses the problems with the conflict. They laugh since no one who thinks legislation like in the link would be generally bad can do anything. The ignorant will vote what the Orwellianishly-named "smartphone" will command them.

In the next five years, it's likely the option to stab the kings will be for the first time removed, since robotic militias will mean no insurance CEO can simply be shot. This means there will be zero limits to what cruelty they'll do you, since no matter how torturous it gets you'll be unable to even violently resist this. You'll have no democratic mouth, but you must scream. Completes cyberpunkization well.

---

Aside: US drones + US satellites that enable global connectivity of drones was a rather obvious consequence of Starlink ~4 years ago. If they really want some person, they now can search most of Earth in few hours with the drones + computer vision, and soon with land robots, all connected through Starlink (starshield to use the euphemism). The irony is how this at the same time solves the connectivity problem.

Xen9··on Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law
There's no difference between the two.
Xen9··on Boids, an artificial life program, which simulates flocking behavior of birds
The impressive recent ALSA either used graphically or actually Boids. I don't know which because there's too much information to go beyond surface even in impressive things.
Xen9··on Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?
The world is cyberpunk. Has been since 1990s.
Xen9··on RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]
Within 30 years the game development & gaming will have been integrated as an experience for the average game.
Xen9··on Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)
re: riccar e

https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricercare

Xen9··on Gboard double-sided version
Notice the donuts & the coffee mug.
Xen9··on Internet Archive data is safe, still bringing services back up
Recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41792500

I was bit late to comment on it so here's that also, in case someone wants to continue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41813750

Xen9··on Internet Archive: Security breach alert
I believe that it would be possible to cost effectively build and implement an architecture for a distributed IA backup—this comment entails some notes.

The system that asks volunteers about their age, sex, location, and storage format details (the model, past use etc. can be used to predict the durability of a single storage) without sharing most of this data anywhere.

The downloaders are then algorithmically allocated pieces of the archive. Exampli gratia such that there is at least limited amount of overlap between the pieces, and two people same country won't provide redunancy for each other.

When a downloader verifies that they have completed the download by giving (unique, to prevent fake-download sabotage) SHA hashes of the data, the information that these pieces have been downloaded in this or that country, plus an estimate of the reliability of the storage, is added to a public database, for the algorithm to use in the future.

Every downloader is then generated a public and private key so that they can give the hash of their download again once in a while or just verify that the piece is still there. The reliability estimates (based on storage / hardware details) would be empirically calibrated based on the data about the actual storage failures.

A public counter, estimating how well the archive is currently backed up via this scheme, could be displayed.

For copyright issues, it would be possible to encrypt some of the data, e.g. such that normally borrowable items become readable files only when X% of downloads are pieced together.

The scheme would be primarily based on existing designs and algorithms but work roughly as depicted above. I am not an expert of what compression, hashing and other algorithms should be used, and it needs lots of good work, to determine how to avoid errors in the scientific part of estimating the reliability of the downloads—and generally a situation where it would turn out that lots of data was lost when attempting to put the pieces back together again.

Remark (engineering): To empirically validate the correctness of the software of the backup architecure by testing it on grids of real hard drives in single places will probably give safety against catastrophic failure. Even better would be to obtain large amount of old hard drives and SSDs kept in a single place for a long time, to validate that the software works over time.

Remark (integrity): That a downloader actually has the downloads can be verified efficiently by IA server adding small part to the piece the downloader has, hashing it again, and requesting the new hash.

Remark (redunancy): It may be possible to develop a social program that analyzes whether a volunteer in certain place can provide more redunancy by buying themselves a hard drive or by supporting the acquisition of hard drives for volunteers who have proved themselves realiable elsewhere. This is speculative and the benefit may be lower than the risks.

Finally, instead of "public database" it may be much more optimal to decide to use a blockchain of some sort. Not a cryptocurrency, but a blockchain. This is because if the idea is to distribute copies over the world to ensure continguency in case of IA main architecture collapse, then the more parts of the distributed backup architecture (which must actually not be "the backup architecture" but "a scheme", that no everyday IA decisions rely upon, and that just exists out there) are on a blockchain network run by a "decentralized" system, the more reliable it will be.

My heuristic plausibility analysis: 0. IA backup would not need to be constantly accessed or changed (this makes storage easier, cheaper and prolongs the maximun age of the storage) 1. Not all IA has to be backed up: a distrobuted backup that successfully recovers 10% of IA in a catastrophe is by all means a great success (consequently priorization of what might / should be stored should probably be part of the algorithm that decides what volunteers download; and what existing "big" archives already store that overlaps with IA should be taken into account in this analysis) 2. I recall you estimated 30-40 M USD ballparks for a single copy: a properly led open source project may be able to develop this for free, and fairly compensated one could be ~ 0.1% to 1% of the cost. 3. The Sia network https://siascan.com/ has space for 7PB; and it's for storage where one can download their own files at any time; and they have had very little publicity. 4. 2TB hard drive costs 50-100 USD and 20PB would be 10 000 humans buying one 2TB hard drive which by itself is possible. Hobbyists and organizations may be able to provide even larger capacities. 5. Most IT projects fail, but since lots of technology already exists and in this we know what we are doing and IA might be able to recruit above talent we can conservatively, give conservatively 50% chance the groundwork development to succeed, or 45% without funding. 6. If the develoment succeeds, then there may already be around ~ 100 potential volunteers. I estimated that 0.1% IA visitors may volunteer, plus 1% from Hacker News traffick were to project to be mentioned there, plus growth over first few years and traffick from elsewhere. Perhaps 75% chance to get 10% of IA backed up by volunteers, given development succeeds. 7. If that much is backed up, there is perhaps 5% of attaining 200 TB in next few decades.

Conservatively, given that open-source development starts, one gets apprx. 33% - 38% chance that 10% backup is achieved & apprx. 1-2% that 100% of what is now in the IA, could be backed up. These are of course rather meaningless numbers, but the fact seems that in the lack of funding to build a complete backup IA can best guarantee continguency by starting to build a distributed one. Perhaps this was needlessly lots of words for a simple proposal.

- X

---

Note: It's probable that at least the NSA has a private full IA backup.

Xen9··on How Discord stores trillions of messages (2023)
Reasons as to why I should believe that the comment or parts of it were "incoherant babbling"?

I did express a low condifence.

My information is limited. You ought to expect to feel my points being "incohetent babbling"

Xen9··on How Discord stores trillions of messages (2023)
In Discord culture, indeed, users usually share a shit-ton of PII in "introduction" messages from images to specific hobbies to medical information (EG "support" communities).

The problem from GDPR perspective is that Discoed makes it impossible to delete those, since once thet detect your interest in trying to delete any of your accounts' data, they will try to get to "anonymisize" it. Then at least publicly your username isdisconnected from thos messages, but they can still be traced back to specific persons. Now if this also is done server side, then they would be in a situation where you'd either have to go through ton of messages or to bulk delete past messages of all to enforce the GDPR demands of an user wanting their PII deleted.

EU Parliament is not a real Parliament in the sense that ONLY the Comission can propose new laws, and the elected parliament basically just votes on those. Who controls the Comission if not the people? The US State Department. Newsguard and non-Musk US bigtechs including Discord are in the same poli-financial bed of the establishment here. And they are full of previous state department workers.*

Unless there is public outrage, the EU-level bodies at least will probably be owned. But Public opinion is controlled by the cyberpunk establishment that trains their LLMs & targets their campaign ads using that illegal Discord data to get political advantage.

You in my view ought to "worry" about the fact that it's possible there will sooner or later no longer be escape from a permanent establishment, Orwell-style. Goes along with the theme that "cybersecurity" is the United States government level has been "war against hate speech" for years, and of course "hate speech" meaning "censorship of internal and external enemy speech."

Budd Dwyers if I recall correctly shot himself in TV after writing to Biden (???) that under some conditions (that became true), the Department of Justice should have "Justice" removed from its name.

---

Most of this I hold only at 50+% confidence of being broadly correct. Take with lots of salt.

Xen9··on The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out
In realistic replication your body probably would not be continued, at least for a while. You'd have a digital clone that shares some memories, most values and is cognitively at your level or above. If the preservation part is well-enough and you continue to hold it important to actualize your past wish of getting a realistic clone, one day they may be able to use the cryonically frozen body & the scans of you that were taken when it was alive to re-anime it or to create a digital clone that would be much closer to you.

A commenter above pointed above that the body changes all the time. Getting replicated and having the old body die is almost the same what you had already gone through your whole, first biological life, but only at a larger scale. It does entirely replace the "hardware" (body) but most humans would agree that "they" are made of "personality, dreams, ideas, algorithms, memories, knowledge, logic, thinking, emotions, feeling, values" more than what computational medium these exhibit as long as it emulates what they have had in the past to some degree.

Xen9··on The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out
You cannot make such AGI if the information is gone. Imaging & cryopreservation sort of insure against early death.

I agree that at point behavioural replication is possible, AI probably also will be. Harsh.

Now the point you ended your reply in is a very common response. Many follow the same direction of thought. I think that to think one should not get a behavioural replica because you don't think it would be you is a non-sequitur however; if the behavioural replica continues to advance your interests, is it not the rational thing to do?

Moreover, if you said "no, it doesnt matter, I'll be dead" you would be following a strategy that'd lead to huge loss if it turned out you actually never died.

Xen9··on The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out
The most realistic and rational path to life extension is creation of behavioural replicants with purpose of only extending the lifespan of one's agency.

To reach next 1000 years, you need to do:

(1) Information theoretic presevation, IE body imaging, cryo, and proper archival / storage.

(2) Behavioural emulation, IE a virtual replicant that roughly makes same decisions far enough for you to identify with it and trust it will carry on your pursuits, even though it will be at least for the beginning slower than the meat was. Behavioural emulation is much less difficult and much more computationally efficient than whole brain emulation.

Many humans would say they want someone to be there taking care of their kids, if nothing else. But there is nothing really pioneering this. I hope the separate developments in neuroimaging, qualia research will eventually converge.

Xen9··on Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers
I see, it's then from the same document as blinkenlights.

https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.6.dos.txt

← PreviousPage 2 of 9Next →