robryk

If I start the primary coolant pumps and "increase steam output", I get nontrivial output power for a while until a scram happens. This indicates to me that something is very off with the underlying model: there should be no power generated in the reactor in that situation.

I'm surprised that making sure the service does not trust the ambassador is not listed in the list of issues to consider.

> Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?

I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?

> I suppose I got a bit carried away originally, but the point is just that - can one truly be well-meaning if he works in such a feature as that of the first example?

One way of reading the original statements is that there are many people who are not doing that and would not do that.

> But we do not have a choice (...) or in paying taxes to our governments

This obviously reminds me of Thoreau, but more practically many people can move. Unless you are from the US (or a handful of other weird countries) that stops you from paying taxes to your origin's government.

E: Upheaval caused by moving is often actually not higher than one caused by quitting: consider (a) people on employer-tied visas and/or who don't speak the local language well enough to use it professionally (b) people who don't have families of their own yet.

> First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Do you mean that new areas appeared that require specialization that didn't exist previously, or that areas that require some sort of specialization have comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)

How do all the combustion-powered engines prevent their shutdown? Well, they were useful, so we adapted our society to rely on them -- anyone who didn't was outcompeted. Now we can't stop using them or the society falls apart.

This is not necessarily the mechanism most people consider, but it's a simple counterexample to "anything with an off switch can't be a threat to humanity".

Consider that your argument could also be used to advocate for safety of starting to use coal-fired steam engines (in 19th century UK): there's no immediate direct problem, but competitive pressures force everyone to use them and any externalities stemming from that are basically unavoidable.

Having the initial pass specify the public key that it accepts for updates would be sufficient. Having an association with an Apple developer account doesn't help for the updates problem at all AFAICT.

The only reason I came up with for the blessed-by-Apple requirement I came up with is selling fake tickets. There is no way to tell (with or without that requirement) whether a pkpass file with a "ticket to concert X" is actually legit. So, one can try to combat the (potential?) problem by responding to complaints of fraud by revoking the corresponding developer's account. However, that doesn't seem like a solution either: developer account are probably way cheaper than how much you can gain on fraud before you get caught in that way.

That seems to have energy density lower than even batteries though.

When you vaporize LN2, you apparently need 0.2MJ/kg of heat. The amount of mechanical energy you extract out of vaporizing that (when heat is provided by the environment) can't exceed the heat required to do so (because condensing the nitrogen back into LN2 is exothermic). Apparently current Li-ion batteries have ~250 Wh/kg = ~0.9MJ/kg energy density, which is significantly higher than the upper bound above.

Am I mistaken somewhere?

I don't know what the law in California is, but such provisions are not very rare. The reason for them is to deal with e.g. landlords that rent without a written contact, or various complicated fraudulent situations (subletting when that's not allowed, pretending to be a landlord, etc.). The premise behind them is that (a) depriving someone of a place to live should require a very high bar (b) property owners are expected to keep track of what's going on with their property.

There's obviously abuse enabled by this, but the correct amount of renter-initiated abuse is not zero.

What's the difference that you see between people that had a gap and ones that didn't? I would expect an analogous grouping (struggling to continue working without a break, being in the "groove", just being interested in the paycheck) among people without a gap.

I think that the reason is that waves only move water close to the surface, and FLIP's drag is centered way below it. It's clear to me how this should reduce rolling and lolling, but am less certain how it should affect bobbing.

You'd want the delay between first publication of X and the microcode update making its way into releases of OSes to be smallest, for various values of X (mention of a vulnerability, microcode patch, description of vulnerability, PoC). Making various OS releasers aware that a microcode patch that fixes a vulnerability will be published on a given date before that date decreases that for most values of X.

I think you're missing his point. He does acknowledge that statements of facts and their proofs can be easily communicated, but claims that the understanding their discovery was a side effect of cannot be communicated easily. This is not affected by having a better way to express facts and their proofs.

In the late 80s many people were of a similar opinion about attempts to find extrasolar planets.

Note that GP complains not about the request for IP addresses of user X, but the request for IP addresses of anyone who downloaded content uploaded by user X.

One can also use ostracism to enforce a rule. I wouldn't classify that as violence.

A natural way to cause positive reviews to appear is for landlords to point out the site to tenants. Sadly, this can very easily morph into basically requiring tenants to leave positive reviews (i.e. disadvantaging them until a positive review appears).

It seems to me that the semantics are different: you return the security deposit ~at handover time, while last month's rent is counted as rent for the last month of the stay, so the tenant "gets it back" (in the form of not having to pay rent they'd otherwise have to pay) a month before they move out. Do I misunderstand something?

But that doesn't limit the rocket size in any way, only the fraction of its mass that can be used for payload. That limit does not depend on total mass of the rocket. Is there something that makes larger rockets less feasible than smaller rockets with the same payload mass fraction?

What's the source of the constraint on rocket size that you refer to?

If I understand your proposed world correctly (I understand it as morally equivalent to the escrow of ~all keys with k-of-n split across some well-chosen entities/people), I expect a person holding that view to support encryption-by-default even more strongly, because in a world that looks that way (and that way actually works as described) there is no apparent downside to that. I'm curious whether you disagree with any part of this.

OT: Do you have anything more concrete written on the choice of holders of escrow shares (so that they can be trusted to actually follow the audit rules)?

See also http://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html

> in what way could it meaningfully be described as being private?

You can broadcast encrypted statements: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#private-m...

~Everyone can tell how many of these you sent, when, and how large were they, but not to whom (incl. how many recipients they had unless there were too many and you had to send multiple copies[1]) or what was in them.

[1] The copies will still be unlinkable, but if someone sends 5 messages of ~same size within a second, it's a pretty good guess that they're sending 5 copies of the same message.

But they're not required to obey it, so they ignore it, presumably because they expect that more people will agree if they are annoyed with a dialog by each website they visit.

The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to various information sources" part was an easy extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994: Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994. General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a device, was created in 1990.

I grant you that the existence of such easy to query information sources was probably less predictable.

> Look, if people want to encrypt their chats on Telegram, they start a secret chat. That’s how it should be. Why should it be the default? Because you think people are idiots?

Because everyone is an idiot once in a while (just after waking up, when drunk, when stressed, when sick, ...). Also, because the very presence of a secret chat is something that can be observed and can be enough to raise suspicion.

> The algorithm is public. It is a straightforward application of well known primitives. It is hardly proprietary.

Note that its predecessor, was very much not that (e.g. https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/ was a vulnerability in it, and it stuck to some weird choices of crypto primitives/key sizes for a pretty long time). This colors my expectations about the current version slightly.

I personally know nothing about the current protocol used (mtproto 2.0) and a few minutes of googling surfaced https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/595.pdf, https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/469 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03141, which I'd need to read in reasonable amount of detail to have an opinion on mtproto 2.0.

So "left blinker bulb" and "right blinker bulb" would be different products?

How would the bulb know which one it is?