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National security can mean protecting a society founded on the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It can also mean facilitating a militaristic surveillance state.

Not necessarily the same things, and at some point we might have to choose who's side we're on


The point is to convince people who are undecided. Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported is then short-sighted and counterproductive, because enough false predictions will turn up that those undecided will tune out entirely

>Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported

But where does such information originate from? Is laypeople just making it up?


It applies to anyone knowingly using false information to try to influence people

Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups?

I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups of young males will get excited and loudly vocalise as they gather together and head towards a neighboring territory, but when they get close they all go very silent, and will attack individuals from a neighboring troop if they sufficiently outnumber them. They tend to target the face and genitals when attacking other chimps, a different behaviour to when they're hunting monkeys, for example. I think Wrangham mentions that some chimps will hold the targeted individuals' limbs while others attack.

Aside from the brutality, these behaviours seem too cogently goal-directed and sophisticated to just be responses to environmental pressures. There's some deeper reasons involved, imo, even if the severity of the violence is exacerbated by resource and territorial pressures.


How are resource and territorial pressures not environmental pressures?


They are. I just used different words to refer to the same idea


noob question: can't we just use longer classical keys, at least as a stop gap?


They're a pretty bad stopgap: https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html. Going to RSA-32000 only buys you ~a year once QCs can factor RSA-2048. In order to get a standard that would resist quantum attacks for realistic time, we would need MB to GB keys at least (see https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/351.pdf for a hilarious post-quantum RSA attempt that used terabyte size keys)


No, and even if we could, it would require a migration of approaching the same difficulty of a migration to PQ, at which point why not just migrate to PQ


In the UK the main deception was the farcical Iraq Dossier, aka "the dodgy dossier", put together by Blair's propaganda chief Alaister Campbell. Colin Powell had seen it before release but not sure what role it played in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier


Looks like not much. The book is about using Python to implement numerical methods, mainly about teaching the Python part, and that's all explained. You might be missing motivation if you don't know any physics, but even so, basic mechanics using differential equations seems to be enough to give context, at least for the earlier parts


Dogs are allowed though, and used to herd sheep and cattle, so ground-nesting birds don't seem to be a big concern


> People who really grasp a subject can usually explain it well in plain language.

That's very much a matter of style. An equation is often the plainest way of expressing something


The problem is that equations give the illusion of conciseness and brevity but in reality always heavily depend on context.

You give a physicist an equation of a completely unrelated field in mathematics and it will make zero sense to them because they lack the context. And vice versa. The only people who can readily read and understand your equations are those that already understand the subject and have learned all the context around the math.

Therefore it's pointless to try to start with the math when you're foreign to a field. It simply won't make any sense without the context.


Of course, but everything depends on context. Stating a mathematical theorem in English will also make no sense to someone who's not acquainted with the field


You can start with plain language and work your way up towards the math. But it doesn't work the other way round.


> The platform doesn’t need to bother with individual prompts - it just needs to see where the questions cluster. A map of where the world is moving.

This was insightful, but is it much different to the kind of data google and other search engines have had access to for a long time?

And while LLMs might have sped up the rate of code generation, the tech giants have always been able to set a team on reverse engineering whatever they feel like, though they also often just bought up the startup that was producing what they wanted. I guess I'm not seeing exactly where LLMs specifically are creating the dark forest, rather than the consolidated, centralized tech landscape itself


Nice post. Just this bit:

> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.

I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.

I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained


The blind spot still isn't noticeable if you close one eye, though. You have to look for it carefully with a specific setup that allows you to detect the discrepancy between what you see and what's actually there.


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