That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
I deplore current Israeli policies, but Ukraine isn't disguising its war fighters as civilians like Hamas is, which is an important qualifier to your numbers.
But Russia is doing exactly that systematically for years now, disguising as civilians. I'm also pretty sure Hamas isn't disguising themselves as children, who make up the largest share of the civilian victims.
They do claim everyone under the age of 18 to be a "child", which I know is the UN definition, but is pretty absurd in this situation with Hamas fighters of 15, 16, and 17 years of age being very common.
Someone said that Russia has conducted its invasion in a way as to keep civilian casualties to only 5% of Ukrainian casualties. In evaluating that number, it is relevant that Russia's task is made easier by Ukraine's adherence to the widely accepted principle that a war fighter should wear the uniform of the side he is fighting for.
In contrast, for the purposes of this thread, it is irrelevant that "Russia is doing exactly that systematically for years now, disguising as civilians" (to quote you).
This isn't a contest to see how many negative things we can say about the Russians or the Israelis. Or at least that is not a coversation I would be interested in.
I think Israel's actions since Oct 2023 have been deplorable and disgusting. But that doesn't mean I am interested in no nuance at all in discussing how deplorable and disgusting.
I don't see how that's relevant, nor why such a distinction matters in such an asymmetric conflict where international law clearly allows for violent resistance to occupation.
I'm talking about no javascript, no additional requests besides the bare document, no sending any information back home. Dynamic behavior only by a simple declarative language.
You are trying to express something that is logically impossible. Not technically difficult or socio-economically difficult to get companies to agree to or get users to care about, simply not a valid string of words.
There is no way not to send information back to the host.
Merely requesting a document is sending information to a host.
I don't mean all the extra metadata in the request header or cookies let alone the all the functionality in javascript or wasm or plugins, I mean nothing more than the name of a document, the bare minimum info required to get something you want it to give you.
If you want me to give you an apple, at the very least you have to tell me to give you an apple.
It all started with nothing more than that bare function, and we don't even want any less than that.
You do need to be able to request a document, and there is no way for a client to prevent a server from replacing a simple static document with a cgi script that performs logic based on the file name. Even without the extra cgi query string, just a document name itself.
But about query strings... there is no way to make a typical query string illegal anyway. It's all just strings of characters. Anything can be encoded within anything else. If you try to make a system that makes say the & and ? characters illegal, that accomplishes exactly nothing.
You just pick any sequence of legal charaters and interpret those in place of the old ? and &, and = and % and anything else you want that doesn't look like part of a legal file or document name.
The special encoded charaters can even be different for each document, even different for each request. It's not possible to make a rule that prevents it.
Let's go totally off the deep end and say that you aren't even allowed to make up your own file names any more. All documents on earth have known names in a whitelist. You can't encode anything because every valid document has a known name and known content. Then you can still encode information in the pattern of access. Requesting file A followed by file F means something extra to you and the server.
But don't take my naysayer defeatist lack of imagination word for it. Go ahead and try to actually explain how the system should work.
Caching, distributed sharing, the lack of a redirect mechanism or cookies all can contribute particularly if the goal is kneecapping surveillance but not the platonic ideal of secrecy.
For example, you can't do very much surveillance with DNS or bittorrent.
It just occurred to me that some of the car-hating comments on HN might be motivated by a yearning for a more communal way of life (the expression of which has been suppressed by the US's ethic of freedom for the individual).
The point is that Japan has a well-established private-equity industry [1] so the fact that PE firms haven't ruined Japanese railways suggests that PE firms aren't universal corrosive solvents like you seem to want us to believe they are.
Or it could be there are Japanese laws or customs preventing them from doing it. The article mentions maximum fare prices for example. Japanese antitrust law is strong and thoroughly enforced.
Most likely more long term thinking in culture. Where as in West every single person just think of ways to profit in absolute shortest possible ways. Even if that were to kill untold trillions of human beings. After all what does a few hundred million dead matter if you can make extra cent from your company.
Your first sentence might in fact be true, but you've presented no evidence or argument that it is, so all you've done so far is make a cheap dig at America's private-equity industry with nothing to back it up.
I fail to see how the topic of this comment thread (namely "why Japan has such good railways") sheds any light on the US PE industry or vice versa. Maybe you can explain the link. (If you can't then your cheap dig is also off-topic.)
(And I fail to see how antitrust law in particular might constrain a PE firm in any way.)
>Switzerland is a land-locked village with fewer people than <one of the biggest cities in Europe> and entirely dependent on trade and the movement of people and money for all they have, and barely a scrap of a language to call its own.
Everything in that quote has been always been true though, and my guess is that they never allowed significant numbers of migrants at any time from about 800 (i.e., after the end of migration period) until whenever they started letting in large numbers of immigrants (some time after 1990 probably) (but not large enough numbers to suit you, I gather).
>I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum.
Good: a man willing to put his money where his mouth is! However many dollars you put up, I will put up $10. (I.e., I will give you 10:1 odds.) How much do you bet? Who do you suggest as arbiter in case one is needed?
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
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