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> No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion.

I have met some transhumanists and longtermists who would really like to see some orders of magnitude increase in the human population. Maybe they wouldn't say "tragedy", but they might say "burning imperative".

I also don't think it's clearly better for more beings to exist rather than fewer, but I just want to assure you that the full range of takes on population ethics definitely exists, and it's not simply a matter of straightforward common sense how many people (or horses) there ought to be.


I remember enjoying https://meldmerge.org/ in the past for interactive visual file merging. It's apparently still being somewhat actively developed.

I really like the rubberband connections. They are like mental glue.

We also don't technically have proofs for some of the computational hardness assumptions that popular "real" ZK proof constructions rely on!

This might feel different because those assumptions were chosen in part because people had studied them and they certainly seem to be right, whereas perhaps here nobody has really studied this particular random number theory topic one way or the other.

But in some sense, there isn't a proof that regular ZK proof methods are actually completely zero-knowledge (against a computationally bounded adversary).


Although maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?

Maybe! In that case there would be no contingent universe, only the necessary one. You can see how this would appeal to theists like old Kurt. A buddy of his had a saying about dice...

Not even cardamom?

Did "links" mean "a criminal organization is involved in the project" or "a criminal organization is using the technology"?


It's not clear what they mean by that in the threats they've made in multiple places but it's clearly a threat, and they're already lying about us. Therefore, we're leaving France including leaving OVH and not hiring people in France without them relocating first. Our most sensitive infrastructure is local but we don't want a state taking over our website and network services. We don't trust France and OVH to respect rule of law and human rights at this point. It's not a safe country for open source privacy projects and French companies cannot be trusted to even host a static website without hijacking it for French law enforcement.

French law enforcement is conflating companies making products with GrapheneOS code with GrapheneOS itself. They're presenting it as if those companies are working with us and that we're responsible for their actions selling devices using our code. Most of those are using forks of GrapheneOS with features we don't have which are repeatedly incorrectly referred to as being GrapheneOS features. GrapheneOS users can read the many articles and see many references to non-existent features. They similarly refer to non-existent distribution methods and marketing which are actually about these products they're conflating with us. Since they're conflating products and actions by other people with ours, that makes their threats very concerning.

GrapheneOS doesn't even currently bundle an end-to-end encrypted messaging app as we don't have our own and leave choosing third party apps up to users. We plan to make an RCS app with MLS to replace people using Google Messages via sandboxed Google Play but that's no different than what Apple and Google are working towards providing earlier. Even if Chat Control was already the law, we don't have Signal or a similar app bundled with the OS and don't currently distribute a hardened build via our App Store despite plans for it. We do distribute the sandboxed Play Store and Accrescent via our App Store which have end-to-end encrypted messaging apps available...


> We don't trust France and OVH to respect rule of law and human rights at this point. It's not a safe country for open source privacy projects and French companies cannot be trusted to even host a static website without hijacking it for French law enforcement.

VeraCrypt is French, too, iirc?


I wonder if say some drug cartel was found to be donating money to graphene?


... And what if a competing mobile OS (say iOS or android) received payments or donations from said organization :-)


Probably the former. SkyECC, Encrochat, etc, were found to be deliberately sold to nontechnical drug lords for large amounts of money - as in, the project leads went out searching for drug lords and selling phones to them individually and offered to sell them 100 phones for $200 per month per phone. Drug empires have that sort of money. And they didn't sell to anyone else since nobody else has that sort of money.

It seems unlikely that GrapheneOS is the same way, since it's free, but you never know - maybe it is made for drug lords, and giving it away to the rest of us is just for plausible deniability.


When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.


When was Noisebridge new? I started going around 2010/11


About 2008.


An $824 aeroplane?


I saw someone on youtube the other day building a single seater out of cardboard. Could work, especially with economies of scale. /s


Why can't they estimate the immigration (and emigration) rate like they estimate the birth rate and death rate? Both of those also change in response to numerous factors (including economics, culture, and technology), and both of them can also be estimated with statistical models.


They can and do but it's much less reliable. Births and deaths are systematically recorded, and fertility rates are shaped by comparatively stable factors like education levels, access to family planning and gradual cultural shifts. Mortality rates follow similarly predictable trends.

Whereas migration flows are heavily influenced by sudden events that are difficult to anticipate, like economic crises, political instability, wars, natural disasters and so on. The data is less complete too, for example unauthorized border crossings will not be recorded officially in cases where these are undetected.


I'm sure that strategy was used until open xenophobes got into power and wanted to nurture the fear of their supporters by artificially raising the urgency.


It does get worse in the sense that there could be languages whose description is incompressible (we can simulate this, assuming hash functions approximate random oracles, by saying "choose a secret key; now the language is 'every string whose HMAC value under that secret key is even'").

If you accept some axiomatic assumptions about infinite sets (that are common in mathematics; I'm not sure exactly what the weakest required axiom is for this), then you can even believe that there are infinite languages that have no finite description at all, very much akin to the commonplace claim that there are real numbers that have no finite description at all. There are formulations of mathematics in which this is not true, but most mathematicians seemingly work in formulations in which it is true.

I even expect that we can probably prove this directly using the powerset operation and diagonalization, which doesn't require particularly strong assumptions about infinities.


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