I think you need to rigorously define your macrostates. If your two states are "my friend's password" and "not my friend's password" then the macrostates are perfectly objective. You don't know what macrostate the system is in, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is objectively in one of those two macrostates.
If you define your macrostates using subjective terms (e.g. "a string that's meaningful to me" or "a string that looks ordered to me") then yeah, your entropy calculations will be subjective.
In one case you're looking at the system as "alphanumeric string of length N." In another, the system is that plus something like "my friend's opinion on the string".
Also, as the article says, using "entropy" to mean "order" is not a good practice. "Order" is a subjective concept, and some systems (like oil and water separating) look more "ordered" but still have higher entropy, because there is more going on energetically than we can observe.
I guess part of my question is, are there any macrostates that are useful to us that can't be described using more abstract human-subjective terms? If a macrostate can be described using human terms, I'd say the state is somewhat ordered. And if a state can't be described using human terms, then wouldn't it be indistinguishable from "particle soup" and thus not a useful macrostate to talk about?
I'm open to outsiders improving inefficiencies. The concern is that these are kids, barely out of college. They don't have the domain-specific knowledge required to rework these complex systems, no matter how smart they are. Plus, given Musk's track record, they were likely chosen more for their loyalty to Musk than for their technical acumen.
I've noticed that airline wifi doesn't block DNS traffic. You can likely accomplish the same thing with a DNS tunnel like Iodine (https://github.com/yarrick/iodine).
Many years ago, I noticed I could browse the Google Play Store on a flight WiFi without paying for it. No images would load and no apps would download, but I could browse through app listings and read reviews.
Probably not. I bet something in Android didn't work properly until they whitelisted some Google domains — for example, maybe it didn't detect the Internet connection when the user paid for it, or maybe something on the entertainment tablets broke (I don't know if they usually run Android or something else).
This seems likely. ~6 years ago on a Delta flight I noticed that I could use Google and view cached pages without paying for WiFi. I managed to catch up on the news on my flight…
(1) When a resource is unlimited, it's easier to distribute that resource cheaply to everyone, which is exactly what communism strives for. Resource scarcity leads to power being concentrated in a small ownership class - e.g. capitalism.
(2) Why think "more cars, planes, phones, content, etc" are unique to capitalism? People want to travel and to be entertained, regardless of the economic system they live in. Communism doesn't mean people will suddenly want fewer material goods.
If you give 10% of your income, you're still keeping 90% for yourself. So it implies you consider yourself nine times as valuable as all other humans. I'm not on board with Effective Altruism, but 10% of your income seems like a reasonable amount to give to those less fortunate.
If you define your macrostates using subjective terms (e.g. "a string that's meaningful to me" or "a string that looks ordered to me") then yeah, your entropy calculations will be subjective.