Like, maybe you can't stop the LLM bots, but you can use them as one-off Bitcoin pool mining pool participants. You have to assume that making them find hash values with N leading zeroes has led to finding hash values with more than N leading zeroes. Maybe run a Bitcoin node under there and let each visitor take a couple swings for you with their pickaxes.

Proof of authority, essentially.

We wouldn't have street lights if the Fourth Amendment could prevent the monitoring of people in public. If I can install a webcam pointed at an intersection and stream it publicly, anyone and everyone can, and eventually enough public webcams like that create a network that anyone can use to track what's going in public. The only thing we can really do is ensure knowledge of what people do in public is kept public.

Flock extracts value from public information and there's nothing Flock can do to prevent competition. Flock is only a problem for the moment because they have a relative monopoly on public information and can make claims or provide evidence nobody can contest, but eventually we're going to decide we shouldn't trust a private entity like Flock to accurately report reality any more than we should trust anyone else with a private agenda.

Who is doing the presuming? That sounds like a bad-faith interpretation.

It's bad math. You can't expect statistics to be applied at that scale, and I think courts would have agreed if anyone had tried.

I'm willing to switch between Chrome and Firefox. On Chrome I get 66% body content I can't read. It's one of the reasons I stopped using Chrome.

If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.

It's a race to the bottom.

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

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

Check out Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1981).

Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.

Cryptocurrencies allow market participants to communicate value to each other without having to trust other market participants or an institution. Mining verifies transactions and commits them to the public record, earning the miner a fee for their work.

https://strudel.cc/ Strudel on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571822

Ships coming through the Gulf of Aden to reach African ports south of it are advised to head east until they were south of India (past the Maldives) before heading south, and then head due west to reach their destination. It's really expensive advice though, and not everyone follows it.

I was on the USS Momsen's VBSS team in the Gulf of Aden back in 2010-2012. We showed up with overwhelming force and they knew they'd survive if they didn't fight back. It was relatively safe and boring. We had protection from our reputation.

I think the US Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year and I've worried it would make VBSS a lot more dangerous.

Edit: we also didn't hear much from the Houthis while I was there. Things got worse in Yemen after my time.

https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-ma...

I used to be a purist about IDE configurations, but if everyone isn't on the same page about formatting and stuff like that you see a lot of file churn as things move around.

I would have said the same thing about the .github/ folder, but I've had to add things to it to prevent Copilot from thinking bad patterns in existing code are actually good patterns that should be repeated.

It makes more sense when your communication between teammates is constrained to the repository, because your other communication channels are already saturated. They're meta concerns that really have nowhere to go outside the repository without getting lost.