Yes, there is a non-zero chance that spare bits will be identical. But that's only relevant, if you have a bug in your code wherein you are trying to use a destroyed handle. If you are never using a destroyed handle, then the spare bits being identical is completely okay.

Another way to think of this is that the spare bits are optional. The interface is good even if there were no spare bits. The spare bits only add an additional probabilistic security check.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944643

Points: 155

# Comments: 160

Assuming that all the intelligent people in the world only belong to your camp is a reliable way to cloud your perspective, and not only unpersuasive, but dangerous. Since while you're complacent about the abilities of your opponent, they are recruiting and growing because they are not that stupid after all.

> radically un-enlightened position

How so? As I said, it's compatible with equality and symmetry. Your argument about minorities and wealth disparity is unfalsifiable. There will never be a time when we'd say that wealth disparity is gone, and discrimination doesn't exist. It's un-enlightened to use unfalsifiable statements as driving principles. This is why we're stuck on a downward spiral right now, because someone forgot to put in a good termination condition.

People have moralized their political stances (diversity in tech), so that disagreement automatically categorizes you as sexist, and possibly Nazi. Bulletproofing your stance from critics by moralizing it is profoundly unenlightened. Enlightenment requires making your idea criticize-able, something we're forgetting how to do.

Also, the Enlightenment and Hellenistic ideal is equality before the law, not "each man is equal", but "each man will be treated equally by the law".

> why is it that you feel that you could not share a country with people with a different culture from yours and with a different skin color than yours?

I'm a non-white non-western immigrant to this country, so I do speak from a very academic point of view. I have no skin in the game, and maybe that's why I am comfortable taking such an extremist position.

Color doesn't matter to me. But culture does. I believe there are inferior and superior cultures in this world, and there is little to be gained from an inferior culture. I've come out of such an inferior culture myself, only because I had the writings and wisdom of great western thinkers, who instilled the spirit of scientific inquiry in me. In no other culture, is science and its spirit as respected.

Culture and community is humanity's greatest strength. Most of what we achieved is due to culture (that we accidentally acquired in the 1700s) and cooperation among people of the same culture. By fucking up our culture, we risk losing the very thing that built western civilization and its ideals, and gain next to nothing.

Do you not see how little freedom of speech is valued these days? How hurtful speech is categorized as violence? FoS got us out of the fucking dark ages, and we plan to abandon and replace with absolutisms like "Nazism and anything which remotely touches Nazism is shoot-on-sight", or even better "I'll decide if you're Nazi or not, coz you mentioned biological differences between sexes/races, and we've already established that punching/killing Nazis is Good".

Since I come from a non-western country, I know the value of western ideals, probably (dare I say) much more than you, since I've lived in the counterfactual. And I see that the west is also denigrating to the same, becoming the worst of multiple cultures mixed together haphazardly, adopting the most base populist idea of each.

> there is a much simpler and baser emotion at work here: fear.

I don't deny this. Fear is not a base emotion though, unlike hatred or ignorance. It's fear of losing what's important. It's not an impulsive misinformed fear either. It's very carefully evaluated and sustained.

> you're going to have a hard time finding a country where you will feel comfortable.

I'm not a radical myself, so I am comfortable being a passive observer in a country going to the dogs. The altright have half the story right, and the other half (violence, anti-semitism) wrong, and it's possible to have a decently rational brain which believes in the first half without the second.

Also, believing in something just because it's comfortable and would make you the most friends is a profoundly unenlightened idea. I'm sure I don't need to recount the countless times in history when people had to take contrarian positions, make enemies, and eventually been proven right. I'm not saying you should abandon your friends, but you shouldn't disrespect people simply because they have an extremely provocative position. Being gay or an atheist was extremely provocative in the dark ages. Are you sure you're objective Right and not simply following a moral fashion?

Can't not mention this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> how you arrived at your position

Radical skepticism. Mistrusting everything mainstream media tells me, and trying to find alternative explanations for the same. The rationalist bloggers (SSC, LW), Sam Harris, a bit of Moldbug, conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, but mostly my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources, or if not available, reading from ALL the biased sources (instead of just one), and weighting their argument's merit. You should try this. Every time you read an opinion `X`, find someone intelligent who is (for some godforsaken reason) arguing for `not X`, and see if his explanation makes more sense. Most of the time the mainstream opinion would be right, but often it won't.

This is a non-trivial statement, because there are other things which are not leaky. For example, he's not arguing that deep learning practitioners should also learn assembly programming or go into how CUBLAS implements matrix multiplication. Although these things are nice to learn, you probably won't need them 99.9% of the times. Backprop knowledge, however, is much more crucial to design novel deep learning systems.