That’s literally the whole point of encryption:

Your message becomes unintelligible to those who aren’t able to decode the content.

> that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.

Our force structure shifted towards logistics and infrastructure from combatants as we moved up the weapon complexity hierarchy. First automatic guns, then tanks, then airplanes.

To a large extent, a tank or air crew is 50 guys waving off 1-5, while they sit back at base and do hobbies between bouts of mechanic labor. They’re not literally at home, but we do fight with small mechanized armies while most soldiers watch on from the base.

The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.

They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.

HN is a place where people don’t ask what is true with intellectual curiosity but classify opinions as “problematic” and justify bullying people based on that.

HN becomes emotionally upset if you discuss actuarial tables or quote people’s own words from their own presentations because those facts go against the narratives many on HN believe — and like many before them, people on HN believe censorship and bullying are justified by that emotional turmoil.

As you just did, impugning my character while carefully avoiding the veracity of my claims — only saying they’re “problematic”, as a good apparatchik would.

But my personal experience is something snapped in a lot of people during COVID when people asked reasonable questions like — “is an experimental gene therapy really QALY positive in populations not at risk, such as healthy children?”

According to government actuarial tables, the answer was no: the UK government concluded that there was no point at which for those under 40 the immunizations prevented more serious outcomes than they caused. But people were (and often still are) absolutely rabid if you point out we (in administering a QALY negative treatment to a vulnerable population) decided to poison children and young adults en masse. I’ve had people look up my mother on Facebook for calmly citing UK government actuarial reports, which did the calculation on COVID vs vaccine harms.

That’s setting aside that on HN you’d get shadowbanned for even posting the clip of BLM leaders describing themselves as “trained Marxists” and BLM itself as Marxist in ideology. Apparently, no matter how politely you state facts, if HN froths irrationally in response it is an “inherent flamewar”.

But I’m not sure I qualify for what you’re asking, as I generally post under my true identity, not anonymously.

Most people would pick up both.

These economic proclamations don’t seem to make sense, when applied to different contexts — which suggests what you’re saying might be folk wisdom rather than sound theory (and greatly over simplifying the problem).

You’re also discounting ecosystem effects — gaming GPUs driving demand for datacenter and workstation GPUs as hobbyist experimentation turns into industrial usage. We don’t know what would happen if nVidia stopped suppressing the GPU market, because it’s never been tried — nVidia has always viciously undercut their own grassroots.

https://xkcd.com/936/

Passwords are the ultimate example of technologists turning in substandard bullshit and then blaming users for “holding it wrong”. If that’s Microsoft’s largest problem, they’ve deserved every call.

Now the discussion is about how Facebook glasses are offensive and worn by murderous psychos who take creep shots of their neighbors.

The exact point is that Anthropic is unexceptional and the same as other corporations.

- Central and Aeon own malls;

- Tesco owns multi-story shopping complexes including banking, retail, fast food, etc;

- and for that matter, Walmart, Target, Costco, and some grocery stores in the US operate multiple smaller businesses inside, eg banks or fast food.

It’s really not that uncommon for a corporation to operate part of their commercial space as a subsidiary marketplace.

When the US issues reports saying the EU is actively working against US values both within the US and globally, that report can be elevated by later US administrations to justify military drawdowns, exiting NATO, etc. The EU should produce counter artifacts demonstrating they do align with US values, but instead they responded as if this was a power struggle.

Your comment about “mind games” suggests too simple an interpretation:

This isn’t about what people believe is true, but what facts are available to the machinery of government policy making — much like litigating semantics and debating evidence inclusion within a court case.

This is about constructing the sentence:

“The EU’s widespread blocking of the freedom.gov free speech platform for the past decade demonstrates a divergence from American values that means NATO no longer functions as an effective vehicle for American vision on the global stage.”

- Lean supports calling out as a tactic, allowing you to call LLMs or other AI as judges (ie, they return a judgment about a claim)

- Lean can combine these judgments from external systems according to formal theories (ie, normal proof mechanics)

- an LLM engaged in higher order reasoning can decompose its thinking into such logical steps of fuzzy blocks

- this can be done recursively, eg, having a step that replaces LLM judgments with further logical formulations of fuzzy judgments from the LLM

Something, something, sheaves.

Obviously we should censor fascists and subversives!

I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.

Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.

Histrionics over normal law enforcement that is tame and well-regulated by global standards is embarrassing — it makes Americans look uneducated and childish.

You knew exactly what point I’m making, because it’s the first thing you responded to. And indeed, what you responsed to throughout your question. So no, you’re not being sincere.

Those groups always interacted and your bald assertion of their morality is directly contradicted by my experience of their interactions (eg, criminals and government corresponding at UW) and the change in Boomer and Gen X hackers following 9/11.

> There was a prevalent community of programmers and hackers who understood what these organizations represented and would never be on a forum blithely talking about some tool they made as if it was acceptable.

From their computers that originated in a US Navy lab?

Again, my experience from Seattle is that the idealism was always more show than reality — and government technologies were not only consumed, but built on contract when interests aligned (eg, stopping cyber warfare or dismantling terrorist networks).

What you’re describing — ineffective moral absolutism — wasn’t what I recall from the 90s hacker ethos that always existed in a liminal zone, but rather the 2010s era co-opting of existing groups (eg, Anyonymous) for moral crusading.

- there are 2.4B under 18 globally

- which means 500k is 0.02% of all children

- or around 1 in 5000 children globally, per day

- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly

That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.

Anyway, disturbing.