Because hashes are deterministic one way functions - they’re generally one way only

Let’s say I hash a picture. It could go from 14MB to 128 digits of base 64 - there’s orders of magnitude less information in the hash than in the source data

Now - with that hash can you rebuild the picture? You’ve lost a great deal of information, you don’t necessarily even know the size or the format of the input.

Let’s set up an equation - x is the input (the photo), so hash_func(x) = hashx

There are multiple, maybe infinite (depending on the hashing function) values of x that will solve our equation. In the case of the photo, most of it will be random combinations of pixels that mean nothing to a human. There could also randomly be things that appear meaningful, but without knowing more about the original you could never be sure if you have the correct answer

Now, passwords might actually be shorter than the resulting hash, but we salt them so each password hash function works differently, and can still destroy information from the original password. Part of the password and the salt are then used as basically the seed for a deterministic random function to generate this extra information

Again, you have the dual problem of a huge problem space as well as an inability to be sure you have the original input or just another solution

Ultimately, everything is defeatable, and if you can narrow down the problem space (say, by knowing the length of a password, having enough known before and after data, or finding a bias in the algorithm), you can reduce the needed computations by orders of magnitude and make it feasible. Quantum computers also grow exponentially with chained qbits, so I expect someone clever will figure it out sooner or later

…Do you not think corn can be turned into a carcinogen?

… So a short form video platform is more dangerous than a dubitably secure group chat app?

That’s comparing apricots to ocelots

There’s different types of hacking. Finding and coding up an exploit? That takes skill

Then, they post it in a corner of the Internet somewhere to get appreciation for their achievement, or maybe even sell it on the dark web (or someone else sees it and packages it up in a state to sell/share)

Now, using the exploit? That’s pretty easy. It requires some technical ability, but not much. It’s just installing and configuring stuff, then using an app

So here’s what I think happened. Someone found the exploit, and posted about it in a hacker community off the beaten path. One thing led to another, and somehow a group of edgelords get a hold of it. As a group, they manage to get it working, and act like edgelords

The original hacker might have been related, but real hackers are cautious or quickly caught - they probably solved the puzzle, maybe played with it a bit, then posted their findings and moved on to the next puzzle

The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it’s not at all a dog whistle for them. It’s very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined

But they hear “go woke go broke” so often that they’ve been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - “yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let’s be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?”

I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion

"You think it’s a bad game because it is, you feel like it’s an attack because they went online and said you’re a bigot for thinking it’s bad, and we’re all biased but you’re self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.

“Now let’s talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you’re sounding just a little more like a leftist each time”

Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds

It keeps traveling. If you splash some water, where does the wave go? Same question - it terms into something you can no longer see or hear… It never goes away. It becomes part of the world, forever

Music is what you hear - but it was only ever sound waves

Right on. The proof is in the pudding even their games I don’t finish, like the gwent one, aren’t bad or not fun, I just lost interest

I used this argument with my friend the other day - cyberpunk lets you play as a trans character, . People got upset when they found that out prelaunch… And then no one cared, the main complaint was bugs

It’s not “go woke and go broke”, it’s “no one wants shit media, and inclusivity is not a substitute for quality”

Inclusivity isn’t the problem, only bigots care if you make something great that happens to be inclusive. It’s observer bias, not correlation - inclusivity is generally good. Gamers don’t mind inclusivity, they’ll get the experience they want and ignore the options they don’t want

The problem is shit writing and gameplay

That is what tax is meant to be… But at the end of the day, what happens if you refuse to pay? Eventually, either the money is taken without your permission or people will show up to put you in a room under threat of violence

Yeah, this is coercive. That’s what happens when you continuously act in bad faith in a community - eventually, people get fed up. This is just the chaotic version rather than the lawful one. It bypasses the states monopoly on violence, but it’s also a very pure expression of the will of the people

The best tool is the best tool for the job. My php code was immaculate - import header, write your content, import footer. I wrote it all in a few hours, and I think my university is still using it today. One of my proudest moments was when a team member whose abilities I respected gushed over how easy my code was to work with

I haven’t used it since.

I’m led to believe modern PHP has become pretty good. It’s also never been the right tool for the job since then

Mojo sounds incredible - python is a beautifully consistent language, and I’ve written a shit load of it. I like it a lot. It’s often not the right tool for the job, but mojo promises to turn it into something extraordinary that shores up its weaknesses… It’s just promises so far though, I really hope they pan out

But always ask yourself - what’s the right tool for the job?

So what could be better than getting started?

Yeah, if search hadn’t become dog shit I’d be happy with it

Instead, everything is a video for some reason, and the results are purposely worse than a year ago…I don’t want to watch a video, I can read 20x faster than I can listen, I don’t want to read an ad in article form - I’m generally looking for one little nugget of information

I took this into my own hands - I’ll use free services if they work, but increasingly they’re just demos for a product that may or may not be better. So I spun up a searx container, I point a local LLM at it, and I let it filter read through results. My next stage is to crawl documentation, use LLMs to feed it into a vector db, and use AI to retrieve exactly what I want without sifting through garbage myself

I think Android is big enough to be immediately forked. There’s many existing forks already, if they tried to take it private many companies would be invested in a new “Android core” being developed upstream - it’s one of the few situations where open source can work, because businesses would throw money at an org that keeps them competitive

But I’ll be hopeful but pessimistic about a Google breakup. It would be huge, it would be real change

Well I don’t think that’s the real problem here - if you could nuke a hurricane out of existence, it would be a feasible option. The area of effect of a nuke is a lot smaller than media has led us to believe, and if you detonate it at the right height there’s not much fallout. It’s a totally reasonable option… If it worked

The problem is, it wouldn’t work. For any competent president, this was just a bit of brainstorming. It’s creative out of the box thinking, I bet previous presidents have asked the same thing

And that’s the problem. The conversation should’ve gone “can we nuke the hurricane? Have we looked into that?” “Yes Mr President, we’ve looked into it and it just doesn’t math out”. And then they continue on with disaster preparations like a sane person

The problem is: why did we even hear about this? Even the most harsh critics couldn’t make brainstorming look bad, throwing out any idea that pops into your head is the point.

But he had a creative idea, and where most people would feel a moment of disappointment and move on, or maybe even task people to reevaluate the option, he bragged about it in public. He turned “the science doesn’t work” into “they wouldn’t let me”

And honestly, it’s probably one of the best ideas he’s ever had…“if sunlight kills the virus, can we use that?”, “if bleach kills the virus, could we inject bleach?” - it shows like understanding of biology, but a president doesn’t need to know biology. They just need to hear “this wouldn’t work” from someone who understands the science, and move on

But the damaged little snowflake he is, he doesn’t let go of the weirdest of ideas, because they made him feel smart for a moment and he’s deeply insecure. He brags about his brainstorming sessions, which is weird, and then he presents his ideas in public as “they wouldn’t let me” instead of “this was a neat idea, but unfortunately it wouldn’t work”

And that’s far more disturbing. Having a creative idea is good, having it turn out to be impractical is fine, but holding onto it and pitching it to the public is deeply worrying

… What? There are fully integrated Palestinians living in Israel right now, they could just integrate them or let them establish their own self rule in one form or another

All it takes is to improve conditions and slowly increase rights for Palestinians until they’re full citizens. Probably start by making it illegal to mow them down in the streets. If you cut off the flow of new recruits, Hamas will wither. If conditions are rapidly improving, it’s hard to convince people to martyr themselves

And Israel could do that… Just not with an unpopular administration that is using this conflict to stay in power

Probably not. I was just answering your question - that’s how you’d eliminate that variable from the experiment

The m in stem stands for medicine. Maybe your new body doesn’t trust experts, so when doc spoke in an overly educated tone it provoked aggression. Possibly because of overhearing this tone during incubation and while getting the original brain replaced

Or maybe I made a typo

While I think the job selects for doctors with less compassion, but I believe some of them are there for genuine harm reduction

The system they’re installed in is just insidious. They are given extremely short amounts of time each request, they face basically no consequences for a bad rejection, but they do face them for a bad acceptance. Their main metrics boil down to “rejections per hour”

A “bad acceptance” often means “improper paperwork”. If the doc fills in a form wrong, you send it back. If the doctor files in a way that doesn’t link relevant history correctly in their system, send it back. If the doctor fails to state a required prerequisite for the procedure, send it back (even if it was previously stated, or stated differently)

It’s a pure lawful evil system, it’s designed to slow things down and delay, hoping the problem will go away. It requires doctors to navigate a complex hostile bureaucracy perfectly, and often blindly. We’re at a point where each patient is seen for an average 15 minutes before 45 minutes of paperwork to get insurance to pay for it

Then the requests are read feverishly to meet metrics. They can’t think they’re doing good, but I buy that some of them are doing their best to reduce harm in a broken system

You paint a second control group the colors and patterns they already are

The body. It’s feeding you vast amounts of information every moment, it’s the one making decisions, you’re the AI assistant providing analysis and advice

If you clone a tree, you get a similar tree. The branches aren’t in the same place. If you clone a human, why would the nerves be laid out the same way? Even if it’s wired up correctly, without a lifetime of cooperation why would your body take your advice?

Imagine you wake up. Red looks blue. Everything feels numb. The doctor says “everything looks good, why don’t you try to stand up?”. You want to cooperate with the doctor, but you don’t stand up. You could move, but you don’t. Rationalizing your choices, you tell the doctor you don’t feel like it. You feel your toes, you shift to get away from the prodding of your doctor, but you just can’t muster the will to stand

Imagine you wake up. Your sight is crystal clear, you feel your body like never before. The doctor says “don’t move yet”. With the self control of a child, you rip out the itchy IV to get the tape off of you. The doctor says something in a stem tone, and you’re filled with rage. You pummel the doctor, then are filled with regret and start to cry

Emerging science suggests this kind of situation could lead to brand new forms of existential horror

Generative AI is definitely useful - it’s mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let’s you easily do things near impossible before

It’s also best used sparingly