Viewing profile — btilly

Yes. There exist numbers that cannot actually be written down because they are too big. But you get there by a path of increasing fuzziness, and no clear boundaries, from numbers t…

Bad example. You can do all of this with constructivism. Any constructable Cauchy sequence converges to a constructable member of the space. What you get for the formalism around c…

That is not a number in constructivism. But there are numbers in constructivism for which it is unknown whether they are zero. Some of which must remain unknown, if mathematics is …

That apparent belief is common. People with current access to power, seldom anticipate what might happen in the future if it is turned against them.

That is who it was created for.

Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful. It's easy to verify this. Tor…

Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power. Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to intro…

Yes, there is always a path to a problem. Even random monkeys on a keyboard can write a security exploit. Random monkeys with guidance from a knowledgeable human will do it much fa…

How does this make the model useless? It finds and fixes the security hole. It can even write a test that verifies that the fix didn't break things. But it deliberately doesn't rev…

What I suggested would allow it to fix the issues. Just not write a test that was directly usable as a security exploit. This doesn't stop attackers from being able to leverage the…

I don't believe that this is unfixable. Just have an internal verbal loop of, "Is this a security issue?" The thought that it potentially is should trigger both a high priority on …

This is a take on Elon that I cannot agree with. I get it. I know how much people want to hate him. And how much fuel he has given for that. But he's very talented, and really puts…

So now that Tesla is clearly crashing, fold it into the more successful SpaceX and get to roll the dice again? Classic Elon. This is the same thing that he did to rescue a failing …

Just so that nobody jumps in with what I first wanted to jump in with, this estimate was done with the assumption that Elon Musk's Starship is built, works as advertised, and launc…

How does almost everyone pay for food at the grocery store? If stores don't have a good way to get money from customers, how do they pay the next step up the line?

Yes. Read through https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941 to see that, given a good enough environment, mice can wipe themselves out. Here is a particularly tell…

Here is what it actually means. When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you? When the rev…

I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear. That said, like Democracy, capitali…

Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse. The result may not be extinction. But …

The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution in…

Most power outages are local, not regional. And cellphone towers will work at a surprising distance. Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though…

The first thing that I did was zoomed out, surely Shakespeare wrote about something in the New World? No. It is amazing how small his world was. He was born and grew to adulthood, …

Wonderful strategy. Take something that someone else said. Come out swinging at a distortion of what they said. Then if they call you on it, say, "You seem very defensive and angry…

> Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said. On personal attacks, you literally said that it…