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Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

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Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#61

Post by chacha2 »

arugulum wrote: post #53
michaelscott wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this completely; Light makes up for what I would say is an inferior deductive ability by using a supernatural item with rules that defy ordinary logic and reason (L catches on early that such a tool must exist with his TV announcement stunt, but he can't possibly know the ruleset of such an item). The only way Near and Mello end up overcoming this advantage is by: (1) Mello obtaining a Death Note of his…

>I think the most under-utilized ability of the Death Note in the series is the ability to specify manner of death. Absolutely. This ability is so significant that it completely overshadows the ability to kill people. If anything, the deaths should be treated as an unfortunate byproduct of being able to control people for 23 days in a row.

There were limits to this ability though. All behaviour had to be in character.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#62

Post by arugulum »

chacha2 wrote: post #61
arugulum wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the most under-utilized ability of the Death Note in the series is the ability to specify manner of death. Absolutely. This ability is so significant that it completely overshadows the ability to kill people. If anything, the deaths should be treated as an unfortunate byproduct of being able to control people for 23 days in a row.

There were limits to this ability though. All behaviour had to be in character.

Agreed, but there is still so much you can do. You can make dictators liberalize their countries. You can make billionaires donate away their wealth. And so on.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#63

Post by fennecfoxen »

squirrelicus wrote: post #56
arugulum wrote: post #39

I would frame things a little differently. Light makes a lot of mistakes because the Death note is incredibly powerful and there would be almost no reasonable way for L to catch Light without Light making obvious mistakes (and would also make for a boring story). Undoubtedly, the biggest mistake Light makes is revealing the existence of the Death Note, and all the rules therein, which not only gives L (almost) all th…

> Remember, the goal is fear, not specificity. I think that's where your proposal breaks down. Light is powerhungry and arrogant, but he's also very moralistic. A character that proritizes fear over accuracy would be a different character than Light. He wants to build a better, even perfect, world. And for that, he must have accuracy. Otherwise he's a mere tyrant, something he believes he is not. Of course, it's wort…

Is that really meant as the tragedy? I'm not sure to what extent it's really intended that way. Light's attitude to criminal justice is a distressingly realistic one in a country where 99% of arrests lead to confessions.

Just a little light reading that's close at hand from a few years back: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/12/05/forced-to-confe... https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/12/03/silent-screams

See also any critical commentary on Nissan and the extraordinary case of Carlos Ghosn.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#64

Post by NikolaeVarius »

chmod775 wrote: post #44
Malic wrote: post #23

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine. Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient." Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use. Cou…

Spoiler territory for Evan Currie's Hayden War Cycle Series ahead - which would deserve some spotlight and an editor for catching all the spelling mistakes both... Anyways. This is touched upon by a favorite sci-fi story of mine, where humans come in possession of such technology and make huge leaps in capabilities in short timeframes. Those leaps are unexplainable to most alien species they are in contact with. Espe…

Also recoomend Evan currie

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#65

Post by donaldknuth123 »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #7
lawn wrote: post #6

If it's true that privacy is dead, how come Satoshi is still unknown?

He/they may be known to some. https://medium.com/cryptomuse/how-the-nsa-caught-satoshi-nak...

The likelihood that they were able to use Stylometry to identify him is near Nil in my opinion. State of the art language models out of Google, Stanford, MIT etc. are barely able to accurately identify authors based on style. I doubt very much that even with "trillions of emails" the NSA was able to do this successfully.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#66

Post by donaldknuth123 »

jquery wrote: post #29
lawn wrote: post #6

If it's true that privacy is dead, how come Satoshi is still unknown?

Is he? He leaked a lot of writing samples. Unless he took great care to anonymize his writing style (and I'm not even convinced that it's possible to completely anonymize a writing style without scrambling the ideas themselves), it's possible (perhaps likely) he leaked enough bits for a state actor to track him (or her) down.

You are vastly overestimating how good Author identification methods are.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#68

Post by dredmorbius »

joe_the_user wrote: post #5

The ability to kill anyone one chose would be a far more terrifying weapon if used to instill fear. If someone used to this ability to kill individuals who didn't fit their agenda but kept anonymity about their goals, whatever changed they wished would only happen fairly slowly and haphazardly - those replacing the dead wouldn't have that much chance to produce different policies. Also, even a bunch of seemingly rand…

On "invisible death":

Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order, not only in the beginning, but through the whole progress of an ancient battle, and till one of the two armies was fairly defeated.

-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

There are three uses of the word "invisible" in the text. Two refer to invisiblbe causes of injury or death, and their psychological impact.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#69

Post by antepodius »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #35
Malic wrote: post #23

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine. Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient." Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use. Cou…

If allowed to send a message back in time any mistakes made by such a person could be fixed presumably. It would seem to me that you would have to detect that someone is playing with time, find out who that is and then capture them before they learn that you know and send a message back to kill you.

Well, not if you make a mistake that leads to you being unable to send a message back. That's part of the plot of a sci-fi story I read: there's a machine that does this, and the messages stop at a specific point in the future. (It's 'the Arrows of time' by Greg Egan. The Orthogonal trilogy is good stuff.)

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#70

Post by jhpriestley »

jacobush wrote: post #50

Someone on HN linked to a list of the best anime - and I can't find it now, because I foolishly thought I would remember the name of the website. Anyone know what I am talking about? The "winning entry" was, I think some kind of pretty abstract anime story. If Death Note was on the list at all (the list may have been compiled before Death Note was aired), it was not on the top of the list. The list was written by a s…

I think you're a few bits short of specifying a website here
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