I'm not convinced that this added latency will help, especially if everyone uses it. It may protect you as long as nobody else uses a cooldown period, but once everyone uses one then the window between the vulnerability being introduced and it being detected will expand by a similar amount, because without exposure it is less likely to be found.
Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis.
Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.
Ok! I take your point that your comment was more related to the topic of this thread than I assumed it was.
Probably if you had phrased it in a slightly more informative way, that pattern-matched slightly less to internet-dismissal-trope, I'd have understood that better the first time.
(By internet-dismissal-trope in this case I mean something of the form "After X, I am no longer interested in person Y".)
It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale.
It is just phenomenally dumb.
Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read.
It is not distasteful to participate in it -- it is embarrassing and, from my perspective, disqualifying for a commentator on AI.
I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale.
That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI.
Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2".
> The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race.
Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights.
Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system.
All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.
Sure, in the space of 100 ways for the next few years in AI to unfold, it is their opinion of one of the 100 most likely, to paint a picture for the general population about what approximately is unfolding. The future will not go exactly as that. But their predictive power is better than almost anyone else. Scott has been talking about these things for a decade, before everyone on this forum thought of OpenAI as a complete joke.
Do you have any precedent from yourself or anyone else about correctly predicting the present from 2021? If not, maybe Scott and Daniel just might have a better world model than you or your preferred sources.
>The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing.
AI doesn't look like a competition for a junior engineer and many of the people using not "managing" AI are going to be juniors in fact increasing what a junior can do and learn more quickly looks like one of the biggest potentials if they don't use it entirely as a crunch.
Meanwhile, it suggests leading-edge research into AI itself will proceed fully 50% faster than research not without AI but those using 6 months behind cutting edge. This appears hopelessly optimistic as does the idea that it will grow the US economy 30% in 2026 whereas a crash seems more likely.
Also it assumes that more compute will continue to be wildly more effective in short order assuming its possible to spend the money for magnitudes more compute. Either or both could easily fail to work out to plan.
I'm not sure why it's so distasteful, but they basically fear monger that AI will usurp control over all governments and kill us all in the next two years
Yes -- the closing of mental hospitals was very much in response to a moral panic (possibly justified) against the unreasonable use of involuntary indefinite confinement. That combined with the inhumane conditions in the facilities themselves, which was itself worsened by the difficulty in obtaining funding and overcrowding.
In the US this is very much an unsolved problem -- chronic homelessness is probably a problem better served by indefinite involuntary confinement, but the moral cost of this is very high and there's a lot of reluctance to go back to that. In Europe this is less the case -- if you look closely into any country that has made big strides fighting chronic homelessness (I'm looking at you, Finland [1]) underneath it you'll see a huge rise in the involuntary confinement numbers that are the quiet solution.
Not just the moral cost. The monetary cost is quite high too. Easy decision to save money by cutting something that most see as immoral, consequences be damned.
I'm not convinced at the narrative presented here, thought it seems compelling and worthy of further research.
My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
And rather than being refuges for same-sex couples and generally "[offering liberation from family supervision and the constraints of Victorian mores", they were the opposite -- often being extremely stringent in "morality" clauses and forbidding mixed company after dark. They were frequently racially exclusionary in ways that became incompatible with civil rights laws.
The reality is that the situation was probably a mix of both attacks -- attacks through over-regulation and tenant rights, as well as direct attacks on SROs as hotbeds of crime and illicit or immoral behavior, but I'm curious as to the mechanics of how this came to be.
Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).
The reason we see these simplistic narrative is because nobody wants to blame their pet favorite regulation for having any hand in it.
A great example is HOAs. Everyone wants to complain that they stand in the way of diversification of housing stock or use of land (they do). Nobody wants to address the fact that they're infinitely more prevalent than they would otherwise be as a side effect of environmental regulation and often their absurd rules were a condition of approval of the development in question in the first place.
I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.
The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).
At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.
HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).
There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.
IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.
>O an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality
Don't forget snow plowing and sidewalk maintenance and the cluster of mailboxes down by the gate where the driveway meets the main road and the pool and and and and and and....
It's like the touchscreen in a goddamn car. Once you have it you get lazy and use it for everything because it lets you cheaply add "premium" features.
I agree that a lot of these HOAs should be dissolved, but like everything else involving real-estate it's less painful in the moment to keep on bending over and taking the status quo and hoping you can pass the buck to the next sucker.
If you really want your blood to boil, a some of the larger stormwater features (for example those drainage ponds commonly found in certain regions beside the highway or on the outskirts of strip malls and other large commercial development) wind up getting regulated as wetlands, they are constantly wet after all, and the legally implied setback and permitting requirements can push over the property line depending on the details. And that's assuming they build them right, that water being returned to the ground affects the height of the water table, with potentially huge negative affects on nearby properties.
For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.
But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.
Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.
right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)
That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.
there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.
Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.
Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.
The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.
It should be, except that a lot of people demand taxes too low for that municipality to function if it actually did everything, so legally required HOAs get used as a shitty stopgap because the work still has to be done.
That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.
American HOAs simply have too much power. In Canada HOAs exist, but their ability to levy fines or put liens on property is much more limited[1] and usually requires actual damage. This effectively eliminates a lot of the ridiculous rules about the size of someone's shed or the species or grass because there's no real way to enforce them.
I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.
That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.
Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.
It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.
I looked at the rules for dissolving an HOA in lived in. There were a couple of procedural barriers, but the biggest one was that it required 75% of homeowners to sign a petition within a 3 month period. That’s a pretty high bar and lets a minority perpetuate the HOA.
My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).
And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.
But are the rules actually the same as those imposed 20 years ago for regulatory reasons, or are they now stricter without good reason? Are there really good regulatory reasons for restricting exterior paint color and other things that HOAs do?
Yes, typically the local government require a HOA-like structure for all new housing developments.
In addition to supporting adherence to environmental regs, they also form the collective financial entity that pays for maintenance of development roads and other common items. The local government shifts that burden onto the HOA instead of adding to its obligations.
That doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. An HOA that only existed to maintain the stormwater plan and just collected small dues to maintain it would be almost completely unrecognizable compared to how actual HOAs function. Come to think of it, even my standard explanation of HOAs being prevalent because local government use them as a backdoor way to increase property taxes is inadequate, since an HOA that just maintains the roads and parks would also be pretty unrecognizable.
Maybe these explain why HOAs exist, but not why HOAs almost always have a big tangle of rules on top. Is there some regulation that explains that aspect?
I think the thousand cuts analogy applies in general to the housing crisis, specifically affordability.
You announce or plan some "affordable" housing in an area, or actually these days ANY housing that would increase housing units and decrease demand for existing homeowner homes, and it's like a telepathic demon takes over every homeowner regardless of Trump or Biden signs on the lawn.
The knives come out, and it gets killed.
People would rather have homeless outside their houses than any sort of project that will dilute their unsustainable growth in housing values.
Tenant rights is a huge one. There were other contributing factors as well:
Anti-discrimination laws
• 1968 Fair Housing Act made SROs “dwellings” subject to full federal anti-bias rules
• 1974 McQueen v. City of Detroit: an SRO that refused welfare recipients was liable
• 1982 Sullivan v. SRO Management: an owner who turned away unmarried couples violated marital status discrimination
• 1988 FHA amendments added “familial status” making “no children after 8 pm" illegal
Also building code and tax incentives
• 1974 UFC required sprinkler retrofits
• 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
• 1986 low-income housing credit gave 130% write-ups for new construction but only 90% for rehab of existing SROs
I mean SROs that aren't subject to full federal anti-bias rules, are allowed to refuse welfare recipients, that turn away unmarried couples, or reject children after 8 pm probably wouldn't really fix the problems that people want SROs to fix.
I'm not sure if
> 1977 24 CFR 882 required private-bathroom retrofits
means that SROs are required to have private bathrooms, which would absolutely damage the model and doesn't strike me as strictly necessary.
Here in Chicago there are still some SROs. Chicago has middling tenants rights: not as strong as New York or SF but stronger than most of the country. If tenants rights ended SROs you'd expect them to not exist in a place like Chicago.
I moved to logan square before gentrification. There were two SRO buildings that I knew of. Both were redeveloped by the time I moved out.
SROs often serve as half-way houses for people getting out of prison so there's a lot of community opposition. All the SROs that are left in Chicago have been around a long time, there aren't new ones being built and the old ones slowly go away when the area gentrifies.
Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
> That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.
There are still a decent number of sros in uptown. We’ll see how long that lasts with the new towers and zoning probably making them prime redevelopment targets.
> My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly
It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.
But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
> My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
Possible that tenant rights could have had some negative impacts as you say, what's the timeline on when that would have been happening? We do know that very early on that wealthy neighbourhoods were working hard to prevent SROs (prevent multi-unit buildings at all really) for class and racial exclusionary reasons. We have a great deal of direct evidence of this in contemporary reporting on these issues.
> By the early 1900s, cities and states were classifying lodging houses as public nuisances. Other laws increased building standards and mandated plumbing fixtures, raising costs and slowing new construction. Urban reformers next embraced exclusionary zoning to separate undesirable people and noxious uses from residential areas. SROs were deemed inappropriate in residential zones, and many codes banned the mixed-use districts that sustained them.
In Vancouver for example they brought in zoning to put an end to apartment development in a great deal of residential areas in the 1930s.
It may be that there's no one answer because every city is different.
In Chicago, for example, the ongoing decline of SROs is still a live issue. The most recent time the city passed a new ordnance intended to try and halt the decline was 11 years ago [1].
As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs. The ordnance requires a 180-day notification period prior to the sale of any existing SRO building, and during that period you can only sell to an owner who intends to preserve the building's current use as an SRO. If that fails, you get about a year to find another buyer, and any residents being displaced by the sale get relocation assistance, including a $2,000 check to offset relocation costs.
I believe the people who drafted and passed the ordnance had the best of intentions. But (and I'm no real estate financier so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about) it seems like it might have also made it functionally impossible for anyone to open a new SRO. I can't imagine any bank or investor would be willing to finance an enterprise with those kinds of strings attached. That really amps up the risk to investors, and for an enterprise that's probably already relatively unattractive due to low potential ROI compared to yet another luxury development.
> As far as I'm aware it hasn't slowed the decline, and there maybe a plausible argument to be made that it's worsening the problem by creating significant barriers to opening any new SROs.
For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
I'm skeptical that there are landlords who want to run SROs, having interacted with landlords, they see SROs as being more work (maintaining lots of public space like shared kitchens) for undesirable tenants. Further, in the unlikely event that a landlord would want to run an SRO, they will have to deal with nimby opposition. I just find it difficult to believe that laws designed to keep existing SROs open would be the threshold for preventing new ones. Additionally, we don't have to speculate because there were no new SROs being created before the law passed.
> For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.
Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.
>For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.
Another way of seeing this is "Sure, I'll give it a shot, but if it turns out to be a bad business I want the option to bail, rather than getting trapped slowly going bankrupt with a 90% empty building because I'm not allowed to evict 4 tenants and do something else with it."
It's possible to concoct a theoretical landlord who has that thought, although in your example it would cost $8000 to evict those people under the law ($2000 per).
The bigger problem is that no SROs were created in recent history before the law was passed. To say that there's some demand by landlords to create SROs but for the law you would have to show SROs getting created before the law, and that stopping after the law. The law was written to preserve the existing SROs with the understanding that the era in which SROs were an attractive investment was already past.
Secondly the OP claims without evidence that the law didn't slow the rate that SROs are being redeveloped. But gentrification in Chicago has accelerated so even if that's true the law is doing its job if the rate of SRO destruction didn't likewise accelerate.
SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.
But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?
I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.
I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.
That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."
So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.
One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.
The high-end SRO market arguably still exists. There are plenty of young Americans rooming with strangers they found on the internet, not infrequently converting the living room into an additional bedroom, and nobody in power really seems to complain unless they throw too many parties, even if the zoning laws prohibit it. I also think it's unlikely they'd rent to a down-on-his-luck, 45-year-old (even if they could afford it).
You can also find medium-term, single-room rentals on sites like FurnishedFinder, often explicitly catering to traveling nurses and other medical professionals. Again, my strong suspicion is that many of these violate local zoning laws, and nobody really cares.
> My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly, because it made eviction almost impossible and compliance with anti-discrimination laws presented too large a burden for low-cost housing.
You could also just as easily argue it was naive reliance on the market that led to this failure. It doesn't take much thought to come to the conclusion that this approach will never fully alleviate basic housing concerns.
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
This is what I was taught once upon a time -- that scientists acknowledged she could sign "food" and "thank you" and such, but is this language?
But this doesn't hold up. Nobody but her handler could interpret the signing even for basic gestures. Identical signs were often interpreted differently depending on the context. Similarly, unrelated gestures were given the same translation, also in context.
No reason to suspect any malfeasance or anything; the interpreter (as in the telepathy tapes and FC) is most likely acting in good faith and just unaware how much weight they are giving to their own mental model of the subject.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
I mean, at some point we are convinced as a convenience. You can use mathematical formulations describing _how_ a motor works without understanding why they are true. Similarly, I don't believe that there is a grand conspiracy involving chemtrails, even though I haven't proven that all the theories I've heard are false. I'm just fairly confident that this _could_ be done, given enough time and resources. But practically, I have to get on with my life.
Being lazy incurs costs. With regard to "conspiracies" that cost is explicitly vulnerability to them.
Neither "chemtrails", "UFOs&aliens" nor "telepathy" appear particularly "plausible". But that could just as well be a statement about your method of determining 'plausibility'?
You invoke limited personal resources to justify complacency. Likely, you estimate the costs of being wrong as negligible since you never really thought about possible implications and do not know about any being particularly relevant to you. That's an argument from ignorance.
Ya, I agree, my main point is that arguments from ignorance are acceptable sometimes. My main claim to schiffern is something like "Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is sometimes fine." As specific examples, I propose chemtrails and how-motors-work. I think it is totally acceptable to dismiss the in-depth explanation for most people, because for most people they just aren't that important.
Are you claiming that you never dismiss anything without fully understanding it? Do you completely understand all of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Baha'i, etc? I think it is possible to generate an infinite list of things you don't fully understand. And yet you of course have to take a practical stance on some of these things for your everyday life.
Catch 22. The best way to avoid hard facts is to scare away scientists. ;)
But I agree, this is just garbage pseudoscience. I listened to the Banned & Reported episode, and TL;DR the Telepathy Tapes experiments had a non-blinded 'facilitator' touching the blindfolded 'psychic.' My mind immediately went to Clever Hans, before the podcast hosts even brought it up later in the episode.
Just watch any Derren Brown video to see how easy it is to 'cue' someone from across the room. This is James Randi 101, folks...
How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund.
No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes feasible on the horizon they could update to post-quantum encryption and offer the ability to transfer from old-style addresses to new-style addresses, but this would be a herculean effort for everyone involved and would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.
Fortunately this will never actually happen. It's way more likely that ECDSA is broken by mundane means (better stochastic approaches most likely) than quantum computing being a factor.
> this would be a herculean effort for everyone involved and would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.
Any rational economic actor would participate in a post-quantum hard fork because the alternative is losing all their money.
If this was a company with a $2 trillion market cap there'd be no question they'd move heaven-and-earth to prevent the stock from going to zero.
Y2K only cost $500 billion[1] adjusted for inflation and that required updating essentially every computer on Earth.
> would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.
It doesn't require all holders to update their wallets. Some people would fail to do so and lose their money. That doesn't mean the rest of the network can't do anything to save themselves. Most people use hosted wallets like Coinbase these days anyway, and Coinbase would certainly be on top of things.
Also, you don't need to break ECDSA to break BTC. You could also do it by breaking mining. The block header has a 32-bit nonce at the very end. My brain is too smooth to know how realistic this actually is, but perhaps someone could do use a QC to perform the final step of SHA-256 on all 2^32 possible values of the nonce at once, giving them an insurmountable advantage in mining. If only a single party has that advantage, it breaks the Nash equilibrium.
But if multiple parties have that advantage, I suppose BTC could survive until someone breaks ECDSA. All those mining ASICs would become worthless, though.
Sometimes there is no valid hash found for any nonces in the 2^32 space and the timestamp and/or the extra nonce in the coinbase transaction in the block header have to be updated and tried again, so at least it's not quite that simple (simple, as distinct from easy).
Firstly I'd want to see them hash the whole blockchain (not just the last block) with the post-quantum algo to make sure history is intact.
But as far as moving balances - it's up to the owners. It would start with anybody holding a balance high enough to make it worth the amount of money it would take to crack a single key. That cracking price will go down, and the value of BTC may go up. People can move over time as they see fit.
Wouldn't they have to crack the private key by the time the block is mined? Otherwise that transaction would already be sent to another address? I don't have a good idea how long it would take supercomputers to crack a single private key, so I don't know if 13,000x faster would be fast enough, but I don't think it would.
The private key is a 256-bit number. I don't think even 13,000x faster than supercomputers is going to get your cracking time under the time for a 10-minute block. 2^256 is a really, really, really big number.
> How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund.
So if this understood knowledge, it means you cannot really transfer to quantum safe algo for Bitcoin. Are we only ones aware of this? Because if this true, it's actual alpha and Bitcoin should be sold asap and exchanged for land and physical gold.
As you alluded to, network can have two parallel chains where wallets can be upgraded by users asynchronously before PQC is “needed” (a long way away still) which will leave some wallets vulnerable and others safe. It’s not that herculean as most wallets (not most BTC) are in exchanges. The whales will be sufficiently motivated to switch and everyone else it will happen in the background.
A nice benefit is it solves the problem with Satoshi’s (of course not a real person or owner) wallet. Satoshi’s wallet becomes the defacto quantum advantage prize. That’s a lot of scratch for a research lab.
>Satoshi’s wallet becomes the defacto quantum advantage prize. That’s a lot of scratch for a research lab.
Considering that would be criminal theft I doubt it. Moving the funds could also lead to panic crash, selling them off would not only take ages but involve doxing yourself and put a billion dollar bounty on your head because transaction are public and off ramps all use KYC.
It would be much safer to slowly crack old small value wallets over time.
Reminder that actual good cryptocurrency like monero have the advantage of wallets and transactions being private so you would need to crack without even knowing if they are worth it or exist.
The problem is that the owner needs to claim their wallet and migrate it to the new encryption. Just freezing the state at a specific moment doesn't help; to claim the wallet in the new system I just need the private key for the old wallet (as that's the sole way to prove ownership). In our hypothetical post-quantum scenario, anyone with a quantum computer can get the private key and migrate the wallet, becoming the de-facto new owner.
I think this is all overhyped though. It seems likely we will have plenty of warning to migrate prior to achieving big enough quantum computers to steal wallets. Per wikipedia:
> The latest quantum resource estimates for breaking a curve with a 256-bit modulus (128-bit security level) are 2330 qubits and 126 billion Toffoli gates.
IIRC this is speculated to be the reason ECDSA was selected for Bitcoin in the first place.
Note, the 126 billion Toffoli gates are operations, so that's more about how many operations you need to be able to reliably apply without error.
It should be noted that according to IonQ's roadmap, they're targeting 2030 for computers capable of that. That's only about 5 years sooner than when the government has said everyone has to move to post quantum.
Yes obviously that has to happen before authentication doesnt work anymore. And then it also needs to end before, because yeah obviously everybody who can crack it has access to all wallets.
Clearly the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is a fitting place for one of the decommissions shuttles to reside. So why move it?
Endeavor is located in California (at the California Science Center) and Enterprise is located in New York (at the Intrepid Museum). They should steal one of those and take it to Houston; not Discovery.
As a New Yorker I have a conflict of interest here, but I would favor moving Endeavor anyway since Enterprise is a fake shuttle that never went to space.
Endeavor is in the county that built (https://www.energy.gov/etec/downey-facility) the Space Shuttles. They've got as much claim as Houston, and Houston already has a high-fidelity replica and one of the two 747s.
Houston already has an amazing replica shuttle that you can go inside and explore. Why do they need to spend hundreds of millions to dollars to steal another one?
I think there is at least something of a middle ground for almost-but-not-quite-public spaces and events. In this case the author is talking about airsoft games; it seems totally reasonable for the venue or organizer to enact policies, whether "no cameras allowed" or "purple helmet means don't show / blur this person".
In fully public spaces I think we're pretty much out of luck, though I do think that laser/lidar-based countermeasures should be legal.
This (and the underlying text) reads as intensly naive and an attempt to further a modern narrative completely divorced from historical context.
While I don't think that we can make a definitive statement that justice in "Africa" was nonexistent, the very idea of considering "Africa" as a single homogeneous environment or domain of policy is incredibly reductive at best.
Even the specific examples given of "restorative justice" are pretty much identical but less formal than the Roman Law counterparts.
> For instance, in ancient Zimbabwe, if you killed someone, you would pay 109 goats. If you had no goats, you would offer one of your children to the victim’s family. If you did not have a child, an adult from your family would go live with the dead person’s family.
I find this nearly impossible to believe that all of the hundreds of clans spanning tens of ethnicities that resided in what is present day Zimbabwe had "109 goats" encoded in their traditions, much less that oral traditions had sufficient stability over generations that this is even a sensical statement. If we accept the dubious idea that this was codified in a uniform way then the question is how does this differ from other traditions? Restitution for murder to avoid blood feuds was an essential part of both Roman and Germanic law traditions, as is subjugation and slavery (in the non-chattel sense used in the book).
There's also a bit of whitewashing of what it means to give someone to a victim's family. Without having looked deeper into it, it sounds rather like giving them someone to be a slave in recompense.
It's not like trading adult family members is in any way "restorative" emotionally; they certainly won't be pleased to have their lives uprooted. They'll be contributing labor to supplement the victim and that's about it.
reply