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Requisite link directly talking about this:
The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
Erica’s original hypothesis was that violence was more successful, but was convinced to do research on the topic and found that while it does work, nonviolence on a mass scale is more effective.
The two papers:
18·3 months agoI asked Sonnet why should or shouldn’t trust a PACT, For what that is worth:
Reasons to Trust It
- The privacy is in the math, not in promises.
Unlike a privacy policy, which is a legal document you have to sue someone to enforce, cryptographic unlinkability is enforced by mathematics. If the blind signature scheme is correct, physically connecting your identity to your token redemption is computationally infeasible - not just forbidden by terms of service.
- Separation of knowledge is structural.
The design deliberately splits what each party knows so that no single organization - not even Cloudflare - can see the full picture. This is called the “need to know” principle enforced by protocol design rather than policy.
- It is open and being standardized.
This is going through the W3C and IETF - public standards bodies where cryptographers around the world can review, attack, and critique the design. Contrast this with Google’s Web Environment Integrity proposal, which was designed unilaterally and killed by public backlash.
- MPC prevents any single party from aggregating data.
When sites want to measure “how good are our Anchors?” they use Multiparty Computation (MPC) - a technique where multiple parties each hold a piece of encrypted data, compute a result together, and none of them ever sees anyone else’s raw data.
Reasons to Be Cautious
- Collusion is still theoretically possible.
The system’s privacy guarantees break down if the organizations involved secretly cooperate. The architecture tries to make this structurally unlikely (different companies with competing interests), but it cannot make it mathematically impossible.
- The Anchor becomes a new gatekeeper.
If most Anchors are big tech companies, and you don’t have accounts with them, you may find yourself unable to pass PACT checks - effectively locked out of parts of the web. This is exactly the criticism leveled at the old Apple PAT system.
- It is still in design phase.
The technical details of PACTs are still being finalized. 3 The devil is always in the implementation details.
It does seem worth looking into the setup of this, as I admit too a healthy amount of skepticism, but a bunch of people gave it some thought and some of the choices don’t look like money grubbing corporate ones.
52·3 months agoI’d be curious why you think LLMs are dead ending? Is it that you think the Jepa models are likely to find success and win out or do you think the LLMs in generally are just hitting their peaks?
Your point on power usage is interesting, although I think that is mostly on training not usage correct?
To your point it’s one of the levers regulators and governments have against corporate entities.
It’s a difficult venue, but it does work even if it seems like it has a minor effect. It creates disincentives and incentives which business are influenced by.
It would be better if regulators had more teeth, but capitalist defang whenever they can. Be it laws, regulators, or even just public influence.
1·7 months agohttps://www.niwater.com/media/geso5q4o/2024-ni-water-drinking-water-quality-annual-report.pdf Is the report vs those standard.
This is a comparable report from NYC. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-water/drinking-water-supply-quality-report/2025-drinking-water-supply-quality-report.pdf
'Tis a great question and one very worth digging into. First off, I suggest getting The Big Thirst from the library. It’s a great book describing the challenge of water for several cities across the world and the processes used to make your water safe.
Second, I’d also suggest checking out some YouTube videos like this Animagraffs video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVfshmK0Ak. As The Big Thirst and others describe, there are a plethora of engineering techniques now to purify water on a citywide scale, and it is very much up to local utilities to decide how they do it.
Third, someone has already pointed out that there are water quality standards in N. Ireland. As others have noted, it needs to be “safe,” not “sterile.” Indeed, you actually do want some minerals in your water—otherwise it can be detrimental to your health. Drinking straight distilled water continuously, for example, is problematic because “pure” water will actually leach the minerals it encounters.
Fourth, the purity of water is ultimately about how much money is invested in purifying it. Chip companies and scientific endeavors need higher levels of water purity for some of their processes. This can be achieved through the engineering processes mentioned above, producing incredibly pure water—which is actually dangerous to drink.
Lastly, the purification of water from your swamp is a function of how much money the city is willing to spend, but it is feasible to take nearly any water and make it safe to drink with enough investment in infrastructure. As part of this, the pipes that deliver water to your house are crucial: they must remain full and pressurized (pushing clean water out, not allowing contamination in). I mention this because it’s important to understand that the infrastructure around water delivery is nearly as important as the treatment itself. (Similarly true for wastewater.)
Worth reading on the background of 230 https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2026/02/30-years-of-section-230-why-we-still-need-it-for-a-safer-internet/
Good call out of the identifiable victim effect and the affect heuristic, where decisions are driven by emotional responses rather than objective analysis of risks or benefits.
I feel like you watched the video differently than I did because his whole point was about the prewash and the wash. The fact that the main washes where the pod gets dumped in, not during the pre wash for the for 15 minutes, which is his trying to be using powdered soap.
Or at least that was the first half of the video. The second half was about heat and wash cycles.
A dishwasher has two major cycles that are relevant to dish soap. One is the I’ll show about 15 minutes. And the there is the main wash, which is like an hour plus depending. If you don’t use powdered dish soap and split it up then you’re missing the advantage of the prewash.
Second half is focused on the effect of heat and why you should drain your water line of cold water through your faucet before you start your dishwasher. By doing that, you increase the heat and you increase the longevity of that heat on is that are in your dishwasher. It’s worth noting that heat is good for dishwashing liquid both because it helps the enzyme break down and also probably breaks down with the food material at some cases.
Beyond that, he was very enthusiastic about his new soap, which he helped create, and rightfully so. Double blind test, it came out very well against premium pods, and he was able to prove his whole point about pods not being useful in a prewash.
201·2 years agoTry How do I pass cookie to yt-dlp.
As install YT-dlp on your command line, (including ffmpeg). Log in to your site, and use this section to pass the cookie to your YT-dlp command with your video link.
To quote from a paper on the topic of OS security:
According to the paper [5], windows is the most user friendly and has more hardware compatibility. In terms of security, Linux is the most secure among all OS given that it is an open- source operating system which gives users the ability to customize and implement security patches. As for memory management, macOS is the better option due to its fully integrated virtual memory system which is often on and continuously provides addressable space up to 4 per process. The virtual memory system allocates extra space for swap files on the root file system as a program uses space.
All available OS offer some level of security features such as firewalls, antivirus software, and encryption [6]. macOS has a level of security due to its unique operating system designed specifically for Apple devices with no third-party developers involved. Linux, being open source, is often regarded as more secure than Windows, which is a target of many malware attacks [7].
I would entirely agree with this, having watch BBC, NatGeo, History Channel, and more media people who love GDrives, only use Macs, filmed deliverables on iPhone, want Mac Pros for editing etc.
Have you used windows lately? I swear it’s become half-assed as an OS. Might still have the enterprise management features, but it’s incredibly painful in a mixed enterprise environment that is not standardized office boxes. (e.g. science equipment). I avoid it like the plague if at all possible due to it’s now quirky nature.
I’m dating myself, but at least NT didn’t crash all the damn time when you access a share on a NetApp or install a new version of the evil Java… Etc.
Sounds like a good bot.
Anyone know how much of the oil transported is actually used for plastic, percentage wise?
Also worth remembering that Crime in the US is at a near low overall. Violent crime is at a historic low, while non-violent crime is also low with the exception of retail theft. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-historic-rate-new-fbi-data-show
So less money for Police, more for Mental health professionals, as that is a huge percentage of their callouts. But why would politicians want to keep people off the streets by a universal income, and gainfully employed and healthy… oh wait bureaucratic inertia and campaign finance corruption… 🤦