Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.

Sure, the internet is more practical, and the odds of being caught in the time required to execute a decent strike plan, even one as vague as: "we're going to Amerika and we're going to hit 50 high profile targets on July 4th, one in every state" (Dear NSA analyst, this is entirely hypothetical) so your agents spread to the field and start assessing from the ground the highest impact targets attainable with their resources, extensive back and forth from the field to central command daily for 90 days of prep, but it's being carried out on 270 different active social media channels as innocuous looking photo exchanges with 540 pre-arranged algorithms hiding the messages in the noise of the image bits. Chances of security agencies picking this up from the communication itself? About 100x less than them noticing 50 teams of activists deployed to 50 states at roughly the same time, even if they never communicate anything. HF (more often called shortwave) is well suited for the numbers game. A deep cover agent lying in wait, potentially for years. Only "tell" is their odd habit of listening to the radio most nights. All they're waiting for is a binary message: if you hear the sequence 3 17 22 you are to make contact for further instructions. That message may come at any time, or may not come for a decade. These days, you would make your contact for further instructions via internet, and sure, it would be more practical to hide the "make contact" signal in the internet too, but shortwave is a longstanding tech with known operating parameters.

I guess that's why you pay your soldiers. In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development. ... The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.” ... Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.

I think a generic plug would be great but look at how fragmented USB specifications are. Add that to biology and it's a whole other level of difficulty. Brain implants have great potential but the abandonment issue is a problem that exists now that we have to solve for. It's also not really a tech issue but a societal one on affordability and accountability of medical research. Imagine if a company held the patents for the brain device and just closed down without selling or leasing the patent. People with that device would have no support unless a government body forced the release of the patent. This has already happened multiple times to people in clinical trials and scaling up deployment with multiple versions will make the situation worse. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2818077 I don't really have a take on your personal desires. I do think if anyone can afford one they should make sure it's not just the up front cost but also the long term costs to be considered. Like buying an expensive car, it's not if you can afford to purchase it but if you can afford to wreck it.

It’s infuriating that Safari/Apple only allows me to choose from five different search engines. I self-host my own SearXNG instance and have to use a third-party extension to redirect my queries.

OpenAI has stated that its models were trained on publicly available and licensed data. There is no confirmed evidence that ChatGPT was specifically trained on copyrighted books like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The company has not disclosed the full details of its training data.