That the motorways are untolled is not the only relevant number. There is also the tax in petrol which is quite far from being 'untolled'. Taxing petrol is much better for privacy in general than a toll for the roads.
Well, it means that people who need petrol are basically paying for EV owners to use the roads. I also worry about privacy but ANPR is everywhere is it not?
I remember paying for tolls with cash, but then, I'm ancient...
The damage to roads by heavy vehicles is the fifth power of the weight. So it’s trucks that are subsidizing your driving an EV and that’s perfectly fine.
I like coding in C++ a lot. I think it is great that it can both be a high level language an a low level one. One has control of the bits if one wants that but there are also a lot of goodies to make things happen automatically. I think RAII is the greatest invention in programming ever.
You have a point that there are a lot of separation mechanisms and that, if things were designed better, fewer would be needed but by the same argument it also seems unwise to increase the number of mechanisms to share data. Sockets by themselves are quite big enough on their own to quite literally drive the whole internet through.
A socket is just a raw byte stream. It's a solid base layer, but you'll have to implement your own communication protocol on top, and it'll require copying the data from one process to another. A "stream" is the wrong metaphor for local data sharing.
The data is already in memory and the source program knows its "shape"; there should be an easy mechanism to provide access to that by default, like /proc or gdb but for arbitrary data structures and with better UI.
One idea would be that the data structures that a program uses declare if and how they want to be protected/accessed. E.g., access levels could be: only accessible in a local code block, only accessible in one thread, accessible by a limited number of threads, persistent or not between program runs, accessible over the network by certain machines/people, accessible to the whole world. A tree of all data in a program/computer could be exposed subjected to such access control. I would think that this does not even need to cost performance because 'only accessible in one thread' would not have to be implemented in a way that is different from current local/global variables.
Well, I think people should go with their own judgment. Was a bad parent bad as a person or unable? Children who endure such an ordeal, as I once was, will know the difference. One of the aspects of enduring bad parenting is that one starts to doubt ones own judgment. Once all aspects have been weighed ones own judgment should be taken as accurate. Spouses of bad parents are very often quite blind to what is happening in their own house.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not
defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
> But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum...
I, frankly, don't. A lot of these conversations stop because of statements like this. You're assuming a set of priors that make your argument make a ton of sense and assuming other people agree with them as well. Take away that as your prior assumption and other viewpoints make a lot more sense.
There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it. I think that happens a lot when people talk about "bad ideas".
I don't think it's the ideas existing that is the problem. I think a focus on the ideas is a distraction from the question of what are the conditions that make these ideas attractive to people?
As an example, I dislike Trump immensely. However it's not at all surprising to me that people voted for him for a lot of reasons but I think the best example was in what is probably the best political slogan/ad I've seen in my life, "He's for you, she's for they/them."
I don't think the problem was Trump, I think the problem was the choice being Trump's ideas and the ideas he was up against being.
>There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it.
Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.
That may be the term but I recall it as a little more closely related to how I phrased it though probably not as clinical.
I don't necessarily think you're guilty of it but I do think the premise you're proposing hints at it.
I wouldn't argue that democracy doesn't requires are shared understanding of the facts. The argument I'm making is that the motivation for people to believe certain things often is the root of the "problem", rather than the existence of things for them to believe.
Notably, I think, The shared understand of "the facts", is a convenient over-simplification. The real world situations where someone has "the facts" wrong, isn't usually a question of fact or fiction really, it's a focus on the emphasis of the narrative being spun. A reading of the same story comes of very different, even with shared facts, depending upon which parts of the story you think are important.
The usual disagreement on a lot of current events isn't what actually happened. Fringe elements will argue the plain facts but the majority of people are disagreeing about why something happened, not what happened.
Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.
Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.
It's true though, these people exist. There's bias in everyone, but it takes a special kind of arrogant to call a large portion of the population "cattle" because they are in disagreement.
Regarding questions of what how measurement relates to schrodinger time evolution:
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0503009 . I think it is absolutely astonishing that many physicists do not know this.
Sure, we are likely to see soundness bugs in the current lean kernel again. And in other proof assistants too. Regarding the correctness of proofs this is not the biggest worry, in my opinion, though. Both sides of attempting to get faulty proofs in and of strengthening the kernel to keep them out have AI on their side. If AI advances more and becomes smarter it can be used on both sides. And the defending side has the easier task here. I am not sure about the Navier-Stokes proof but in general it sounds highly unlikely that many well-known theorems turn out false.
The bigger worry are question that Terrence Tao is also talking about. I.e., is the proven theorem actually the theorem we are interested in? Are basic definitions of the field stated correctly? That kind of question. There is also still parts of proof assistants that are not the kernel and that can be abused. E.g., abuse the pretty printer/parser to make something look different from what it actually is. Introducing an axiom while typographically hiding that one was added. If I remember correctly I saw an example of the latter thing in the Coq (now Rocq) theorem prover many years ago. I forgot how it precisely went or where I read that.
> If AI advances more and becomes smarter it can be used on both sides.
Yes, and that's true even if it doesn't advance or become smarter. It's happening already that people are using AI on "both sides" both adversarially and defensively and that is improving software, and hopefully mathematics as well.
> I am not sure about the Navier-Stokes proof but in general it sounds highly unlikely that many well-known theorems turn out false.
I'm talking about the LLM Navier-Stokes proof specifically because it's very long and complicated and an LLM is not the same as a human mathematician. A human mathematician is trying to use the tools in a truth-seeking way, whereas LLMs are trying to satisfy the goal of presenting a proof that convinces people it is correct. Maybe naively, it seems to me the failure modes of proof assistants would be amplified under adversarial conditions (i.e. driven by LLMs).
Completely agree that there seem to be many ways that relying on proof assistant software can go wrong.
What happens when we have proofs that are too long for a human to understand, and only the llm can spend the perhaps years of human effort to verify things? That will happen.
With humans we break things down (proofs, new concepts) into digestible hunks for each other, because you want other people to understand them but also verify them. And it's less common for someone to build a tower of new intellectual things with 1,000 new connected ideas that prove things and build up together, that ends with P = NP after all or something.
So since we have these new tools that can chain things together more than we can, eventually there will be huge "proofs" where there are long chains of new ideas, concepts used to build up ever more in giant intellectual towers. And we can't verify/understand them, at least not for many many years.
I shudder to think of such a situation. We already have very important ideas that have no proofs, that people build on. Now build 100s of these things together.
If we accept that AI is going to do all of these things humans will be superfluous and will just be optimized away. It looks a lot like we see the birth of silicon based life by the efforts of carbon based life. Carbon based life will die and it will not even be because AI decided to kill it, it will be because feeding and watering it was less important than other concerns. Bacteria may continue to exist, though.
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