Why, a hexvex of course!

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Ye gods, I can smell the armour polish AND the cheeto dust in this thread.

    The translation holding up is hilarious, it really does and you can hear the emotional damage that causes out there; I do wonder if it struck a genuine nerve.

    The amount of “protect the children” out there is also priceless - this is one of the best outrage manufactories I’ve seen in years; I look forward to that outrage fuelling more surveillance laws.




  • As someone who has taught both mathematics and statistics in his life the real difference boils down to proof Vs evidence.

    The mathematician is uncertain because Gödel showed no system can prove its own consistency. Proof is (generally) rigourous enough that this is the main issue; once it has been proven (assuming your axioms are good), it’s considered true.

    The statistician is uncertain because they work with samples rather than the population. There is also the issue of inferring causation even if your sample isn’t unrepresentative. With statistics you’re always building evidence, but you can never have concrete proof via statistical methods alone.

    Also fun fact, given that there is more than one type of mathematics (e.g. platonist Vs intuitionistic), some giving different answers to the same question (excluded middle/trichotomy on the reals), and all of which are equiconsistent, we realise that mathematics really is just a branch of philosophy (i.e. what axioms are you willing to believe).










  • There are a lot of comments here saying “it’s tragic because no-one cared”, but that is misleading as there is now a strong privacy movement.

    I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.

    Yes we’re all fighting a rearguard retreat, but without Snowden’s sacrifice there would be no rearguard and there would be abject surrender rather than retreat, and we’d all live under eastern-style surveillance states without ever knowing.


  • “If it continues long enough, even a reign of terror may become a fondly remembered period. People believe they want justice and wise government but, in fact, what they really want is an assurance that tomorrow will be very much like today.” - Terry Pratchett

    It’s a good quote, and it tells you a lot about the idea of organising to forcefully change things. Change comes through education, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice; it comes from teaching people that tomorrow can really be better. It’s never quick, it’s rarely (if ever) a great leader who brings it about, and it’s never such leaders who pay the price.



  • I’m not entirely sure how that’s panning out in Aus (a quick search suggests it’s a flop, but the sources aren’t great). I think the general consensus is that it’s not as enforceable as they hoped.

    We are moving towards an era of a more locked down web in the UK. The main flag here is “robust age verification” - i.e. we’re moving from “you must provide ID to view adult material on social media” to “you must provide ID to use social media”.

    One can quickly see “your id must be retained and linked to your account to reduce crime” and “any officer of the law may view this ID to better support crime reduction” slipping in over the next 20 years or so.

    Overall, this feels like another Trojan horse to move towards a China-style de-anonymised web. Bad move all around really.