stifle867 @ stifle867 @programming.dev

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439

Joined

2 yr. ago

I haven't read the paper but an event is just any interaction between particles. Just literally anything happening. I wouldn't be trying to learn much from this write up though and highly suggest looking into some better sources of information.

Since the second law of infodynamics is a cosmological necessity, and appears to apply everywhere in the same way, it could be concluded that this indicates that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct or a giant computer.

This is such a huge leap to make. It's nearly equivalent to saying due to the fact that your coffee gets colder over time you can conclude that the entire universe is a simulation.

A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.

According to? Presumably if you can simulate an entire universe you have at least orders of magnitude more computational capacity than this universe. But apparently not too much more because you would "require" compression in order to fit all that data?

Just a few things that stood out to me as wtf moments.

EDIT: I forgot the best quote in the page:

We know the universe is expanding without the loss or gain of heat, which requires the total entropy of the universe to be constant.

Not even remotely true. It's commonly accepted that the entropy of the universe is constantly increasing and it's got nothing to do with the the universe as a whole being unable to lose or gain heat (from an outside source). Entropy increases because what's inside, as a whole, is moving towards a state of equilibrium.

Information is quantifiable in physics. PBS Spacetime has some videos on information theory if you're interested. A very simple example could be the spin of a particle (say it's either up or down). That represents one "bit" of information because it only gives you a binary response - the same as in a computer. We don't have any great models once you get to the size of biology but in theory you can layer it up all the way from the smallest of subatomic particles and "measure" the information of anything.

Possibly true, but as much as that's bandied around it's rarely balanced against the fact that if it's not possible then there's a 0% chance of it happening (somewhat obviously). And it's not like the possibility exists on a continuum where you could say it's 50/50. It's either one or the other.

the children apparently duped him into putting on the 2023 horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

You definitely have a point with the public facing posts. However, I will disagree with you on two points.

1. "Harmful content" does not seem to apply here as the article implies that specifically posts criticizing government policies were flagged.
2. Even so, harmful content could just as well be classified through existing procedures such as members of the public filing complaints rather than simply "keeping score".

It's a bit different when your employer is the government as they should be held to a higher standard.

"we need to break encryption so that we can stop terrorists and CP!"

China's claims don't stand up to any scrutiny. The whole world has seen over and over how China has been attempting to setup a conflict with any country operating in this general area. We see them bumping into ships, coming within feet of aircraft, setting up chain nets, etc. For them to say "oh look the Phillipines hit us!" is outrageous. China is nothing more than a school yard bully who repeats "stop hitting yourself", and like a bully their behaviour comes from a place of deep inadequacy and insecurity.

It's the fact that the intelligence agencies have proven themselves to be unable to responsibility use their powers, and instead find every sneaky way possible to infiltrate and spy on their own citizens while preventing nothing. That's what has pushed the world to say enough is enough and we are going to encrypt everything we can. Now the global powers are crying poor about how they need access to stop terrorism, while being completely unable to point to a single instance where they stopped a terror attack and contrarily there's plenty of terror attacks that were never stopped.

Just go in and leave a 1 star review for constantly bugging you with review solicitations

What are we giving up in order to get these concessions from China? They aren't going to give up the penalties they imposed with no reason. Deeply concerning.

These are all points to be making to a totally different conversation. The original comment that caused this person to step down was a condemnation of committing war crimes, not an analysis of which specific acts qualify as war crimes nor whether they support a specific party. These type of comments further the exact problem I pointed out. It's not an excuse to say "but they do". Be better, don't make the same mistakes just because everyone else is.

Yes I did and everything you pointed out does nothing to address my comment.

It doesn't do any actually tests to compare it to other OS implementations.

Is it Windows 11 that's specifically causing this, or is it a general problem?

How does pointing out that they did tests with different CPUs and SSDs, multiple benchmarking software, and different encryption methods do anything to address my complaint that they did not comment on whether this is a Windows 11 specific issue? Did you even ready comment?

Exactly right. To me it seems overly clicky baity to specifically condemn Windows 11 for the overhead of software based encryption because the hardware doesn't support it. The same problem exists across all platforms (hypothetically) if there is no hardware support.

It would have been another thing if they could show this problem was unique to Windows 11, or if they focused on the fact that it was difficult to disable. Instead they put so much effort into saying Windows 11 runs 45% slower due to Bitlocker.

It's not a competition to see who can commit the most war crimes. This whole idea of comparing one faction against another to see who is worse is just stupid. It should not even come into play when someone simply condemns war crimes! The fact that people read so much into a simple statement says more about them than the person who posted it. If someone's reaction to someone saying "war crimes are war crimes even when commited by your allies" is to think "well that person is justifying Hamas's actions" then the problem lies there, just as much as it is to think "that person is saying Israel doesn't have a right to defend themselves".

All it is is making the world more divisive when it should be unifying to condemn the tragic loss of innocent human life. People should not impose their factional viewpoints on something as simple as that.

That's one issue I had with this article. It doesn't do any actually tests to compare it to other OS implementations. How can we condemn Microsoft for 45% slower speeds (in a specific benchmark on specific hardware) when there's no context to compare it to? And this claim is specifically only for software encryption where hardware level encryption is not available. Is it Windows 11 that's specifically causing this, or is it a general problem?

Everything you said is valid... but to me, it doesn't really apply to this specific context. As far as I could see (admittedly I did only skim the article) but the general statement he made did not mention any specifics. I think it's unfair to take a broad statement such as condemning war crimes, and to rebut it by saying well a lot of other people are calling this one specific instance a war crime when it hasn't yet been proven.

Good point. Smash & grabs are definitely a valid threat model that FDE can help mitigate the effects of. Can be more or less prevalent due to location and ease of access. Personally, I live in a high rise, access controlled apartment so the smash & grab is a non issue for me.

Another specific threat could be protection against government seizure.

While this is a real issue, the threat is best mitigated outside of the browser. In theory any application you run could put contents in your primary selection, the threat is what you do with that. The biggest threats I can imagine are insecure shell settings which the author pointed out and can be mitigated easily. Or as a commenter pointed out, cryptocurrency related activities could be at risk - such as pasting in an address to send the currency to could be hijacked and you probably wouldn't even notice as the addresses are random. X is known to be insecure and if you're doing something sensitive like handling cryptocurrency it would be best practice not to run X anyway.

It would be much easier to check the settings for your shell and display server. It's a very niche threat. Think about how having something copied into your clipboard could actually effect you? I can't imagine too many scenarios where you would paste something malicious that would actually be a problem. Paste something malicious into an email and you could just delete it. Paste something into the URL address bar and it wouldn't submit until you told it to. Paste something malicious into your terminal and it wouldn't submit until you hit enter (check that last one yourself).

Alternatively, disable javascript in the browser.

I 100% agree that it effects an extremely small percentage of the population, but it's also not hard to imagine a scenario in which this can have real consequences.

Let's imagine I have a popular website that documents Linux tips and tricks (think: which command can I run to see drive storage used again?). In there I have a short command people can copy and paste to run (maybe df -h). The user copies this command and switches window to their terminal, at which point the blur event listener fires and I override the innocuous command with a malicious command. The user pastes it into their terminal without any indication that the primary selection content is now different.

Yes, this is due to both insecure X and shell settings that doesn't effect everyone (Wayland and sane shell). It's as much or even more the fault of the insecure programs, but Firefox is a part of that. Even in this situation it would be much more likely that the user is effected compared to the "general population". It's more of a targeted attack than a broad insecurity, but it's not a "one in a million" chance.