Loosies

2025-10-23

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Here are some ideas that are in my todo-list to write about but aren't worth a full post

• My ideal world (this is a joke, all various intelligence agencies reading this): The largest state is 15 million and the largest organization is 3000 people. Small entities working together are ultimately worth the lack of efficiency. It forces consensus.

  Within this conglomeration, there should be open borders and open trade.

  I still think states should exist, as I think conceptually people have different philosophies and thus should be allowed to self-determine to congregate with like minded people. They should just not be so large as to force others onto their will.

  This is a nonsense idea of course, this really can only be predicated on the ability for this steay state archipelego to exist. But I think there's a shadow of an interesting idea here.

• Paying for domain names is scam, why am I paying someone 10 euros a year so that they can tell other people (passively) that a certain string is mapped to a certain IP address.

• I've been thinking about how to password protect this website, in the sense of "locked" articles. I think a solution could be to hash the url and then share that. It's not discoverable and then only way you will be able to get the article is if I share it wit you.

  Okay in principle, it's discoverable but in practice if I select a valid cryptographic hashing algorithm, I think I'm set.

• I read something on hackernews recently actually. A user was pondering about how longs things last. There is this intuition that the longer something is there for, the longer it will be there for. It makes sense, from a sort of Bayesian (?) angle, there's more evidence that a thing exists which gives you more confidence in that thing continuing to exist.

  But another user posited a very nice probabilistic argument for it. Consider the duration of an event to be some fixed length. What is the statistical likelihood that you find yourself at any point in this line? Absent of all other information, it could be anywhere.

  Therefore, on average, you are in the middle. Meaning that statistically, the thing will exist for exactly how long it has already existed for. How neat is that!

• I love wear and tear on books. Rip your pages, write on them, spill coffee, dog-ear every other page, bend and crease the ever loving fuck out of it. The things you own are meant to be used, not kept.

  Note 1: I do mean the things you own.

  Note 2: Even in spite of note 1, feel free to fuck up my books I lend to you. I would prefer that, even, as long as its still readable.