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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • Then I would steer away from arguments which are more debatable and stick to ones that are more robust and focus on the present and future than the past, and avoid anything that can get mired in debate. I’d focus on what the specific problem is (we will have fewer artists due to competition with AI) why it’s a problem (cultural stagnation, lack of new inspiration for new ideas) and why alternative solutions to regulation wouldn’t work (would socializing artistic fields work as they’d no longer be subject to market forces).



  • I’ve heard the sentiment that change and convenience are killing society before, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I prefer to shop online. I get no sense of community from stores where every interaction has a hanging financial incentive around it, I get it from local organized runs, other frequent visitors of the dog park, etc. To me, that line of reasoning feels almost like lamenting how good the pipes in your house are, because you don’t need to call a plumber and get to interact with them.

    Shopping online gives me more options, more reviews, easier ways to look up additional technical details without feeling weird taking space in an aisle while researching on my phone. It’s also more efficient in terms of total driving; one person making deliveries for everyone in a neighborhood requires less total driving than all those people making individual trips to a store. And it frees up more time for me to do things I actually want with the people I enjoy.

















  • I think the responses with an encrypted/committed guess being made public, a public result, and then a reveal of the key, have it right for the scenario of people making guesses as to the result of a flip.

    Re-reading your question, though, refers more to there being an agreed result for a group of people as opposed to checking a guess. I think this would require a bit of a variation. The trivial method would be to use the previous method and assign “correct guess” to heads and “incorrect guess” as tails, but this only works if you don’t believe that any two members are colluding with each other.

    Another solution would be to have each member generate a random number and encrypt it, and post the encrypted value. After all have been posted, everyone posts the key to decrypt their number, and adds up all the numbers together and takes the sum modulo the number of options (2 in the case of a coin) and matches it with a predetermined mapping. For instance, if 1 is heads and 0 is tails, and the sum of the numbers is 63752, 63752 % 2 = 0 which is tails.

    There are a couple gotchas to prevent errors. There has to be an agreed upon maximum number which is one less than a multiple of the number of options. For instance, if random numbers are allowed from 0 to 2 inclusively, there is a bias towards tails (0 % 2 == 0, 1 %2 == 1, 2 % 2 == 0). The other is the encryption algorithm would need to be chosen such that multiple keys can’t easily be created to provide different valid decrypts. This would also likely require some padding to the clear text, which could be achieved by some member of the group posting some arbitrary text first, and then all members appending that text to their number before encrypting it.