Well, that seems a bit reductive because nothing can create a single cell right now. All cells are self-copied-and-divided. Omnis cellula e cellula, as they say. There is no cell constructor anywhere. Both Nature and Artifice use the same device to make more cells: a previous cell.
One thing that seems reasonable is to have car points and driver points. In the event of violations, both the vehicle and the driver are assigned points depending on detection. Then after a certain number of points, the vehicle is impounded with the owner able to have it stored at an appropriately licensed facility of their choice that ensures that the vehicle cannot be driven on public roads.
Reporting vehicle theft etc. can provide immunity from points on the car.
That seems extremely unreasonable, cops can prove who was driving at the time of the violation or they can not bring a case. If I lend my car to someone and they break the law, it’s not the car’s fault.
I’m glad my state found these unconstitutional as well.
Well, objects used in the commission of a crime are frequently confiscated. That's not outrageous. If I lend someone my gun and they rob a bank, I will likely not get my gun back though "it's not the gun's fault". Automated machinery has the advantage that it is impartial and effective, and given that law enforcement costs a lot in these circumstances, and that chasing cars for small enforcement violations creates worse outcomes, it seems thoroughly reasonable to apply the crime to the detectable object.
If you're curious what it's like for a couple of normies doing IVF, I wrote down our experience here to the degree I remembered: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
So I don't see people who annoyed me for one or other reason in the past, I auto-hide the top 1000 accounts by word count, and I hide all green users. This was trivial to write for myself and I think more people should work on something like this for themselves.
They're a structure to compensate for the lack of state power created by us burdening our instruments of government with overwhelming requirements as much as I suspect that all we did is move the location where crimes were committed. I doubt the direction to success is through burdening these successor organizations with requirements. I suspect it is through reducing the constraints upon our governments - though how one would go about that in the face of highly-organized directed interests is an unsolved problem. Certainly, no one has yet come up with a scheme where firefighters' unions cannot impose rent-seeking requirements like FARS upon the remainder of society. Perhaps I'll take the chance to make a grand proclamation or 'hot take': "America will succeed or fail in the next century depending entirely on her ability to solve rent-seeking".
Well, the natural thing to do then is to allow cryptocurrency bets on our opponents' actions. The men in their governments will likely eagerly give up valuable information in exchange for money: distributed espionage.
Well, certainly, if they had chosen otherwise it is unlikely they could have continued to operate:
> ...the Commission may determine that such agreements, contracts, or transactions are contrary to the public interest if the agreements, contracts, or transactions involve—(I) activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law; (II) terrorism; (III) assassination; (IV) war; (V) gaming; or (VI) other similar activity determined by the Commission, by rule or regulation, to be contrary to the public interest.
Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.
By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.
So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.
So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.
I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".
0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.
1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.
2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.
Even though the OP didn’t write their posts or the code or the text on the website, we at least know that some part of the project is original: only a human could come up with a project name so terrible. Speaks to the problem of vibecoding: anyone can generate a bunch of output but still, taste matters.
I was the developer of CamRAM/2pennyblue, so I have a fair bit of knowledge about how SenderPays works with hashcash, why it failed, and what issues any email postage system will have to solve.
The reason we chose hashcash versus a digital currency was that we were trying to eliminate friction points in terms of creating tokens for sending email (i.e., going to the bank for more tokens) and eliminating the possibility of everyone in the message chain holding their hand out, saying, "Pay me too."
The use of hashcash in email clearly had some benefits, including raising the cost of spam, guaranteeing mail delivery to a mailbox, and providing a clear indication of your mail server's reputation. But there were some other faults that were a combination of implementation problems and poor vision of the future, such as:
- The token was embedded in the message.
- There was no mechanism for scaling the cost dynamically.
- Power of two, increasing cost of tokens. I.e., increasing by a single bit doubled the time cost of a token.
- Distribution in time costs of creating tokens.
- T0 problem. How do you get started when nobody else is generating tokens?
- political issues. Ordinary people understood the concept and were willing to pay the cost in time to reduce spam, but technologists were indignant. How dare I spend their CPU cycles on creating a token?
- Vulnerable to botnets generating tokens.
Before I gave up on the project, I had a few fixes, and since then, I've thought of more that I would implement if I were to take on this particular albatross again.
In the ideal Hashcash email system, all messages would have tokens, but you need to get started. The solution was a somewhat messy combination of spam filters and a reputation database. The reputation database was populated with those to whom the server sent messages or whose messages had a valid token. If your email address was in the reputation database, you bypassed the token and spam filter requirements.
Dynamic pricing would have been created through an SMTP protocol extension. EHLO would indicate whether the server supports Hashcash tokens and provide a default token size for the sending server. Mail from: Rcpt to: would tack on an additional field for the token itself. A 250 would indicate that the token had sufficient value. A 3XX/4XX response would tell the sender the size of the token that should have been generated.
The Power of Two problem was solved by someone in the community who proposed creating a chain of tokens. Each individual token was smaller, but in aggregate, it was a large token with finer granularity than the original.
The political problem may have been solved because of Bitcoin. The main difference between Bitcoin and Hashcash postage tokens is that postage tokens do something positive: they deliver a mail message without getting caught by spam filters.
The botnet problem is simultaneously a benefit and a detriment. The attack model was a botnet software that could be used to distribute the load of generating Hashcash tokens across multiple infected machines. The attack was validated today in cryptocurrency miners as part of malware. At the same time, the botnet problem is how an organization could generate tokens for all the emails passing through its servers. Let the server distribute the token-generation load across all the desktops in your office.
As I envision it, such a system would start out generating lots and lots of hashcash tokens, but eventually, between remembering who you sent mail to and dynamic pricing, most people would not need to generate very large tokens, and spammers would be fully burdened.
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