Mike Dilger ☑️

I have to admit to feeling jealousy. I wish my government was shut down.

FYI there is a massive cyberattack on NPM right now, package developers being attacked, nasty commits being added and published, tokens being stolen and used to corrupt more packages. The ecosystem is currently widely corrupted. We just got an advisory from the NZ government about it.

SHA256 length extension attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOIBUe1fjX0 Just for entertainment and education. This isn't a problem in nostr because we use a signature, not a MAC (and nostr messages can't be extended beyond the closing brace).

Wow! I just got raptured! I guess it was real. Maybe it happened to NZ first because of the time zones. Definately ask Jesus for forgiveness and be good because you have less than 24 hours. It is SO nice up here.

狡兔三窟

The population of the globe will not go down to zero. The last few people (and it won't even go that far) will not just decide to not have children because that is the trend and the norm. Extrapolation is the tool of ignorance. You can extrapolate the population up towards Malthusian starvation, but you can also extrapolate the population down to zero. And believing either way is nuts. The population will change. Over the very long term it will bounce around a lot, sometimes going down. Just because it is going down now, for the first time in our lives, doesn't mean "panic!". The only problems we will encounter are ponzi scheme collapses, but those are probably good to clear off the table now and then. This is all I really meant by my last post about population. I wasn't defending the 1960s view. I was attacking the 2020s view. I have more respect for Norman Borlaug than for Elon Musk.

House prices are often hard to figure out. Is the market high? It is low? What is normal? I'm fond of the ratio of average house price to median household yearly income. This gives a number that you can compare across countries and over time. For you Americans: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ The lowest I've seen in my lifetime is 3.6 in the USA in 1973. The highest I've seen in my lifetime is 8.9 in NZ in 2022. NZ has fallen off of that back down to about 7. Which is now equal to the highest the US has ever seen. The 2005-2007 subprime meltdown, where up to 25% of subprime loans became bad debt, the peak was at 7. The US is back up to about 7.

I'd like to have an offline master key. For Mosaic, this would still be required to sign my relay list (server list) and sign device keys and again anytime those things change. Moving the data around on a USB stick is feasible but annoying. I quite like the seed signer and using QR codes and cameras to move data around. So I'm writing an android app that I will run on a disused android phone that I disable as much as possible (no SIM, no WiFi password, airplane mode, flashing the modem with zeroes). Yes of course the far-side of the modem pinging the towers is not something I can disable. Still it could be attacked from the cell tower. Not likely but completely possible. Unfortunately I haven't found any good handheld computers with cameras, without networking, and running linux. My Librem 5 spontaneously hard crashes and reboots after less than an hour of usage, else I'd try that. Maybe I should just pull the seed signer code, add what I want, and use my seed signer. Anyhow, the code I'm writing is with Dioxus that targets a lot of platforms: linux, macos, windows, appimage, web, ios, and android.

Population growth is slowing way down. Some people are worried about this. But I think it is a good thing. The Earth has some carrying capacity and if we go beyond it people will start starving. That is not fun. Yes, we can engineer a higher carrying capacity as we did during the green revolution. But there are still limits. Population is still growing. It is still growing in the USA. It is still growing in NZ. It is very much still growing in sub-Saharan Africa. Current estimates put the peak at 10 billion. The problem with population contraction that most of you and I will feel is that all the government (and non-government) Ponzi schemes will collapse. Economies will be rubbish, growth will be stalwart. But you can accustom yourself to such times. The idea that we need to start having more babies is misguided. We could push out the inevitable, but we can't avoid it happening eventually.

Speech that orders violence, such as a general telling his soldiers who and when to kill, is close enough to violence. But all other speech is just speech. It doesn't compel violence. Even if acting upon the speech would be violent, the speech itself isn't. One might suggest that arguing in support of Israel genociding all Palestinians is violence. But even as such a genocide clearly is, speech in favor of it is just expression of desire and thought. The difference is that the speech CARRIES NO FORCE OF ACTION. And we all benefit from very clear lines in this respect, else our ability to talk about things will be severely curtailed. Even promoting the assassination of Charlie Kirk and then celebrating it afterwards... that too is just speech. The violence was the gun shot. And frankly, I prefer for assholes to open their mouths and show us who they are. I want us all to be able to talk about despicable thoughts, so that maybe we can head them off before they cause actions. As for violent retaliation against actual violence (not speech), that is a very touchy and complex game theoretic landscape. In civil countries the best course of action, clearly, is to leave violence to the law enforcement people, and if you are motivated, help them find the perps. I know a lot of Libertarians are super anti-government, but when there is an effective monopoly on violence that isn't behaving horribly, it is better to work with them, even if idealistically you think things should be different. Even places like the UK where they are arresting people for jokes, it is better at this point to work with law enforcement and just put up with the violation of your freedom and rights. All other paths are orders of magnitude worse. It would take quite a lot more than that to inspire me to start thinking about anti-government violence. Maybe I'm pacified by peaceful New Zealand, but also I'm more tolerant of injustices to myself as I get older. As for uncivilized places, the problem is much more complex. But before you think about joining or forming a violent gang to protect your family, go watch The Godfather movies.