It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
> it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.
In 2000s there was some company in Russia selling English courses. It spammed so much, that people were really pissed off. To make long story short, the company disappeared from a public space when Golden Telecom joined the party of retaliatory "spam" calls and make computer to call the company using Golden Telecom modem pool.
So, yeah, you kinda can achieve something in this way, but to make sure you should lease a modem pool for that.
Only if they give that money to the fossil fuel industry ... bit of an important detail in the context of US energy subsidies and thumbs on scales.
Environmental groups denounced the deal as an alternate way to block wind projects, with one group calling it a "billion-dollar bribe" to kill clean energy.
"After losing again and again in court on his illegal stop-work orders, Trump has found another way to strangle offshore wind: pay them to walk away," said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action.
When I was dying from COVID, it was an agony that lasted for two or three days. I don't remember the most of it, but I had no will or strength to get up. My cat was pissed off about me not feeding her. Obviously she was, though I didn't witness it with my own eyes, I was too deep into that COVID thing. At some point she decided that enough was enough, so she came to me and sat on my face. But the real devilry was the piece of shit that was stuck to her fur. I can tolerate my cat's ass on my face, but not her shit. I was fully awake in seconds. And she got her food.
I always thought of her as of the stupidest cat I knew, but that event convinced me otherwise. She was the smartest cat, she was smart enough to conceal her intelligence so as not to raise my expectations for her behavior.
> it's because it's simply good at providing content the user wants to consume.
Well, a drug addict wants to consume his drug. Because his drug is good at keeping abstinence syndrome at a bay and probably the tolerance hasn't build up to levels when the addict couldn't feel the "positive" effects of it.
The user feels an impulse to consume the content, but whether they want it we can know only by questioning them. They can lie consciously or unconsciously, but there are no better ways to measure a desire to consume it. When talking about doom scrolling I never met a person who said they want to do it, but there are people who do it nevertheless.
> This just seems ripe for selective enforcement if not codified in law.
I agree. I'm not sure how they define "addiction" and how they measure "addictiveness". It is the most important detail in this story.
Oh, corporstions pushed age verification, so of course they will not have any choice now. But before that they could just stop being addictive regardless of age.
I don't see him trying to convince us that Netanyahu is alive. It is just a side story to build the article on. A funny story when Netanyahu struggling to prove he is alive.
Though, it you believe that Netanyahu is dead, then it will look to you as an attempt to convince you, but I don't think this was the goal of the author. Still, if you in this situation, try to run with the opposite hypothesis and think of ways how Netanyahu could prove he is alive. Or, if it seems difficult, then imagine any other prime minister who accidentally posted a six-fingered video of herself and now faces a problem of proving that she is alive. You'll get the idea of the article easily.
Picture this: your grandma calls you in a panic, and you tell her, "Drop me your public PGP key so I can verify the signature".. PGP is dead outside of niche geek circles exactly because key management is basically an unsolvable problem for the average person
> PGP is dead outside of niche geek circles exactly because key management is basically an unsolvable problem for the average person
Can this problem be solved with better software?
I believe it can, it is just average person doesn't need PGP. No demand for software solving this problem, therefore no software for that.
The problem can be solved, like a storage for known PGP public keys with their history: like where the key was acquired, and a simple algo that calculated trust to the key as a probability of it being valid (or what adjective cryptographers would use in this case?).
You can start with PGP keys of people you know, getting them as QR codes offline, marking them as "high trust" and then pull from them keys stored at their devices (lowering their trust levels by the way). There are some issues how to calculate probability, because when we pull some keys from different sources we can't know are their reported trust levels are independent variables or not, but I believe you can deal with it, by pulling the whole chain of transfers of the key, starting from the owner of the key and ending at your device.
It is just a rough idea, how it can be made. Maybe other solutions are possible. My point is: the ugliness of PGP is a result of PGP was made by nerds and for the nerds. There is no demand for PGP-like solutions outside of nerd communities. But maybe LLM induced corrosion of trust will create demand?
PGP works if you vouch for keys in person, both of you are honest and can be trusted to act in good faith when not in person, have good key chain and rotation hygiene, and the private keys can't be exfiltrated.
Yeah, there is no silver bullet solving the problem of trust completely and perfectly. People can lie and we can make them stop, while everything else is just a workaround.
The point of GP was that there any such system will require a central authority, PGP shows that you don't need it. I didn't claimed that PGP is a perfect or good enough solution, just that it exists and works for some people.
> both of you are honest and can be trusted to act in good faith when not in person
I believe it is not strictly necessary for the scheme to work. It is a limitation of OpenPGP and other implementations that they do not allow convert multiple independent observation of a public key (finding it from different sources, or encountering them used to sign messages) into a measure of trust to the key.
It is not a silver bullet either, but it can alleviate the problem and make it tractable.
The only doubts I have is how this system will stand against multiple actors trying to undermine it, but still I believe you can get something that will be better than nothing, and probably better than a central authority.
It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
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