"I often observe people making decisions if their odds of being right are greater than 50 percent. What they fail to see is how much better off they'd be if they raised their chances even more (you can almost always improve your odds of being right by doing things that will give you more information). The expected value gain from raising the probability of being right from 51 percent to 85 percent (i.e., by 34 percentage points) is seventeen times more than raising the odds of being right from 49 percent (which is probably wrong) to 51 percent (which is only a little more likely to be right). Think of the probability as a measure of how often you're likely to be wrong. Raising the probability of being right by 34 percentage points means that a third of your bets will switch from losses to wins. That's why it pays to stress-test your thinking, even when you're pretty sure you're right." - Ray Dalio,

X (formerly Twitter)

Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) on X

I often observe people making decisions if their odds of being right are greater than 50 percent. What they fail to see is how much better off they...

Iran is threatening our plans to murder more people. We must defend ourselves against this threat. All of our lies depend on it. Lives. I meant 'lives'.

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: 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:

Home Price to Income Ratio - Updated Chart | LongtermTrends

How affordable are homes in the US? Historically, a typical house in the US cost around 5 times the yearly household income. The ratio in this char...

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.