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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Assuming that “concern” was in good faith in the first place. I believe it was a bad faith pretext for not venting the gas because it’s a well known fact that nitrogen makes up a significant portion of the atmosphere. If they were really worried about the nitrogen displacing enough oxygen to be dangerous, I can think of several ways to eliminate that risk even if I play along and accept that it’s possible.

    1. Vent the room. Or use a large room and a fan.
    2. Place oxygen meters in the room that sound an alarm if oxygen drops below 20%.
    3. Give oxygen masks to anyone who needs to be in the room.

  • With the hash one, it doesn’t look like that could be exploited by an attacker doing the bad hashing themselves, since any collisions they do find will only be relevant to the extra hashing they do on their end.

    But that encryption one still sounds like it could be exploited by an attacker applying more encryption themselves. Though I’m assuming there’s a public key the attacker has access to and if more layers of encryption make it easier to determine the associated private key, then just do that?

    Though when you say they share the same secret, my assumption is that a public key for one algorithm doesn’t map to the same private key as another algorithm, so wouldn’t cracking one layer still be uncorrelated with cracking the other layers? Assuming it’s not reusing a one time pad or something like that, so I guess context matters here.



  • In the case of the first nitrogen execution, they did dick all to vent away the carbon dioxide he was exhaling, so it eventually saturated the gas he was able to breathe and his lungs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of any more. When you hold your breath, the discomfort and urge to breathe again comes from the CO2 buildup rather than the lack of oxygen.

    If the exhaled gas gets vented properly, then there’s no discomfort. That they didn’t get this part right for the execution suggests malice, or at the very least extreme negligence because it doesn’t take expertise to understand this, just a little bit of depth in knowing how suffocation works. Which you’d figure people designing and carrying out an execution would seek.




  • The weird part is that they are somehow connected. For some reason, Alex Jones accepted a posthumous award to Bill Hicks, which I think was the whole springboard for the conspiracy theory (which I mostly like because it’s funny to see it turned back on him). It doesn’t help his case that Alex Jones’ public persona is a character he does with a fake voice and all that.

    It was also more plausible before Jones took that hard turn to the right. He used to be more apolitical (in a “both parties are fake and corrupt” and “here’s a list of issues but I’m not going to offer any concrete solutions other than ‘stay tuned for more’” kind of way), so it was once more believable that he was an extreme version of Hicks.

    Though even back then, a part of the conspiracy theory was that he was compromised by the elites, so it wasn’t a “Bill Hicks is trying to save us as Alex Jones” but more of a, “they got to Bill Hicks and made him fake his death and come back as a liar who leads people who start to see the truth down some stupid lizard people or aliens path so they don’t hurt the status quo”.


  • Why would you even need a doctor? All you’d need is access to something like fentanyl and general knowledge of how to calculate a lethal dose, then just pick a dose higher than that and have a second one prepared. Other than that, they’d just need training to insert an IV or needle into a vein.

    It’s a separate question from whether they should be executing anyone, but it just seems ridiculous that reliably killing someone is a hard problem. I personally think it’s based on a desire to walk a line where they are cruel to those they kill but don’t seem that way unless you look closely. Like with the first nitrogen execution, it sounded fool proof, but then they didn’t do anything to vent the CO2 and it became cruel.


  • I remember hearing to not layer encryptions or hashes on top of themselves. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. It was presented as if that weakened the encryption somehow, though wasn’t elaborated on (it was a security focused class, not encryption focused, so didn’t go heavy into the math).

    Like my thought was, if doing more encryption weakened the encryption that was already there, couldn’t an attacker just do more encryption themselves to reduce entropy?

    The class was overall good, but this was still a university level CS course and I really wish I had pressed on that bit of “advice” more. Best guess at this point is that I misunderstood what was really being said because it just never made any sense at all to me.






  • One thing I want is for my washing machine and dishwasher to coordinate with my water softener to be sure there’s enough soft water left so that no hard water will go through them and to immediately initiate a regeneration if there isn’t while the appliance waits for the regeneration to finish before starting.