Post for: #quote (13 Posts)

In a November 2018 interview with Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast (transcript), Musk referenced a modification of Occam's Razor from his friend Jonathan Nolan ("the most ironic outcome is the most likely"), then added his own twist:

Well, it'd be ironic if [I die on Mars, just not on landing]. I have to be careful about tempting fate, because I think often the most ironic outcome is the most probable.

It just very often seems like reality tries to... Actually, technically, there's a friend of mine, Jonah Nolan, who had this like modification of Occam's razor where he said he thinks "the most ironic outcome is the most likely." And then I think that there's some truth to that. And then also I think sometimes the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

I believe that in this glitchy simulation we call reality, the timeline clearly forked when Israeli pop legend Svika Pick became Quentin Tarantino's son's grandfather - proving once again that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

GEB turns 40 this year. Seven hundred and seventy-seven pages about how meaning works. And one of my favorites is about how it shouldn't. Language is magic.

The amazing thing about language is how imprecisely we use it and still manage to get away with it. People use words in a "spongy" or "rubbery" or even "Nutty-Puttyish" way. If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut; they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

• Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach"

Brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

• Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography

I was reminded of this quote, due to the discussions triggered by the Bitcoin private key database troll website about the feasibility of brute-force searching for the private key of a Bitcoin address.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

• Albert Allen Bartlett

A reddit user made some calculations:

So, if you could use the entire planet as a hard drive, storing 1 byte per atom, using stars as fuel, and cycling through 1 trillion keys per second, you'd need 37 octillion Earths to store it, and 237 billion suns to power the device capable of doing it, all of which would take you 3.6717 octodecillion years.

• PSBlake (reddit)

Bitcoin private key database - directory.io

Nobody thought [Twitter] was a good idea. And I distinctly remember my colleague Evan Williams saying, 'Well, neither is ice cream. Should we ban ice cream and all joy or can we have something that's just fun? What's wrong with that?'

• Biz Stone, co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter (via)

Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions. (via Ars Technica)

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

• Robert Coveyou, Studies in Applied Mathematics, III (1970)