The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.

A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.

> There is no fixing this. The west cannot afford to start industrialising because it lacks skilled manual labour, it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology, the costs are astronomical which makes it unviable form day one, and most importantly - it lacks cheap energy which is absolutely crucial to have a blossoming heavy industries.

I enjoy doomerism as much as the next person, but honestly those all seem like incredibly fixable things that just require the right policy changes and sustained investment. Western countries certainly have the democratic government systems and financial resources necessary to do those things if they so choose.

One incentive that could work in the US without having to completely change how elections work would be for the government to actually shut down when it runs out of money. Shut downs are only remotely politically viable because nearly all the parts of the government that people regularly rely on more or less keep working.

This means the public backlash from shutting down the government is significantly muted, and it gives the opportunity for some less intelligent people to point to it as proof the government doesn't actually do anything. But it only works because the government basically forces employees in those roles to work for free with the promise of being eventually paid at some point, which is pretty weird when you really think about it.

Consider an alternate version of events where the government running out of money means all government functions immediately cease. No airport security, no air traffic control. Federal law enforcement goes home. The military stands down. Every federal government function stops October 1st since there was no longer any money to pay for it. Not only would the government not still be shut down, it never would have shut down since the impact would be so immediate and so significant that politicians would never risk it actually happening.

> I care less about how they fix the problem and more about that the problem is fixed.

Just in general that kind of attitude is how you end up exchanging one problem for exciting new problems that might be even worse, assuming the poorly considered solution even fixes the original problem.

Any halfway thoughtful and intellectually honest solutions analysis needs to consider A) is this an effective way to solve my problem and B) does it create unintended negative consequences or tradeoffs. Rhetoric exclusively focusing on the severity of the problem is almost always intended to get you to disengage the part of your brain that considers those two questions in favor of supporting any approach that just promises to solve the problem, whether or not it does so or creates any new problems in the process.

"Building things" is not science, it's engineering. We could certainly compare the outcomes of "bureaucratic" science against the free market variety, but there's basically no free market science going on to support such a comparison.

This isn't a value judgement. Engineering is just as important as science, but just as more science is not a replacement for engineering, neither does better engineering free us from the need to keep pursuing science. And at the end of the day, SpaceX might be an impressive engineering company, but we still need the scientists. And it's weird how often the success of SpaceX is brought up as an implicit argument that we can send all the scientists to work on farms or whatever without any ill effects.

It also seems notable that a company like SpaceX is an obvious candidate to bring back the 20th century style corporate funded scientific research organizations to underpin their engineering efforts in a way that would presumably be free of the hated "bureaucracy". But if they've done so, I haven't heard about it.

> The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately.

I feel like you're confusing "science" and "engineering". SpaceX is fundamentally an engineering company, not a scientific one. Don't get me wrong, they've done impressive work in engineering innovation, but that's fundamentally different from scientific research. And as the article points out, engineering innovation from the likes of SpaceX is usually reliant on that foundational scientific innovation, which in turn is essentially useless without an engineering partner to realize scientific discoveries.

> It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades.

Really? Is it just a coincidence that up until recently the US had some of the most robust scientific funding and was an unbeatable source of engineering innovation? For that matter, are there any real counterexamples where science research is non-existent but engineering excellence abounds?

But it's not really a new idea. Vehicles transporting people through tunnels is something we already know how to do and we have many examples going back decades that are more efficient and higher volume.

This isn't some new early stage innovation that can grow into a great new thing, it's a shittier version of something we already have.

Ironically there is a lot of inflammatory language in the blog post itself that seems unjustified given the source material.

I also can't help but note that this blog post itself seems (first to my own intuition and heuristics, but also to both Pangram and GPTZero) to be clearly LLM-generated text.

I hate to be overly simplistic, but:

NIST doesn't seem to have a financial interest in these models.

The author of this blog post does.

This dichotomy seems to drive most of the "debate" around LLMs.

There are probably other periods of time when I might have advocated running hybrids of different families of primitives, although I'm not sure that I was ever following the details closely enough to have actually advocated for that.

The cool thing is the dramatic security improvements against certain unknown unknowns for approximately linear additional work and space. Seems like a pretty great advantage for the defender, although seriously arguing that quantitatively requires some way to reason about the unknown unknowns (the reductio ad absurdum being that we would need to use every relevant primitive ever published in every protocol¹).

I see PQC as somehow very discontinuous with existing cryptography, both in terms of the attacks it tries to mitigate and the methods it uses to resist them. This might be wrong. Maybe it's fair to consider it an evolutionary advance in cryptographic primitive design.

The casual argument from ignorance is that lattices are apparently either somewhat harder to understand, or just less-studied overall, than other structures that public-key primitives have been built on, to the extent that we would probably currently not use them at all in practical cryptography if it weren't for the distinctive requirements of resistance to quantum algorithms. I understand that this isn't quantitative or even particularly qualitative (for instance, I don't have any idea of what about lattices is actually harder to understand).

Essentially, in this view, we're being forced into using weird esoteric stuff much earlier than we'd like because it offers some hope of defending against other weird esoteric stuff. Perhaps this is reinforced by, for example, another LWE submission having been called "NewHope", connoting to me that LWE was thought even by many of its advocates to offer urgently-needed "hope", but maybe not "confidence".

I'd like not to have to have that argument only in terms of vibes (and DJB does have some more concrete arguments that the security of SIKE was radically overestimated, while the security of LWE methods was moderately overestimated, so we need to figure out how to model how much of the problem was identified by the competition process and how much may remain to be discovered). I guess I just need to learn more math!

¹ I think I remember someone at CCC saying with respect to the general risk of cryptographic backdoors that we should use hybrids of mechanisms that were created by geopolitical rivals, either to increase the chance that at least one party did honest engineering, or to decrease the chance that any party knows a flaw in the overall system! This is so bizarre and annoying as a pure matter of math or engineering, but it's not like DJB is just imagining the idea that spy agencies sometimes want to sabotage cryptography, or have budgets and staff dedicated to doing so.

Yeah this blog post seems pretty misleading. The first couple of paragraphs of the post made a big deal that the NIST report contained "...no evidence of malicious code, backdoors, or data exfiltration" in the model, which is irrelevant because that wasn't a claim NIST actually made in the report. But if all you read was the blog post, you'd be convinced NIST was claiming the presence of backdoors without any evidence.