Maxwell Smart’s Demon

Politics Further Afield The Bots, to Everyone’s Chagrin The Return of Hash-Cash Reading Is Fundamental If Not Those, Then What Agents and Demons As you might have guessed by this going out so late in (for me) the morning, most of the idea for this post struck me late yesterday. As such, I hope that you’ll indulge any sloppy structure more than you ordinarily might. In any case, whenever I need to have a conversation about keeping something secure from some outside force, I try to emphasize the need to evaluate every potential solution against its false positive and false negative errors. For an approachable example that everybody probably understands, if I lock my door, it doesn’t actually matter that it protects me against people off the street trying to walk in, because that happens so rarely. Instead, I care about comparing the number of times that the lock actually saved me trouble against two other numbers, and their respective importance. How often I need to unlock the door for…