[ExI] Holy cow!

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 5:13 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 11:24 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> > It is possible to connect to the Internet without presenting an attack surface. I could go on in depth about how, but ....
>
> No you could not!  If you could, you'd be world-famous as the greatest security expert the world has ever known.

Tch.  It may be a grossly underappreciated set of tricks that few
people know how to use, but I'm not the only one who knows them.

> And you'd be even more famous as somebody who had proven that Kurt Gödel was wrong! Gödel claimed to have proven that no logical system, like a computer operating system, that is advanced enough to perform arithmetic, can be both complete and consistent, and he also claimed to have proven that no logical system can prove its own consistency, but according to you he must've been wrong.

It's got nothing to do with that.

> And Alan Turing claimed to have proven that in general there's no way to know if your computer program has a bug such that it will run forever without ever stopping and producing an answer, but according to you Gödel was not the only one who was wrong, Turing must've been wrong too.

Or that.  It is possible that some pages simply take forever to load.
I cut them off when they do.  Granted, they fail to load as a result.

>> > That said, this both is a type of argument from authority
>
> You are the one claiming to have found a way to make a computer invulnerable from cyber attack, not me.

That doesn't prevent a logical fallacy from being a logical fallacy.

>> > you would have no grounds to question me on this by your own logic
>
> So I'm supposed to just accept what you say as being the ultimate authority on computer security? Who is using the argument from authority now?

You are.  I'm just pointing out that your argument is invalid.

> I don't think the catastrophes you list in the above by themselves are enough to bring about the collapse of civilization, but they would just be a symptom of something far more general and far far more profound, the greatest revolution in the way matter is organized since the Cambrian Explosion.
I will agree that they could be, but:
* They could be other things, and
* Again, that wasn't the question you originally asked.