
Weird Tweet by Patio11 - obiefernandez
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624
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panarky
If you're living in another country and you don't want to get deported for
embarrassing that government with observations about how they're
catastrophically screwing up, but you still want people to know you recognized
the catastrophic screw-up as it was happening, then you might publish a
cryptographic hash of your observations.

But since many lives are at stake, you'd only do that if you believed the
government was so impervious to public exposure of their screw-up that nothing
you publish could get them to change course or mitigate the severity of the
impending catastrophe.

~~~
kyriakos
That's a good guess but why even do it? The idea of pointing out the
government faults is to either help them correct their policies or rally up
people. If it comes later it kinda defeats the purpose.

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raihansaputra
eh, he does this once in a while. He did it for his own amusement of
predicting things. He did a prediction about a Bitcoin scam or something at
the end of last year. He maybe predicting something about COVID. or something
else. Socially constrained maybe his way to say "I'm predicting something on
my own grounds. If I say it in plain, people will argue and I don't have time
for that. I just want to put as proof that I have formulated this prediction
by this point in time.".

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rmason
He's tweeted another clue:

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241553311024603140](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241553311024603140)

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Grue3
The main problem with this "prediction" is that nothing stops him from simply
not revealing the file after 1 month.

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irthomasthomas
Perhaps he was shocked in to studying the situation further after being
surprised by his credit drying up. Other people saw that coming.
[https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/124135212329342156...](https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/1241352123293421568)

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mtm7
Well, what are your guesses?

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charlesism
I'm going with :

1) He is materially wrong about the most consequential thing he's "had to"
have a view on in 15 years. We should probably degrade our estimate of his
ability to think through complex problems.

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obiefernandez
This is one of the most unnerving things I saw on the internet today.

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
I don’t get it. He posts some SHA of a file and says to come back in 1 month
because he’s “socially constrained” from publishing a file which perhaps
proves we saw “something” coming? Such as the covid pandemic?

This guy is some engineer at stripe by the looks of it. Not sure how he’d have
access to any interesting files related to covid19.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
He’s also considered a heavy-weight commentator in a variety of fields.

The ‘social constraint’ aspect could be _inciting panic_ or some such.

Edit to add: currently third in the top ten here on HN
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

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morninglight
Classic Clickbait.

Let's all post a 128 hex char string. Somebody out there must know the true
meaning of life.

