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It's kind of horrifying to learn that it only takes 33 bits of information to uniquely identify any living human on the planet. log2(8e9) ~= 32.9.



If it helps (with the horror I mean), that's just a sort of lower bound of course - if you could choose your bits carefully and ideally (and I suppose they'd probably be pretty weird (to a human) and overlapping/multi-dimensional, like 'lives in Europe or Antarctica' or 'uses macOS and is female') which of course you couldn't.

i.e. in practice, for practical metrics, it probably takes a lot (I'm not going to guess how many) more.




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