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Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

I once worked for a company solving mutual suspicion for cloud computing — in the 1980s.

In STEM the trick is to realise your elders are mistaken at the right moment, not too late, but also not too soon. One must have a coup d'oeil for the à-propos.

Lagniappe: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/KCR9FD/friedrich-wilhelm-von-seydl...

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Yielding for a moment while I ruminate on the above, there was a short article in Russian about Kolmogorov which quoths him "ships passing in the dark". (I can't really read Russian -- or find it now -- but a friend once translated it for me in the preAI days. Maybe you can dig it out.)) It could have been written by Arnol'd. Otherwise, you might even run into Arnol'd's family, I hear they favour the French countryside.

EDIT: are you referring to a particular battle of the Silesian Wars? I see light cavalry in KuK livery but cannot identify the exact unit without image search.

EDIT: ahh its von Seydlitz but he's Prussian, Rossbach against the French..

At Kranowitz he capitulated. Interesting.

RE: mutual suspicion: precryptographic techniques, presumably?

There's at least one other anecdote of one of his captivities, so presumably he capitulated when his position was untenable, and otherwise attempted to solely occupy tenable ones.

Just barely precryptographic: my work was still single-system, but cryptography was later brought in for the distributed case, and at the time Ralph Merkle was already talking about publishing root blocks via the New York Times' classified section, in order to be hardcopy or microfilm archived in many, many libraries.

No particular battle, more von Seydlitz' general attitude (and aptitude) regarding timing: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (note especially the unusual connection to Whitehead!)

Von Seydlitz' MO was apparently to smoke a pipe until the propitious moment, at which point he would fling it up into the air to signal the attack. In this picture the trumpeter transduces his visual signal to an audible one, but in principle the limited speed of sound means that a visual signal is likely to produce (assuming the squadrons are paying attention? maybe there's an audible/gossiped "ready" signal?) a cleaner initial charge even for fronts as small as 300m.

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