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Why do you think companies jumping on some hype train is indicative of much at all? For Bosch, for instance, it was the VC part of the company making an Iota investment - I'd say investing in unproven tech is their thing. Deployment in actual products would be something else.

Also, it seems logical at this point to disregard anything coming out of the cryptocurrency subreddits. They drink their own Kool-Aid.

Seems like there is no worse platform to discuss the merits and weaknesses of cryptocurrencies somewhat objectively than those specific subreddits. They are so full of greed and ideology, it's absurd. It's quite hard to look through the hype, so the academics are my best bet when trying to understand things.

>The cryptocurrency adoption has steadily increased so far.

For speculation and investment, not for anything currency-like, though.

The overwhelming majority of people use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through exchanges, they have no interest or knowledge of technical details. So it's not like technical communication has won here, more like greed and ease of use.

Pretty amazing and absolutely deserved. After the failures of systems like PGP, which aren't really suitable for the masses, the Signal protocol did a great job at spreading end-to-end encryption. I'm happy to hear that they got some philanthropic funding, even though I don't doubt that Moxie and the others did the work out of principle anyway and might have continued to do so even without the money.

Maybe linking to the study itself instead of a pro-GMO lobbying site or at least to some popular science news without an agenda would be the safer choice.

Why do you guess that their paper from June 2007 mentioned in the blog was only released February 2009? Seems like a long revision period.

Nothing important, just threw me a bit off guard seeing the date of the blog post and the authors own prediction "forthcoming (2009)". But maybe he edited the blog once he knew when the paper finally came out.

Maybe I'm just blind, but I can't find a link to the paper in the press release. Not that I would understand the hardware-specific parts, but I was just curious what software implementations they benchmarked against and how their elliptic curve algorithms were implemented.

I guess research chips like those end up serving as inspiration for the CPU designers of Intel/AMD/ARM etc. to evaluate which encryption instruction sets might be good to include in the future? Or are the fast vectorized multiplication operations and such already good enough to implement fast asymmetric crypto and no specialized instructions similar to AES-NI are needed? (Though of course this paper seems to imply that specialized hardware is useful)

I don't disagree with you in principle and I don't think it's at all clear that the Russian boogeyman had the significant influence on election results in the west that many media outlets pretend, but at the same time the idea that a hypothetical "true" democracy should be able to take all misinformation campaigns thrown at it seems to be heavily idealistic.

I don't think we really have any historical basis to make that claim since there was never such a tool for spreading global misinformation as the internet before. Maybe democracies won't be able to take it? Maybe they can, who knows. (I am somewhat optimistic though since the radical election results in the west can plausibly be explained even without foreign meddling.)

It's very cool how such a level of computational power is so seemingly easy to reach. I guess it's not surprising if you consider how simple Turing machines themselves are, but I'm always amazed that this is really enough.

And blockchains achieve that at an immense cost, which is the point of the discussion. Decentralised systems are less efficient (orders of magnitude less for proof of work) and it's debatable whether that is necessary in the real world, where trust exists for the majority of applications.

Design patterns are probably broader than just the classic collection of OOP patterns. If you use functional features, new patterns will arise (the most trivial and oldschool one maybe being map/reduce). The original definition wasn't even programming-related, so their scope is quite large.

I don't think being aware of design patterns is a bad idea. In the end, they are just recurring solutions for architectural issues that many developers independently invented to solve them. They just get a bad rep because people applied them even if it wasn't necessary.

It's all extraordinarily creepy because you expect your home to be the safe haven of privacy, but considering how ubiquitous smartphones are and how much of our lives already happens digitally, you could somewhat cynically argue that the privacy loss is comparatively small (because you have very little to begin with nowadays).

But if smart utilities take off, maybe some privacy label for consumers would be nice. Maybe in the future it's a selling point if when device is dumb as opposed to smart and connected. I also somewhat dislike the conclusion of the article that smart homes for everybody are inevitable or necessary. The utility, at least right now, of smart devices seems to be limited, so you don't have even to be a crazy hermit to boycott a smart home.

It's funny how many of the cryptocoins pretend that they have some domain-specific use case (here IoT, which for reasons(?) needs a distributed ledger) that justifies their existence. Guess people can make a business out of thinking up ever more creative justifications for new coins.

Wouldn't the company have an incentive to pay you European rates for your remote work then?

Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining.

Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.

Are you just disregarding the (pretty cost-effective) experiments that could be done in space because of the ISS?

It's not all about flashy missions like sending humans to Mars (for dubious scientific value as opposed to just sending robots).

Electronic voting is hard enough as it is, I sure hope people wait a long time before trying to use a fairly fragile system such as distributed ledgers for it. There are so many more subtle issues that could emerge and threaten the legitimacy of the election process (which is just as dangerous as actually manipulating the election).

Despite being so simple, the paper ballot is quite hard to improve upon without making mistakes. Moreover, a democracy should probably have the requirement that the voting process is transparent and understandable for all citizens.

The first attempts at electronic voting (if at all) should probably be made in countries like Estonia where all citizens have e-ID cards with cryptographic key pairs you can use for some oldschool cryptographic voting schemes.

Of course, the trusted third party can also be decentralized and spread among multiple trusted parties (some of which could even turn out to be adversarial, as long as you use some Byzantine consensus algorithms). I think that weakens the case for full trustlessness further, since most real world applications require some level of trust anyway - but it would still not make you dependent on a single trusted entity.

I wonder how monetization of users compares for those alternative platforms though. Instagram seems to be okay, since you can insert ads and probably deduce user profiles for targeted ads pretty easily from who they follow. Even image analysis for marketable things in the pictures to show relevant ads for is surely possible.

WhatsApp on the other hand seems much harder to make money with.

In both cases though, I guess the good thing is that it's a step back from the all-encompassing and creepy global social network Zuckerberg had in mind for Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp seem more moderate in scope in comparison.

I think I can understand and appreciate many different aspects of Computer science, but programming language theory truly is a bit too arcane and formal for me. I still try to follow it somewhat though (like when the Morning Paper had its nice writeup about RustBelt) and I enjoy learning Rust (which exposes you to the theory underlying its design more than other languages). Maybe it's good that the results of formal methods now find more practical application, so it's easier to get people (who aren't hardcore logicians) interested in the whole topic.

It's really unfortunate that Facebook was allowed to buy WhatsApp. This could have been good news, and maybe it still is since end-to-end encrypted messaging apps may not enable the same data abuse as Facebook's social network. Still would have been nicer if it was a separate entity.

Also, pretty insane Instagram numbers. Now that is a service I really don't get, yet considering how many people use it, it can't just be being too old.

I find the more concerning thing is not that people will believe that a fake is real, it's more that they won't believe something real is real anymore.

Already nowadays the whole thing about fake news and alternative facts has segments of the population flat out not believing the truth. This may very well be greatly exacerbated in the future where, regardless of the amount of evidence you bring, people will just disregard it as fake.

Yet Corbyn's somewhat populist rhetoric seems to have made Labour competitive again, or were their good election results just a coincidence and had nothing to do with Corbyn?

Just curious, since I'm not British and probably only have a very superficial understanding of the politics.

Of course, if you go through the world without ethical concerns, then your plan sounds pretty good.

I liked his comment about trust, it's something that always bothered me with the very radical trust model of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is not entirely clear why you have to go all the way and do away with _all_ trust, except for niche applications such as transactions for people in repressive regimes (which are necessary but do not require us to replace conventional currencies with cryptocoins). In normally stable countries and economies, trust works great and makes everything so much more efficient.

If you don't like single central banks or intransparent financial institutions - cool, good thing there are Byzantine consensus algorithms that don't require proof-of-work but simply some known identities (in blockchain lingo this would probably be permissioned blockchains). You can get much of the benefits and build an ecosystem around known, trustworthy actors and don't have to use awkward mechanisms like proof-of-work.

If the future of grocery shopping is between grocery delivery that you order over the Internet (linked to your account and browsing habits) or using such a surveillance store, the privacy implications are probably not that different either way. Privacy is already in a bad enough state that stores like that probably don't make a big difference anymore either. They are just more creepy because commerce exclusive to the 'real world' seemed like the last safe haven for privacy (provided you were able to pay in cash and didn't use loyalty cards or other offline cookies).

I also can't help but think that they just put those employees there for PR reasons. No matter how Amazon tries to spin it, a majority of jobs will be lost. Maybe that's inevitable, but then we should face it instead of pretending you can just put them somewhere else in your automated store.

Add deep learning and even boring old survival analysis can make headlines as "AI predicts Death". (Not bashing the paper here, just the reporting.)

Though I suppose making use of the large amount of unstructured health data is a good thing and something which classical statistical models which require relatively clean study data could have problems with.

How common is it that paying the ransom doesn't work? Seems bad for the business model of ransomware, though I guess competing malware writers don't necessarily feel compelled to keep the market intact if they can squeeze out a bit more for themselves without the effort of writing a functional decryption routine.

Well, for one thing it doesn't carry that subconscious bias of interpreting something below 0.05 as guaranteed significant as people tend to do with p-values, but is a softer metric that reflects your belief in one or the other hypothesis, given the data. I think that in itself makes it easier to evaluate and reason about.

The fact that you can incorporate (and reflect on) a priori assumptions about the likelihood of one or the other model is another advantage imho.