DonbunEf7

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We keep learning about elliptic curves, and the more we learn, the more we glimpse the edges of a massive and deep symmetry which relates primes and polynomials (Fermat's Last Theorem, RSA, AES) with elliptic curves (Birch & Swinnerton–Dyer Conjecture, ECDSA, Ed25519) and modular forms and L-functions (Riemann Zeta Hypothesis). This is known as the Langlands programme [0].

The significance of this result is that it is yet another brick in the wall of the Langlands programme's immense and daunting blueprint; overall, it is only a tiny tiny fragment. The L-function database [1] is far more interesting if you want to get a good look at a collection of stuff that we know about the topic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program [1] http://www.lmfdb.org/intro

As a good first step, it's easy to configure the Prometheus blackbox exporter (or your TLS-supporting blackbox scraper of choice) to report the TLS cert expiry date; I have an alert which pages me if a TLS cert will expire in a week or sooner based on this.

No Free Lunch is very real, and occurs in many different guises under different masks. Here is an example constructive instantiation of No Free Lunch: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/12/universal-adversarial-pe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Lawsuits_and_contr... is pretty well-filled-out.

Another, different, scientist. No, but I think that he makes people believe that science is more definitive, unbiased, magically an accurate reflection of reality (that is, "true" or "real" or "correct"), and agreed-upon than it really is. I also worry that because his fields, which are relatively "hard sciences", are not being hit very hard by the replication crisis, that he is callous to the danger that the "soft sciences"' collective failure has done to science's mainstream image.

I'm an Oregonian. Art Robinson is well-known locally as either a wingnut or a genius scientist, depending mostly on whether you've actually scrutinized his words. His research might well be scientifically meaningful, but a lot of things he's advocated for are pseudoscience, and he doesn't come across well in discussions when he's cross-examined on his prior publications.

As far as politics goes, he did not pick a great district to try to run for. The incumbent, Peter DeFazio (D), is beloved in the area for his populist attitude and progressive voting record; the Eugene/Springfield/Corvallis/Albany metro population consists largely of aging hippies and college students, and he's been consistently elected since the 1980s.

Masochism combined with a morbid desire to know what my peers think, mostly.

Try it! Sit down. Turn off anything distracting. For five minutes, close your eyes, don't move, focus on your breathing, and whenever you get a thought, let your mind pick it up, examine it, and then put it back down and out of mind. Let your focus come to rest on your breathing.

Curses, time to switch accounts.

My thoughts are mostly that I don't want to wait a decade for a Mill. Find me at SPLASH/OCAP if you want to chat.

Hi, capability-security folk here. Have you considered adopting capability-security language for describing what's going on here? It seems to me that Mill portals are very much like capability-designed syscalls. In particular, I am reminded of the "no stale stack frame" rule from Monte [0], and its interesting justification:

"Since Monte permits mutable state, one author’s code’s behavior could be affected by another author’s code running further up the frame stack. Stale frames make comprehension of code much harder as a result."

I wish that we were having more conversations and classes like [1] to get knowledge of KeyKOS and other capability-safe kernels out to CPU makers. We have ideas to share!

[0] http://monte.readthedocs.io/en/latest/semantics.html#scope-i...

[1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/lec/l-microkernel.html

"As a psychologist, I am very interested in the question of how we know whether we are seeing reality or not. Everything we know about the world is based, to some extent, on these very crude sensations, so we always have to be epistemically vigilant. Don’t believe what you see."

Finally, somebody gets it.

"Could Newton begin to explain how this small device did all that? Although he invented calculus and explained both optics and gravity, he was never able to sort out chemistry from alchemy. So I think he would be flummoxed, and unable to come up with even the barest coherent outline of what this device was. It would be no different to him from an embodiment of the occult—something that was of great interest to him. It would be indistinguishable from magic. And remember, Newton was a really smart dude."

This paragraph sounds like modernist self-back-patting, to be honest. Several things:

* Newton lived at the same time as Boyle, the man often considered to be the founder of scientific chemistry. Newton and Boyle both contributed to the scientific method, and while Newton may have been an alchemist, at the time, the very concept of pseudoscience was still being worked out. Newton's alchemical formulae are not useless; we've replicated "The Net" [0], one of his recipes. The idea that one must "sort out chemistry from alchemy" betrays a total unawareness of the history of chemistry.

* The concept that technology and magic are different was not yet invented in the time of Newton. Newton's research was in natural philosophy [1], the field which predates modern science. He was interested in how the world works, and unlike today, he did not have a roadmap showing how the different fields of study interrelate. Asimov's saying only makes sense in the context of modern science, wherein we (think that we) have enough of an understanding of the world to be able to claim that any magic which we do not understand is merely technology which we have not yet discovered. It's a pretty bold claim, and may be right, but it is based in a (literally) non-Newtonian worldview.

* Compare and contrast Newton with a modern 5-year-old. How much science do you think that the child needs in order to comprehend a phone? (Ask any parent for the answer.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(substance)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy

What is "this?" The paper uses category theory as its lingua franca.

No, that just changes where programmers can put their computations. Scheme and Rust are not more powerful for their macros than C++ is for its templates; both can put unreasonable demands on the compilers.

Type theory is only useful up to a certain point; there are plenty of languages that appear identical from a type-theoretic viewpoint but that have deeper richer interpretations in category- or set-theoretic settings. Check out the actual diagram in the article; it shows off some distinctions that would have been totally washed out if only types were considered interesting.

In particular, a system usually cannot prove itself consistent. However, we have developed systems expressly for the purpose of being as consistent as our intuition for logic could allow it to be. I'm willing to trust Metamath [0] based on the formalism that they've chosen, which is a dead-simple term-rewriting formalism that is suitable for building pretty much any mathematical structure, given enough time and effort.

A better question would be whether, in a theoretical sense, fault-free algorithms even exist. There are similar questions, like whether one-way functions exist, where we have lots of evidence to suggest that the answer is "yes" but we have yet to prove it.

[0] http://us.metamath.org/

Indeed, free society forms a fixpoint of ideas, where it protects itself from being eaten by The State by insisting that any person can stand up and speak about free society. It is unfortunate that it also shields so many reprehensible opinions, but as usual, if the best thing you can say about an idea is that it is allowed in a free society, then perhaps that idea isn't worth much.

Because it's 2017 and we shouldn't suffer non-Free Software any longer.

Well-researched and comprehensive. The survey of distributed languages includes not just Erlang and Akka, but also E and Cloud Haskell. The overview of CAP is deep and rigorous while not wasting words. This will be a great book once it's finished.

Just keep rewriting C as Python. I still remember the day I switched from Numpy and CPython to array.array on PyPy for a 60x boost in benchmarks. (Only a 20x speedup on actual running code; this was for geometry generation in a networked video game server.)

No. There's a documented list of things that are different. [0] That said, you likely don't have many of these issues in your code, if any. The ideal is for folks who write portable pure Python without relying on implementation-specific details to be able to run on PyPy and CPython without any hacks.

[0] http://pypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cpython_differences.htm...

I fear that we do not understand patterns well enough to categorify them so easily.

In the USA, people are used to 5% off the top. Relax already.

Leprous, a Norwegian band, has an album "Tall Poppy Syndrome" with lyrics which reflect this law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36HuYPnx5oE

This article mentions Zcash, which means that folks will be showing up shortly to talk about Monero.

Compared to PyPy, Nuitka is slow, buggy, and doesn't handle as much of the Python language. Nuitka vomits and dies on about half the code I've tried it on.

Alternatively, if you prefer sanity and readability, use cffi; it's pretty fast, especially on PyPy, and frees users from the CPython C API.

Also, there is a CLA: https://gist.github.com/WallarooLabsTeam/e06d4fed709e0e7035f...

Glad to see Pony adoption, disappointed in this "open source" project. Free Software or nothing, please.

Actually! (Full disclosure: I sell access to a Tahoe-LAFS grid.) The Tahoe team has recently been working to merge the "cloud-backend" branch, which would open the door to storing shares on grids by interfacing directly with S3, GSE, etc. This technology's been battle-tested by Least Authority Enterprises, and at least Matador Cloud has indicated a desire to adopt it as well. Other Tahoe vendors are probably sitting up and taking notice too.

Or Tahoe-LAFS, although Tahoe's encoding doesn't leave any keys with the provider, but only with the uploader.