algo646464

Photos have authenticated timestamps.

Older photo is the real one.

If there are US fabs, and China invades Taiwan then Taiwanese fabs are destroyed, and China loses access to advanced chips, but the US and the west do not. This puts China at a major disadvantage compared to the US, for at least a few decades in the future, if it decides to invade Taiwan.

It seems unlikely that US and west would get involved in a direct major military conflict with China, no matter what. The costs are too great. It is far more likely that they would only provide military equipment and intelligence (like Ukraine).

So this move of TSMC actually strengthens the shield a lot more than it weakens the spear.

Silly Question: It it a good experiment to put the medicine in one eye and the placebo in the other eye? What could be other consequences of such a thing?

That is a good point. But all these had racist reasons at their core. Can this be better implemented today? With extensive supervision and scrutiny. For example, teenagers routinely join the army, and spend time learning and training at what is essentially a boarding school. It seems to work quite well.

I sometimes think, one way to break this cycle is to send the all the kids to boarding school or military school. It could put them in an environment free from their background circumstances. It is of course a harsh thing to do, but I think maybe it could work.

Don't manufacturers do that already?

Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.

Also, bribing voters is a thing. It would be far cheaper to pay 2X to buy X votes where each of the bribed voters keep half the money and buy a vote with other half.

I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation.

For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to normal behavior after vaccination, and (iii) the vaccines inhibit the other variants much more than Omnicron. So Omicron gets more opportunities to infect and spread. Of course, all this is just conjecture and could be true or false.

What matters from a practical point of view is that, Omnicron is less severe in the general population today(for various reasons), as compared to the original strain back in 2020.

Ok that makes sense.

But I wonder why doesn't this problem also arise in the current Proof-of-Work system. A sufficiently well-funded group, with about 20% hash-rate can try to extend the current head of the blockchain by 6 fake blocks at every time. If they succeed, i.e. all 6 fake blocks are mined before the real network mines 6 real blocks, then they can publish their parallel chain with the fake transactions and it would be longer than the real chain.

This is equivalent to the expected number of coin tosses to get 6 consecutive heads, where the coin is heads with probability 1/5. Here, heads means that a fake block is mined before the corresponding real block is mined. This number is less than 20000, which corresponds to about 6 months of time. This is expensive, but not infeasible. They just need to remain solvent until they succeed and then easily cover the costs.

I always understood the security of block-chains as a race between the good and the bad agents.

Both are extending their respective chains as fast as they can. A bad-agent, who wishes to double-spend has to rewrite history, and therefore has to start a few step behind the good agent. To succeed, the bad agent has to overtake the good agent.

Even if both have the same speed (i.e. 50% computational power each), the good agent will sill be a few steps ahead of the bad agent, and the system is secure. If the bad agent is faster(51%), then eventually it will overtake the good agent breaking security.

This is true even if the cost of computation is zero (e.g. the Govt. pays for all your computation cost). As long as the bad agent doesn't have 51% or more of the computational power, the system is secure.

The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved.

The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history still remains difficult.

So what am I missing here?

Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail?

I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network.

Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?

> Additionally, it is the universal part of UBI that people struggle with. If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money.

Think about this another way: if it is true that the prices are going to rise because of UBI, i.e. because everyone can afford the "basics"(the B of UBI), then it means that the lower prices of today require that some people do without these basics.

The above is a great answer.

To expand on this (from some googling). All of this requires root.

1) Create a sparse file (actual size depends on usage)

  truncate -s 100G /home/zzz/Dropbox.image

2) Create a ext4 filesystem on it

  mkfs.ext4 -m0 /home/zzz/Dropbox.image

3) Mount it as a loopback file system

  sudo mount /home/zzz/Dropbox.image /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs

4) Create / Copy your dropbox folder to Dropbox-fs

  sudo mkdir /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox
  sudo chown -R zzz.zzz /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox
  cp -r /home/zzz/Dropbox-original /home/zzz/Dropbox-fs/Dropbox

5) Start Dropbox and point it to the new location

6) If we want to mount this automatically at login. Adding it to /etc/fstab may not work because of encryption.

But perhaps some script at login to mount it will work. For example, we can create a script at /usr/local/bin/mountDB.sh and then add a line to /etc/sudoers

  zzz ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/mountDB.sh

Then somehow call this script at login of user zzz.

How about: "Kids who grow up in households full of gym/sports equipments, grow up to be muscular/athletic".

The quality of this research may indeed be poor, but the "tall pants" analogy seems disingenuous.

The free market cannot suitably address the "tragedy of the commons".

If all companies currently follow expensive but environment-friendly processes, a rouge company can undercut them by following a cheaper but environment-harmful process. This will either force other companies to follow the rogue company, or they go out of business.

All dynamic programming algorithms are recursive. They are essentially a (constructive) proof by induction.

For clarity, perhaps one can include a "proof of correctness" of the algorithm in the comments.

> Investors would be choosier about speculative opportunities because the yield on the risk-free asset would be much, much higher.

It won't help how choosy investors are, or how well the economy performs. The money supply is fixed. So for someone to make 120 bitcoins from an investment of 100 bitcoins, someone else has to lose 20 bitcoins, which would be other investors, or the public (workers / consumers).

A simple argument is as follows.

Without inflation, i.e. fixed money supply, it would be impossible for a majority of loans to be repaid with interest, or give a positive return to investments. Note that this fact is independent of how well the borrower or business performs. (This is like a zero-sum game).

So, it would be irrational for investors or lenders to part with their deflationary money, as the net profit is always zero (or negative because of other costs).

I am very interested to know if there is a way around this problem.

Isn't this just like paying insurance premiums ?

Whenever you are sick, the doctor / insurance company loses money curing you.

This is perhaps a stupid question. But, even if we had a real oblivious DNS, can't the ISP figure out what website I am connecting to by a reverse-dns lookup on the IP-address ?

This is true only for erasure RS-codes, but not for general RS-codes. In erasure RS-codes you must specify which points are corrupted and the decoder discards them.

For general RS-codes you don't need to detect which points are corrupted. An intuitive explanation of the decoding process here is that, if a small number of evaluation points are corrupted, then the original degree n polynomial is still the closest polynomial to the (slightly corrupted) set of evaluation points. The decoding algorithm uses this fact.

This however comes at cost. General RS-codes can correct only half as many errors as Erasure RS-codes.