cassonmars

I'll play ball here. What do you classify intersex people as? Especially those born with either completely mixed gonadal representation or genitalia? Are they neither male nor female? These things are bimodal in distribution, but they are not perfectly binary.

I'm trans myself and this language policing game is insane. The most surreal part about it is it's rarely anyone allegedly impacted by it who is actually asking for these things.

I wonder how much this schism exists in people who were near death in a “younger” age. I’ve had a couple of reminders of my mortality from my 20s to early 30s now and it’s firmly grounded a “now or never” mindset to getting things done, because nothing is guaranteed. In the same vein, I’m very continually aware of my age and am mindful of the statistically likely years I have left.

Memento Mori.

Whoa, cool to see Warpcast on the front page of HN

Strange you came to say this unprovoked to a stranger on the internet, but I’m going to rely on the body of medical evidence, psychological evaluations, quality of life improvements, etc. over your insistence to the contrary.

> The Albatross disaster caused PolyData to eventually go under, and Heglsberg left PolyData to go work for Borland in the US.

Interesting case of nominative determinism

If it were a gender transition story, it reads more like a previous generation where therapists were more inclined to tell people to try to bury themselves in living the life of a person they’re not. And it plays out predictably in that case, in that the person not becoming who they truly are appear to be better than before, until it all comes falling apart.

But I don’t think that’s the intent of the story — I think the author did intend for this to be taken literally as a fictional tale, and it’s quite good.

Interesting post. One thing stood out to me:

> The performance of older processes is also not sufficient for the latest cryptographic systems, such as Post Quantum algorithms or Multiparty Threshold ECDSA with Identifiable Aborts. On the upside, one could understand the design down to the transistor level using this process.

It would be great to see support for PQ and MPC algorithms, but what would make that easier would be SE programmability with access to the base primitives. The specific title reference implies GG-20 (which the original paper is broken, revealed in later papers such as the Alpha-Rays attack), so that would suggest a need for an SE that could expose field element arithmetic (both for DKG and signature creation) and support for Paillier, but even just having the former would be a major boon, as you could implement MPC protocols that rely only on base DLog assumptions like DKLs18 and 19 which use oblivious transfer (albeit with some matrix operations). Any news on this that can be shared at this time?

I moved away from my Midwest hometown in my early twenties, lived in Seattle for nearly a decade, then got fed up with the path the city was on and moved back. I feel like moving away is valuable, and teaches you to appreciate the things you took for granted living somewhere during your childhood. Now that I’m back, I get to help fundamentally transform the city into a new tech hub, reviving from the state of decay produced by an industry that mostly abandoned it. This has been extremely fulfilling in a way that living in an already established big city cannot — the skyline is yours to help manifest.

Oh man, I remember BZFlag. I loved that game. Even with the poor graphics it was still so much fun because the gameplay was slow paced enough that text chat was possible along the chaos. It felt like competitive battles over IRC. Haven’t experienced anything quite like it since.

Is there a guide you followed or have for how to do this kind of hardening? I’ve wanted to do this for a while, don’t know where to start.

It’s not even clear yet whether this has been a bad investment decision. Zuckerberg is playing a long game here, and the market is notoriously short-term, immediate-profits-driven. Long term investors may actually be quite pleased if this strategy turns out to be generation-defining. Obviously no person can say this with certainty, but they can see his track record — he’s gone against the grain on many occasions, at the peril of short term holders, only to dramatically increase the overall profits of the company exponentially.

I love that verifiable credentials are starting to make mainstream, but one thing I couldn’t glean from this page: is this purely VC from a perspective of “here’s the attributes I care to see”, or “here’s the characteristics I care to see”? To clarify: say I’m an alcohol vendor and wish to confirm that a user is 21 or older. Does the VC issuance provide a range proof that does not reveal the age, or does the VC issuance explicitly reveal the age?

For starters, signal retains a conversation for the length of time you grant. That can be indefinite. The way it is retained is in a local storage database. It is intentionally guarded against export (although this is somewhat unavoidable with backup features on phones), so as to avoid companies like Cellebrite making it easy for LE to overstep their bounds and pull the message database when they take your phone. If you want some kind of export interface, your best option is a screenshot — signal does not take any action that threatens the mutual security between parties as explicitly agreed.

Might be abuse of IPA, but 100% stealing this trick for platforms that don’t let me use LaTeX

It was something I intrinsically knew, from the moment I became remotely cognizant of the differences between men and women (about 5 years old). I didn’t have words for it, and frequently any mention of the notion either by myself or in popular culture was met with instant derision or comedy. So with the social brow beatings accumulated, I kept quiet, and tried to live as a man. The depression got worse, the drinking got worse, etc. The things that helped me most:

- My spouse, who was supportive and understanding the moment I came out

- My family, who were largely unsurprised by the news (my grandfather made an oddly supportive albeit sexist joke, saying “I knew that kid was a girl the moment she learned to talk and wouldn’t shut up!”)

- My friends, who were also completely unsurprised

- My own physiology, in that I discovered in the process of obtaining HRT that I am intersex, which honestly explained a lot.

Doing so comes at a cost to privacy — by signal having a hosting server, even if the contents are E2EE, retrieving and storing these contents creates a metadata trail. I actually go over these drawbacks and tradeoffs in a recent blog post: https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee

While some people pick up the bottle in addiction due to purely genetic affinity, others are using it as an escape. While my existence is hotly debated on hacker news whenever the topic arises, my escape was a struggle in trying to not address the gender incongruence between that which I was assigned at birth, and who I truly was. About a year after quitting alcohol, which is usually the recommended space people should give before making large life decisions, I had concluded two things after soul searching:

1. These feelings were never going to go away.

2. I needed to, and could, do something about it.

So I began transition. It was not easy, and communities like hacker news unfortunately are not typically kind about the subject, which is why I generalized to say it was a real kind of personal work that most will never have to endure.

This is why I mentioned how dangerous and stupid it was. I experienced DTs for several days, and seizures. I’m lucky to have made it through that alive.

I used to put away a liter of vodka a night. I kept it up for years, accumulating a solid decade of heavy drinking. I was miserable. It was souring my relationship. The stress from work, personal life, and declining mental state of course made me feel even more compelled to drink. I was becoming a shell of my former self, and my dreams were becoming strictly that.

I had a confluence of events that changed my course:

1. I attended a tech conference where someone I personally knew who had went through rehab was hosting and speaking, and he was filled with a vivacity I hadn’t seen from him before.

2. My spouse gave me an ultimatum to quit or he’d be out the door. It wasn’t the first time he had said this, but I had a feeling it was probably going to be the last.

3. My progression in life was stalling. I couldn’t keep up commitments anymore, and I was starting to feel like I had already passed my peak.

So I quit. Cold Turkey. It was a dangerous, stupid thing to do, but I knew if I tried to taper off, I’d just slide back. The withdrawals were nightmarish, and I was lucky I didn’t die from it. But I pulled through, and then started to do some heavy soul searching for why I ever picked up the bottle — what was I escaping from? And I found those answers, and got to work — A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves.

Since then, I have been a cofounder, jumped multiple levels in my career, and have been working towards several academic publications, on top of drastically improving my personal life. It’s been nearly five years since I put down the bottle. And every day I choose to never pick it up again.

They were moving towards E2EE when everyone freaked out about the on-device perceptual hashing trade off.

There's a tremendous situational irony with the massive cookie notice at the bottom of the screen when this loads.

Literally just "Name/Name 1:1" so it's indistinguishable from other 1:1s, but if you're in a remote org and they aren't okay with and encouraging these kinds of recurring meetings, it's probably a toxic environment. They don't dominate a calendar, maybe a grand total of 2.5 hrs a week at most.

The loss of cognitive overhead of dealing with a physical workspace with distractions abound has to be countered with a new cognitive overhead – putting initiative forward in reaching out to coworkers, setting up regular 1:1s to just chat. While the conversations may initially feel forced (because they are indeed artificial), once camaraderie is built, it feels as natural as an office chat.

It absolutely is about regulating content. Just because the content and the people that generate it are vile does not mean an internet backbone utility should play great internet censor about it. I say this as exactly the kind of person (trans) that the community in question loves to attack.

For starters, these events are totally unrelated, and are a very strange false equivalence. Would be very curious to see more details of Tavis’ claim though. That being said, CF is still in the right for the stand they’re taking on not being a content regulator of their base internet utilities.

Considering they could interact directly with the contract with no problem, that aspect worked out great.

That can possibly work, however it has a significantly greater variability in deployment environments compared to traditional time lock puzzles due to it being trivially optimized by hardware (depending on the hash algorithm chosen). It unfortunately does not work at all as a VDF though, as the proof requires the entire chain of hashes and is not succinct enough to be used on commodity hardware.

This is not Timelock encryption. Timelock encryption relies on the use of time lock puzzles, which frequently revolve around variations of repeatedly squaring a value in a particular way which makes it impossible to shortcut without knowing the original setup parameters. Variations include a RSA-style approach (which I've created an open source repo here: https://www.github.com/CassOnMars/Timelock), or by omitting knowledge of the order of the group (possible with imaginary quadratic cryptography), creating a verifiable delay function, such as the Wesolowski VDF (repo: https://www.github.com/CassOnMars/Wesolowski-VDF).

It’s just the return of the crypto wars from the 90s. And privacy isn’t going to go down without a fight.