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ilya_m

413 karma · joined July 18, 2021

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ilya_m··on The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
> But the “riddle” requires P to be exactly true or false.

Your choice of P (whether the continuum hypothesis holds) is still ill-defined! This is because the answer depends on the system of axioms one subscribes to. Or, if you feel like playing God, you may pick an answer (CH holds / does not hold) and find axioms that support it. (Which can be as simple as ZF + CH holds/does not hold.)

ilya_m··on The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
> A Turing machine with finite states must eventually either halt or loop. Those are the only options, because there are only finitely many configurations it can be in, and each configuration completely determines the next.

The Turing machine writes and reads from an infinite tape, and as such, the number of configurations (the machine's state + tape) is countably infinite.

ilya_m··on The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
> the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does

I don't see how the second part of the sentence implies the first. The primary role of academics is generating new knowledge. Educating the ignorant is a public service that few are willing or able to do. Scott Aaronson deserves a lot of credit for dedicating so much energy to his blog, it does not mean that 99.99% of his peers are wrong in focusing on advancing the frontier of knowledge.

ilya_m··on ICANN's list of abandoned vanity TLDs
Ian Goldberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Goldberg)
ilya_m··on The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing
> The worst taxes are the ones that are regressive and secret.

In my book, negative externalities are worse than taxes. If we agree that a car driving in Lower Manhattan inflicts a non-trivial cost on everyone else, then not taxing it leads to socially inefficient outcomes.

Effectively, locals are paying a price either way - either by having their bus moving slower, inhaling fumes, etc, or by buying goods and services that reflect congestion pricing. The difference is that congestion pricing aligns incentives - for instance, delivery drivers may choose to travel to Manhattan during the off-peak hours whereas in the status quo they do not care at all about inconveniencing others.

ilya_m··on Asynchronous Consensus Without Trusted Setup or Public-Key Cryptography
To be fair, peer-reviewed publications are not what they used to be. For example, the conference reviewing process is not designed to validate correctness of the submissions. (Obviously wrong papers are filtered out most of the time, but this is a welcome side effect, not - apparently - their main objective.) See, for instance, recent Carlini's experience of reporting a demonstrably flawed paper to the chairs of a major conference: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/yet-another-broken...
ilya_m··on Asynchronous Consensus Without Trusted Setup or Public-Key Cryptography
> Avoiding PKI and post-quantum security correlate very much. Even under plausibly post-quantum assumptions we only have a couple of assumptions from which we can build public key encryption.

These statements presuppose an overly expansive definition of PKI, i.e., distribution of keys for public-key encryption. A more conservative definition is PKI = availability of trustworthy publicly verifiable signatures (i.e., public-key certificates). Post-quantum signatures can be based on target collision-resistant hash functions, like XMSS.

The paper assumes pairwise private and authenticated channels. While in practice this is not necessarily a good substitute for PKI, in theory it is a strictly weaker setting.

ilya_m··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
> A Mersenne twister ... is fine for deck shuffling

It isn't. Please don't do that! Mersenne Twister is fully reversible given its 624 consecutive outputs (see, for instance, this pretty good write-up: https://blog.ollien.com/posts/reverse-mersenne-twister). In other words, someone who can observe 624 outputs can reconstruct its entire output sequence forward and backward.

ilya_m··on Zero Tolerance for Bias
Exactly.

> things go badly pretty quick.

Dealing 2^200 hands, assuming that one hand takes 1ns, is more than ... pretty much any conceivable physical quantity one can think of. (Technically, the heat death of the universe takes longer than that but all card decks will be long gone, having been consumed by black holes.)

This is a long-winded way of saying that cryptography with 2^256 security margin ought to be sufficient for all human-scale applications.

ilya_m··on Trial results for new lung cancer drug are 'off the charts'
> it is fully approved for ALK+ NSCLC and has been since 2015.

Not exactly. FDA granted it an orphan drug designation in 2014, and then full approval for second- or third-line therapies in 2018 (on the basis of a Phase I/II study). The Phase III study (NCT03052608) is the gift that keeps on giving - it ran 2017-2020, and the progression-free survival in the lorlatinib arm is 60% vs 8% for the control.

ilya_m··on Trial results for new lung cancer drug are 'off the charts'
>>>>Even after 60.2 months of follow-up, the median progression-free survival has not yet been reached [1]

> This sounds awful? Or contradictory at best?

No, quite amazing. At 5 years more than 50% of participants are progression-free. That's indeed off the charts for a metastatic lung cancer.

ilya_m··on Trial results for new lung cancer drug are 'off the charts'
It is:

> In the phase 3 trial, 296 patients with advanced forms of non-small cell lung cancer were randomly assigned to receive either lorlatinib (149 patients) or crizotinib (147 patients, of whom 142 ultimately received treatment).

ilya_m··on One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
> It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children.

SNAP also require asset limits, which is $2,750 per _household_. Given that rent for a large family may easily be in the ~$1,500-2,500 range, it leaves pretty much no money in the bank for any other expenses.

ilya_m··on One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
Is this really? If foodstamps were to suddenly disappear, would Amazon increase their wages? I doubt it. In fact, there would be _more_ desperate people scrambling for some paying jobs, which would depress wages further. Right?
ilya_m··on One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the economic case for reducing or increasing funding for eligibility screening.

ilya_m··on Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
First, ~10-20% of residential home sales are new (the proportion swings widely year-to-year), with a non-trivial fraction of their costs going to materials and labor.

Second, 5-6% of the typical sale go toward the agents and closing costs. Again, this is money that leave the system.

Third, if some of the sale proceeds are applied to repaying an existing mortgage or to finance a home purchase, this is neutral as far as the "investor-backed mortgages create money" argument goes.

ilya_m··on Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
> it is still right to say that money is created when a mortgage is issued if that mortgage is backed by large investors.

Is it? Since the house seller wants to have cold, hard cash (or, these days, an incoming wire transfer, which still counts as M1), the large investors need to cough up that much money to make the transaction happen.

ilya_m··on Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count
Your intuition is correct. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPP_(complexity)
ilya_m··on Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count
"In a recent paper" - really? The paper first appeared in ESA 2022. The revised version (with some errors fixed) is from May 2023. To be fair, compared to the rate of progress in this area between Flajolet & Martin (1985) and the previous SOTA (Blasiok, 2018), a couple of years of sitting on this news is not a lot.
ilya_m··on Online Cryptography Course (2017)
> an incredibly damning simile

I stand by my comment, however harsh it may seem. Some of the disdain held by cryptographers, especially of a certain generation, is in no doubt a reaction to Schneier's prominence in the public eye as Mr. Crypto. The fact that he is highly quotable and media-savvy makes him a go-to person whenever a comment is needed on something (anything!) happening in security.

ilya_m··on Online Cryptography Course (2017)
A better book for what audience? The scientifically minded can do much worse than "A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography" by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup (on which the online cryptography course is based). For a more practical angle, I agree with other commenters on this thread: "Cryptography Engineering" (Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno), "Serious Cryptography" (Aumasson) and "Real-World Cryptography" (Wong) are pretty solid.
ilya_m··on Online Cryptography Course (2017)
(Writing as a professional cryptographer.) Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" is about as useful for learning about cryptography as "The Da Vinci Code" for learning about Renaissance. It is a lively book that name-checks relevant concepts, and may even lead someone to develop interest in the actual stuff. (That was my gateway to cryptography!)

Mention Schneier at a gathering of cryptographers, and you'll elicit groans and eye-rolls. The main reason for that is that his book creates an illusion of understanding without instilling tthat it covers literally 1% of what one needs to seriously work in the field. It is also ~30 years old, and was dated even when it appeared.

This is not to diminish the fact that Schneier is an excellent communicator and has done a great service to the security field by being a consistent and effective critic of the domestic security apparatus.

ilya_m··on P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo (2014) [video]
> Also, there exist problems that are NP hard that cannot be solved in polynomial time and have atrocious worst-case complexity, but their average complexity is quite reasonable and feasible for a machine to calculate.

This is an active research topic of trying to characterize worst-case assumptions (i.e., the traditional kind) that imply average-case hardness for some problems, with several recent exciting results. See, for instance, an excellent talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQZEsmpbWE0&t=578s

ilya_m··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
> having duplicate capabilities for it is a waste.

This is a feature, not a bug. This is how a system of checks and balances works in authoritarian countries - the entire security apparatus is duplicated several times over lest one agency becomes too powerful or indispensable. KGB/Ministry of the Interior/Military kept each other in check for much of the later part of the Soviet Union's existence.

ilya_m··on Once again, California exceeds 100% of demand on its main grid with
What recent news are you referring to? Does it put your concerns to rest: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-electric-cars-c...?
ilya_m··on Quantum Algorithms for Lattice Problems
Grossly simplifying, Alice and Bob may establish an authenticated channel either by physical means (a wire) or by some combination of certificates/passwords and out-of-band authentication. Most of the time, QKD implicitly assumes the former - a line-of-sight connection or a fiber-optics cable. In these circumstances the parties might as well exchange flash drives with one-time pads, similarly to how the Kremlin-White House hotline was protected.
ilya_m··on Quantum Algorithms for Lattice Problems
… only if scalable quantum computers exist.
ilya_m··on SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
Upgrade? More like launch the process of planning for drafting a bid solicitation announcement. If I were 3.5" floppies, I wouldn't worry about retirement any time soon.
ilya_m··on 2023 ACM Turing Prize awarded to Avi Wigderson
> AI is a probabilistic computation ... so what they're saying - if i'm reading this right - is that we can reduce the complexity of our current models by orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, no. First, the result applies to decision, not search problems. Second, the resulting deterministic algorithm is much less efficient than the randomized algorithm, albeit it still belongs to the same complexity class (under some mild assumptions).

ilya_m··on Daniel Kahneman has died
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or, in less dramatic terms, if you cannot reject the null, you should operate on the assumption that the null holds.
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