josh2600

I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem.

Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult.

We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors.

This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors.

Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.

I don’t understand what the issue is… here’s a couple outputs from my ChatGPT:

Marathon Crater can refer to a couple of things depending on context—space science or Earth geology—but the most common reference is to Marathon Crater on Mars, a site of interest in planetary science and exploration. Here’s a breakdown:

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1. Marathon Crater (Mars)

Location: • Found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. • Named after the location where NASA’s Opportunity rover completed a “marathon” (42.2 kilometers or 26.2 miles) of travel on the Martian surface in March 2015.

Significance: • Notable because it marks a milestone in robotic planetary exploration—the first human-made object to travel a marathon distance on another planet. • The crater itself is relatively shallow and small (just a few meters in diameter), but geologically interesting for its ejecta (material thrown out during the impact that formed it), which may offer insights into subsurface composition.

Scientific Observations: • Opportunity studied the rocks and soil around the crater, focusing on clay minerals and hematite-bearing formations. • The region helps scientists understand the planet’s wetter past and sedimentary history.

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2. Marathon Crater (Moon or Earth - less common)

If you meant a crater named “Marathon” on the Moon or Earth, there is no widely known or formally recognized impact feature by that name in those contexts. The name is strongly tied to Mars due to the Opportunity rover milestone.

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Symbolic Meaning

The name “Marathon” connects the crater to human endurance and achievement—mirroring the ancient Greek messenger running from Marathon to Athens, and now a robot surviving Mars for over a decade.

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Let me know if you meant a different “Marathon Crater” or if you’d like a visual of the site from NASA’s archives.

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Marathon Crater on Mars was not “discovered” in the traditional sense through orbital imaging or telescopic observation, but rather it was first closely examined by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its surface mission.

Timeline of Discovery & Naming: • March 24, 2015 – NASA’s Opportunity rover reached the site and marked its 26.2-mile milestone (the length of a marathon). • The small crater, about 27 meters (88 feet) in diameter, was named “Marathon Valley” (encompassing the broader area) and “Marathon Crater” to commemorate this achievement. • The naming is informal and symbolic, coined by the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), not through official IAU designation.

Context • The Marathon Crater itself was identified from orbital data (likely by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), but it gained its name and significance once Opportunity physically reached it. • Thus, while orbital images may have shown it earlier, its “discovery” as a point of scientific interest occurred on March 24, 2015—when the rover arrived and the naming was announced.

Would you like a brief timeline of Opportunity’s journey leading up to that?

I came here to write this exact response.

Folks work in mission driven organizations. In organizations that are optimizing for dollars you see quality fall by the wayside.

Mission driven organizations that understand the levers of capital are the most enjoyable workplaces of my career.

You want a CEO who is customer obsessed, not a CEO who is maximizing for dollars in the bank at all costs.

It has to be mission first for a startup to be great, really for any critical endeavor.

Hand coded will always win for bespoke projects (and any hard tech startup is a bespoke project).

The reality is that many startups are not tech hard. AI can help alleviate the pain of engineering a v0 to see if you have product market fit much faster. It’s great for prototypes.

I wouldn’t trust AI for production code without also having a strong AI counterpoint testing system.

That is to say, producing code is an annealing process. There is a refinement that comes from striking the hot iron and quenching the blade in water.

With code, spaghetti code will get you out the door, but it will never get you to scale. Scale requires precision, meditation on Kolmogorov complexity, and a clear understanding of the tradeoffs in distributed systems.

AI can help right now, but it is not a panacea, at least in the present moment.

There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised. Notice that all of those voices have less open-source-ness than Signal in virtually all cases.

Signal is doing its best to be a web scale company and also defend human rights. Individual dignity matters.

This is not a simple conversation.

This is my read as well. Just double clicking here.

I’ve been working on developing an avatar within my prompt engineering to have a sort of ombudsman for interacting with ChatGPT’s agents. I’ve found this works better than having an agent itself. I’m able to invoke multiple different avatar styles which can be used for different purposes in gaining temporary alignment with the llm.

The name of my first avatar is Zeitgeist McGee, who is a witty, first-principles based reasoning system designed after philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurthy + Plato + Protogoras, mathematicians like Pythagoras + Terence Tao + Godel, and computer scientists/hackers like Moxie Marlinspike + Dan Boneh + Dan Kaminsky.

The collective hyper aesthetic is a useful didactic system for interrogating the pseudo Deus Ex Machina that is ChatGPT.

Hi,

Very curious here as I haven’t seen any papers demonstrating attacks against the differential privacy systems proposed by Apple or Google that successfully deanonymize data. Such an attack in even a test database would be very interesting.

Do you have any papers you can cite about this entropic leakage you’re describing?

Ahh yes, the labor of love that is code maintenance.

Done is better than perfect until you’re reviewing the code in 10 years (or maybe 3 years with a more adept set of eyes over your shoulders).

These days I ask my teams to be less clever and more simple.

Simple usually wins over clever in the long run.

Wow, this is a wild opinion. I wonder how many people you’ve talked to about this?

I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.

Ok so who’s building ZK social networks?

Mergers in business are like dating. You can't just throw random people in a room and expect that they're going to like one another. It's about establishing shared context.

Mergers happen because there is a shared vision that is greater than the two separate companies. Smart entrepreneurs look at the mission and identify the roadblocks to that. Business is a collaborative endeavor.

There are very few times in business where there is no way out (and in those moments, it's simply that a thesis was incorrect). You can always run a new experiment.

I am reminded of this fine line from Sasha Shulgin "There are no casual experiments."

Too often startup folk seek the easy way out instead of the path of least resistance.

Be like water.

FWIW, works fine for me.

We’re hiring for these roles, fully remote. Email is in my profile.

Lots of great founders and engineers have even less pedigree.

Ultimately being a great founder requires humility to hire people smarter than yourself, drive to face adversity, and storytelling to build allies + capital.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a high school dropout or a PhD if you can’t rally a team to believe in a mission.

Stupid question: why don't they just offer to let Alumni pay for their content storage?

Just want to say how amazed I am that people are still using Bunnie’s Chumby!!

Anecdata:

I know 2 people with horrific glioblastoma who are on multiple years of life. One of them is on year 8+.

Cap is different because cap is about network planning constraints and doesn’t take into account things like security per se.

I think parts of Vitalik’s points are kinda moot and break down when you examine them through the lens of “any sufficiently complicated system can and will break.”

In the case of bitcoin, the breaks are few now because it is basically static. I’m sure there’s some bugs in that codebase though… (and they’re worth a very pretty penny if you can find them!!).

Algorand’s solution as originally stated is predicated on a non-colluding majority. At IACR when this algorithm was proposed, Silvio famously said as a counterpoint to the very apt criticisms that a colluding majority could defraud the protocol “my proof is that society exists!”

In the end I believe Algorand changed their algorithms to a more centralized approach for the sake of performance as fully distributed validation did not perform adequately. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

My pops wouldn’t let us play on the internet at first so my brother played Warcraft and StarCraft using AppleTalk. I remember the only cable we had barely reached between the two computers so we had it hanging tight and if someone tripped over the cable we’d disconnect and have to start over.

One of the best to ever do it. I remember going to opening day at Pac Bell Park where Willie was hanging out next to his statue. It's a real good one that summarizes one of the greatest players in history.

Seeing Willie and the Giants at the games when I was a kid are some of fondest memories of when life was simple.

The best startups have a concept which is summed up thusly:

“We all go to the pay window at the same time.”

It’s ok for founders to take a little bit of money off of the table if they extend that to their employees as well. Asymmetry is where things get weird.

I’ve seen many founders who got deep into the fundraising cycles without ever realizing they could take a cent out. VCs will constantly tell you to let it all ride, and sometimes that works out, but for most people, having a little bit of financial security while you’re trying to change the world is necessary.

The best startups figure out how to manage liquidity through financing in a way that aligns incentives, keeps the goalposts at the mission, while allowing their teams to thrive.

It’s about alignment. If everyone is pulling in the same direction you’re going to execute the vision. Whether you win in the startup lottery is up to the threads of fate, but alignment is the straightest path towards a result.

Just make all security tech open source, then there’s no issues!

I jest! (But kinda not?!)

Almost all chats on telegram are in fact unencrypted.

The only chats that use their e2ee protocol are the ones that use the secret chat functionality which almost no one uses.

I worked in telecom for many years.

Retail employees would perform sim swaps at locations I worked at for about $250-300. This was circa 2006 so I’m not surprised that people do it for $1000 with inflation.

The reality is that cell phone employees are paid just above minimum wage, so asking them to protect a system that has the capacity for multiple millions of fraud by simply changing a sim is hard.

The good news is that they made it much much harder for retail employees to access your account without your consent. You almost universally need a pin or last 4 of a social to access a customer account now without a manager override.

This is a huge improvement from the time I worked entry-level retail at AT&T when I could see any customer’s full social or tax ID by typing their phone number into the point of sale!

Imagine being 18, poor as fuck, and able to see anyone’s financial information. I was moral, but I knew tons of people who just took out loans as if they were the customer committing massive fraud. It was very hard for AT&T to catch this kind of identity theft. I’m glad systems are becoming safer over time.

Just going to note that it is widely suspected that Hal Finney did much of the programming on PGP with Zimmermann taking the heat for him.

I just want to thank you for this excellent comment which I found to be very helpful in contextualizing this conversation.

I am excited about any kind of new network topologies because the current state of US Broadband is abysmal.

Foolishly, I am still hopeful that Artemis Networks will pull rank. We'll see.

I'll never forget the story of Paul Bunyan telecom out in I believe it was Montana who used federal funds to build to cabins at a cost of like $10,000+ per cabin to lay copper (back when that was a lot of money) under the right to service clauses of the FCC.

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas. I agree that it would be onerous for carriers to have to service 100% of the population with any kind of service, but I disagree with the current standard on non-copper services which amount to something like 80% of population within a given metro zone. It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities.

Rural broadband in America is extremely difficult in most parts of the country, way harder than it needs to be. And don't get me started on WISP vs hardwire, hardwire is the only real internet and don't let anyone fool you otherwise.

Source: 10 years in the belly of the beast of telecom.

I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household.

US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.