josh2600

Worth reading.

A few key things: decentralized means a network of at least 3 nodes where no operator controls more than 1. Anything beyond that is vanity or more censorship resistance depending on your vantage point.

What we actually want is governance with checks and balances. I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.

Now to how emulate that in software is another quandary. I think ethereum for all of its faults is doing a decent job at decentralized governance.

I think we’re still in the very early days of decentralized finance. A lot of lessons will be learned (and relearned from the past) as we move forward.

Big cities have lots of problems and lots of desirable features. It’s a toss up.

Having recently returned from Japan to San Francisco, I find myself longing for a city which has less crime and more functioning infrastructure, but having grown up here it’s hard to leave my friends.

I grew up real poor and it made me hungry. I think that's where a lot of the hacker mentality comes from, one form of poverty or another.

I am hoping to raise children soon and I am wondering how to help them to feel a hunger for the world without suffering in the same way I was raised. It's hard for me to imagine how they'll learn to thirst for the experience of the world if they don't have the same socioeconomic pressures, but I think that will be one of my most profound growing experiences in this life. I intend to accept them for who they are and to try to give them as much opportunity as they can stomach.

Edit: corollary, some of the best new art happens in the most restrictive environments. Maybe it’s a case of living at the extremes?

Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch.

Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent.

Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives.

Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.

I haven't looked into it, but I would guess that there's a key exchange with the reader that binds the contactless payment to that reader in such a way that the card produces a signed unique identity that proves it is the card without leaking the actual card numbers to the reader. Just a guess, but that's how I would want to build something like this. You don't have that much room on a chip but way more than a magstripe. (Security pattern: something you have that is time/merchant delimited)

I believe that in magstripe they just have a strip magnetized to produce some digits + your pin (Security pattern: something you know + something you have).

Change in society depends upon privacy. Women’s suffrage would not have happened without the ability for women to meet in secret to plan public assembly. This is also true of the civil rights movement. Gay marriage required gay relationships which were also illegal at the time.

Imagine how much more oppressive the in-crowd can be with perfect surveillance of financial transactions.

To be clear, I think money and speech are different. I also believe that a fully financially surveilled society is a totalitarian state where free speech is impossible.

We have to find a compromise where we retain some semblance of privacy in the digital banking era. To lose any hope of privacy is to accept tyranny.

It is possible for us, as technologists, to build systems that both comply with the law and create privacy for the customer, at least in the US as the laws are written today. The danger is the incredibly rapid expanse of surveillance powers as they relate to finance.

Please take a moment to research what is happening in the US right now. This is the front page of Bloomberg from a couple days ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-12/china-....

There is a possibility that miners could collude not to authenticate blocks with tornado cash transactions in them, but that gets into some interesting game theory in a globally distributed system. Not every miner is subject to US law.

It's a very fascinating story.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/15/tornado-cash-adds-c...

It's called a spectrum because there's a range. Some people are further out on the spectrum than others. Some people are autistic in one way but not another. One form of autism might be absolute pitch (distinct from perfect pitch in that you can hear semi-tones; Jacob Collier has this but might not choose to describe it as autism). It is a spectrum.

My point was that we are all somewhere on the spectrum. I don't pretend to be able to identify with anyone else's mental state, all I can narrate are my projections and the projections I receive back from others.

Autistic people have what seems like a much higher tolerance for bullshit both in the context of wanting to argue a point to finality or to obsess over a particularly detail until they’ve reached a shared plateau of understanding. Many times this is actually a very satisfying method of conversation, at least for me. Other times it can feel like talking to a wall.

Your mileage may vary.

Access controls are just not a priority while blitz scaling and then very difficult to patch on after the fact.

If we didn’t have those people, how would you suggest figuring out which system to implement?

For example, we built private information recovery using the first production grade open source implementation of oblivious RAM (https://mobilecoin.com/overview/explain-like-i'm-five/fog you’ll want to skip to the software engineer section) so that organizations could obliviously store and recover customer transactions without being able to observe them. The signal protocol’s techniques might be part of a cryptographic solution but it is not a silver-bullet.

I guess, notably, we never looked at NIST when designing it so maybe that’s the end of the discussion there.

Maybe that's it, maybe you can't?

There are lots of companies who have need for cryptography who don't know who to trust. What should they do in a world where the standards bodies are adversarial?

Maybe this is just the future, if you don't know crypto you're doomed to either do the research or accept that you're probably backdoored? Seems like a rough place to be...

Presenting broken-by-design encryption undermines public confidence in what should be one of our most sacrosanct institutions: the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Many enterprises do not possess the capability to audit these standards and will simply use whatever NIST recommends. The danger is that we could be engineering embedded systems which will be in use for decades which are not only viewable by the NSA (which you might be ok with depending on your political allegiance) but also likely viewable by any capable organization on earth (which you are probably not ok with irrespective of your political allegiance).

In short, we must have trustworthy cryptography standards. If we do not, bedlam will follow.

Please recall, the last lawsuit that DJB filed was the one that resulted in essentially "Code is speech" in our world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States).

Twitter had Aurora, then elsewhere mesos and mesosphere popped up and it seemed like there were going to be about 100 different frameworks until Kubernetes dropped and basically ate the industry alive. K8s feels pretty stable from where I’m sitting.

My advice is to listen to the parts of the critic that serve to improve your ability to heal the world (including yourself) and discard much of the rest.

I struggle with just how much traumatic processing is worthwhile. Like if you accept that everyone in life was always doing the best that they could in the moments in which they hurt you or themselves, or you replay the traumatic events and see them through your adult eyes, or if you try to recontextualize them some other way, at what point do you just put down the trauma and live?

Trauma comes in waves. It never really goes away as far as I can tell, you just develop a new relationship to it.

I am reminded continually of Dune.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I am continually reminded that there are deities in the South Eastern religions which have angry forms when they are unfed and benevolent forms when they are fed. The same deity can be a source of fear or a source of power depending on your relationship to it.

A concept I've thought a lot about recently is, instead of turning away from anger and fear, feeding my anger and fear until they are no longer angry gods but instead, benevolent beings who help me to contextualize my reality. I have found it is possible, at least for me, to do this without any outward expression of fear or anger, only inner acceptance that those feelings are real, valid, and not something that serves me at this time.

I'm not sure if these ramblings are helpful, but I hope you find peace on your journey, at least if that's what you're looking for <3.

* hardware is hard.

* devices that make 126db sustained at low frequencies consume a lot of power (im assuming the author is measuring dba but I know the SB3 puts out a lot of bass so could be dbc).

* battery power + wall power simultaneously with high power draw is very hard to get right.

Basically the thing Soundboks is trying to make is the intersection of a LOT of different hardware problems. Im not surprised they’re having trouble.