josh2600

Pessoa is one of my favorite poets. I would not describe most of his works as truly remarkable, but his best works are up there with the angels and the astronauts.

My favorite poem of all time:

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker, Who’s so good at his act, He even fakes the pain, Of pain he feels in fact,

And those who read his writing, Will read in what he wrote, Neither of the pains he has, But just the one they’re missing,

And so around it’s track, This thing called the heart winds, A little clockwork train, To entertain our minds.

Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL.

There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again.

The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.

This.

I am insanely embarrassed by the third world telecom infrastructure many Americans have to live with.

100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base. The goal of the telco is to keep the FCC speed goal at copper limits for as long as possible to avoid paying the fiber they were paid to build in the 90’s.

Om Malik wrote a fantastic book entitled: “Broadbandits” which covers the $750B telecom heist (way back 30 years ago when a single billion was a lot of money for a business).

https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-H...

Yeah VoLTE and VoWiFi were just getting rolled out when I left telecom. It was all IMS and hacks on top of SS7 and stuff like that.

WhatsApp really applied a ton of pressure to telcos and changed the game. Do you remember they an international sms in the US was $.60 per message before whatsapp?

Cinderella ends happily ever after and the New Testament doesn’t. I think it’s that simple.

Ok so like… think about telcos vs say, whatsapp. WhatsApp is sip, it uses srtp, the whole 9 yards. It works way better than telcos… BUT!!! It rides over telco rails.

This is the dirty truth. What we think of as telco is evolving. Telco is desperately trying not to be a “dumb pipe”, but that’s exactly what the internet wants the base layer to be. When the base layer is opinionated, bad things happen, like net neutrality.

What we want is unbiased fast networks that route data indiscriminately as long as it is correctly formatted and sent from a known address. That’s it.

Everything else is just vanity.

Celsius told their customers they were accruing Bitcoin and then Celsius didn’t buy the Bitcoin to deposit into their accounts, instead using the money to buy their CEL token that their ceo was dumping on exchange.

Their business model was fine. What wasn’t fine was not following it. Abra, Nexo, Gemini, and lots of other companies are business as usual with the same model right now.

Man, not putting Fully Qualified Domain Names in code has been such a recurring source of pain in my software life. You make so many assumptions about the way people parse domain names and all of them are wrong. Vendors do all kinds of things to "simplify" their workflows internally and sometimes they just parse URLs and domains in all kinds of ways that break your brain.

Reminds me so much of the way "smart" telecom engineers bastardized SS7 to ship new features onto legacy telco infrastructure. SS7 is like 20M lines of C. You can't really change it without breaking it in many other places, AT&T used to have a metric which was something like "for every 10 lines of code you alter in SS7, you create 8 bugs in other parts of the code." So "smart" telecom engineers would take existing fields in the SS7 logic and use them for different functions inside of their telco. A billing field could instead be used as a feature flag for some sort of customer state, but only inside of the telco's network (and re-written back to the compliant SS7 standard when the data was headed out of the network). This was called encapsulation and wrapping and un-wrapping packets just in time was the source of many many problems in my telecom life.

Just in time editing of network packets at the boundary is always fun. Most of the problems that would happen would come from forgetting to rewrite back to SS7 and transmitting the internal codes out.

I would say that it really depends on how you think about "the system."

If the hardware is in-scope for the system, you're generally out of luck at having provable guarantees unless you're willing to operate a foundry and courier your own products.

I think it comes down to threat modeling. You have some threshold where it's unreasonable for someone to attack a system for less than $X spend. Right now on iOS I think that's on the order of $500k-$1m usd.

I mean, I think this really depends on how you define ethereum. I think we all agree that there hasn’t been an effective attack against the consensus mechanism in a while (we could argue the original dao was sort of a successful attack against all of eth due to the hard fork).

This is kinda where I’ve gotten to on this: consensus is pretty much safe. Smart contracting is very hard to do safely.

This is not unlike the guarantees in general computation. The metal is pretty safe. The further you get away from the metal, the more layers of abstraction you’re relying on functioning predictably.

To be clear, I’m not arguing with you and appreciate your point about formal verification of eth.

Cryptography has mathematical proofs of the underlying math that are rigorous. There are constraints such as breaking if a proof of an attack against the discrete log were to emerge or other constraints related to p=np.

The implementations are also very close to formally verified if not fully formally verified.

Nothing is perfect but cryptographic code has to be pretty bulletproof or a lot of systems would get owned. The descriptions of how to verify cryptographic systems are academically and professionally rigorous especially compared to eth.

Caveat: sometimes the underlying systems that cryptographic implementations utilize change degrading their guarantees. There have been times where the compiler will get updated and cause what was a branchless process to branch which could lead to information leaks against a dedicated attacker. Thankfully such examples are rare in the literature.

We use this internally at mobilecoin as the base framework for new PRDs. Very clarifying.

2013 isn’t even close to the first time crypto recovered from dead.

3AC isn’t just large. 3AC is the largest trader by volume in the world for like 4 years. Them going bankrupt is like long term capital management going bankrupt.

The answer, as always, is that speculative execution is the devil.

I’m not convinced you can write a “for” loop safely on a modern processor.

Does this also include the whole buying toxic assets thing? Not sure where that fits in your 3 options, but it’s definitely something they’ve been doing, to the tune of trillions of dollars.

We all owe djb a great deal of gratitude for this hard-won freedom. This is one of the greatest victories in hacker history. I hope to never see this stricken from the law of the land.

Code is speech.

It was built into the cost of the computer.

I cannot state how real this is as a startup. There are instances where I have said “yeah I totally agree with you but our lawyers worded it this way.” Most of the time it’s fine and not material. Some of the time it’s the defining detail of the contract. I wish I had the wisdom to know the difference.

Here’s how I feel about this:

You can write all of the tests, you can get all of the audits, but there’s nothing that’s going to stop a 13-year old polish kid from mucking about in the guts of your tech. Security isn’t a promise you can make in absolutes, at some point you have to ship and you hope that you did everything well enough that there’s no low-hanging fruit.

There’s no such thing as a secure system, only systems which are more expensive to compromise.

Yeah mobilecoin makes heavy use of SGX. For what it’s worth Intel isn’t going to deprecate this server side for modern use cases anytime soon.

The trade offs between zk and hardware accelerated encryption still lean towards hardware though I’m not sure how much longer that will be true. It’s very difficult to imagine a general purpose ZK machine, but you don’t need general purpose compute to get most of the value out of defi as it exists today.

In short, we’re 5-10 years away from the first general compute zk machines/vm’s imho but bespoke zk circuits are starting to appear for many use cases. Checkout plonky2 as a cool example of a modern fast zk circuit, the polygon team is doing great work here.

We’ve been working towards a fully zk winterfell implementation/proposal but it’s not there yet.

In closing, one of the unique things in mobilecoin is private information recovery at scale using MobileCoin fog (https://mobilecoin.com/news/fog-foward-in-oblivious-computin...) which isn’t possible with any zk circuit I’ve ever seen (due to the need to store lots of information durably with fast access that doesn’t leak access patterns to the server).

As someone employing a lot of engineers right now, one of the problems is that engineering will just keep requesting resources ad infinitum if there’s no budgetary limit. The constraints of the business are actually always financial, and without proper financial modeling you’ll cease to have a business.

This is true in process scaling no matter the process.

Honestly, my guess is that the fab production issues impact everyone. I wonder if they get the same number of runs per $ as they used to pre-covid, my guess would be no. If that’s the case, that drives BoM up and Apple is hyper margin conscious.

The pace at which apple is pumping out new silicon is astounding. It’s hard to imagine anyone competing with them pound for pound, especially in the flops per watt game. I still can’t get over the fanless MacBook pros and the battery life.

I actually hope somebody is challenged enough by this to really push for competition as this level of performance asymmetry will ultimately result in further pricing asymmetry as competition breaks down.

If you spent 2 years somewhere and can’t find a single person to even confirm that you worked the position you’re asserting, something’s wrong.

Came here to say this. As far as I’m concerned this is a privacy protection.

It’s trivial to verify someone’s position at Apple with a reference check.

Is this only effective at small scale? Many of the biggest hedge funds in the world that do high frequency make money by effectively front-running the book. If you are executing these trades across exchanges I don't see how you don't get front-run by HF firms.

This is the same problem eth et al are dealing with in crypto swaps due to Miner Extracted Value (reordering the tx in the block to favor miners extracting value by front running trades).

Lightform is sick. I wish they'd open source everything instead of (I assume) selling all IP to a patent troll to recoup sunk costs.

If I were a VC, I would make it a covenant in any seed investment that the company had to open-source everything if they didn't make it to profitability.

I honestly feel, in this day and age, patents don't really help you until you get to the scale that they do (purely defensive) unless you're a troll.

Don't feed the trolls.

I often wonder what the world would be like if apple had gone through with it (I am definitely not advocating for it, but wondering what the trade offs would be on the other side of the rollout).

Specifically, I wonder if we would’ve gotten an end to end encrypted iCloud as a result of client side csam scanning.

Right now there’s absolutely no path to end to end encrypted cloud for google and apple. Someone new could try to do it but there would have to be some way to do csam scanning or you’d be violating strict liability. Something like what apple did, effectively client side tagging and server side cryptographically probabilistic scanning, seems like the only way to accomplish this while staying in line with the government asks.

The problem, of course, is that apple is working against a corpus that is hidden.

I’m not sure what the right answer here. It’s an intellectually interesting problem with a lot of policy wrinkles.

You can build this right now with https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/forest#a-forest-of-sig....

We have programmable chatbots running today that will accept payment for goods and services with just a phone number and cryptocurrency (caveat emptor, crypto is volatile and we're still in the very early days of building the on and off-ramps for mobilecoin, but we'll get there).