kurotetsuka

True enough - but carrying and exchanging large amounts of cash is rather unsafe. Not so with Bitcoin :).

You accept the risk you could die every time you step outside -- not because you think you're too smart to get shot or hit by a bus or whatever, but because the risk is so low and you kinda have to go outside to get what you want. Same thing for bitcoin. Sometimes the risk of getting fucked by someone over the internet is lower than getting fucked in person (or by the government), and you just gotta use them bitcoins to get what you want.

Neither of these are true. 'These people' don't want to let any particular party regulate their use of money, for better or worse. By using bitcoin, you implicitly accept the risks of a decentralized currency. Until there exists some good way of decentralized regulation, if its even possible[1], these sort of risks become a simple fact of life, a cost of doing business.

Bitcoin users and proponents dont "think they don't need regulation", they reject it. They don't "think they won't fall for scams", they accept the risk and possibility. They don't think "regulations are for the weak", they think regulations are for people who accept their government knowing everything about their finances and need transactional legal accountability. Your comment, and the parent one, are nothing more than really weak strawmen.

[1] :: I'm kinda sorta working on something that might help solve this problem, hyphaelia (https://github.com/kurotetsuka/hyphaelia), which could theoretically be used to create a trustable darknet marketplace. I'm nowhere near that point yet though.

“Inter-universal Geometer" - This seems to refer to the Geometers from Neal Stephenson's Anathem[0], or is at least inspired by the same concept. "Inter-universal" probably refers to the fact that math, analogous to geometry, holds true regardless of the rules of one's universe. (Math is a set of "if these rules apply to a system, then these other rules must apply" statements.) Just seems a little weird to me that the article was so specific about so much, but left that bit ambiguous ("What does it mean? His website offers no clues.").

Edit - Did some digging, apparently his website offers direct clues:

> "inter-universal geometry", which may be thought of as a sort of generalization of anabelian geometry　and, in particular, "absolute p-adic anabelian geometry"[1]

Idk what the "absolute p-adic" part means, but anabelian geometry is described here: [3].

Edit2 - Dunno why i'm spending so much time on this, but here's Mochizuki's explanation for the term (stolen from this wiki page on Inter-universal Teichmüller theory[4]).

> "in this sort of a situation, one must work with the Galois groups involved as abstract topological groups, which are not equipped with the 'labeling apparatus' . . . [defined as] the universe that gives rise to the model of set theory that underlies the codomain of the fiber functor determined by such a basepoint. It is for this reason that we refer to this aspect of the theory by the term 'inter-universal'."

So I guess that's your explanation?

[0] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

[1] :: http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/thoughts-english.h...

[3] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabelian_geometry

[4] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...

That made me laugh, thanks XD.

Sounds sort of like something I've been working on - Hyphaelia[0]. Users publish both respect and trust ratings for other users, and just respect ratings for content. This allows me to calculate individualized rankings of content for any user, given their direct trustees or alternatively, other specified entry-points into the network.

Anyways, pretty interesting - I'll be sure to hit up the author once i'm done, to see what he thinks.

[0] https://github.com/kurotetsuka/hyphaelia

You might be interested in something I've been working on - hyphaelia[0]. Users publish both respect and trust ratings for other users, and just respect ratings for content. This allows me to calculate individualized rankings of content for any user, given their direct trustees or alternatively, other specified entry-points into the network.

[0] https://github.com/kurotetsuka/hyphaelia

> the only way to correct that is to hire a greater share of them

This is affirmative action, which has the following problem: How do it eventually end? This is especially true when the desired quota is impossible (It may or may not be in the case of gender rep in STEM). In the real world, affirmative action policies never end due to social/political pressure, and eventually just inflict the converse problem.

Affirmative action is not the only way to correct imbalances (it may not even do that). The better way, at least in my view, is to correct the cause(s) of the imbalance, then wait. Of course if there's no discernible correctable cause, then the imbalance is clearly natural, and should not be disturbed. This may be slower, but its stable and infallible.

How is this good? Isn't it a clear case of unfair gender discrimination? I get that people want to correct a perceived injustice, but isn't overcompensating just as bad?

I'd like one please :).

Here's something I wrote a little while ago - an xkcd-style passgen script in ruby. Usage is just `./passgen.rb [number of words]`. Default word count is 5.

https://github.com/kurotetsuka/passgen

Is there a law for mentioning Zike's law? (kinda serious)