light_cone

I just logged in just to recommend Dreaming Spanish (and now Dreaming French apparently). It's absolutely the right way to learn a language IMO. If anyone reading this is lost on what resource to look for to learn Spanish or French, I urge you to try it. (Of course I have no interest here except see them succeed on this brilliant idea).

I use two text manipulation plugins in sublime text all the time. I did not manage to have the functionality in zed, which made be renounce to use it:

- Evaluate, a plugin that evaluates the selections as python expressions and replaces them by their respective results. I added "iota" as a variable in the evaluation context, that gives me the current selection index (like iota in go). With that, so many math or text manipulations can be done in bulk.

- Alignment, to align all my cursor into a vertical column by adding spaces.

Moreover, the law literally says that contracts are considered as laws but only applicable to co-contractants (at least in France it's written like that). So it's the same thing, just with a different scope and precedence on the hierarchy of norms.

I have some of these usb keys, and I remember having remounted the device rw on linux, and the device failed with an io error when I attempted to write. So if I'm correct, the driver was configured as if the key was rw, but it failed because the hardware switch was ro.

So I believe that it is an actual hardware lock, in addition to the os having the ro/rw status info.

If someone is interested, Kanguru have faster models than the one linked (which I have too), which is a little slow by today's standard.

When you imprison someone until they become a spy in the company you're trying to buy, do you really think there is no outcome where you might gain leverage?

I would not know how that works, but I can recall a "strange" order of judicial events in the Alstom buyout by General Electric. Frédéric Pierucci was incarcerated for some weird foreign bribery charges, refused to be an FBI informant, and was released once Alstom was sold. He wrote a book about it. It really seems he was held as an economic hostage.

So when you learn about that, it's easier to think that the justice branch is much much closer to the executive branch than what it seems.

I am using it, and I find it provides good services overall. Much more flexible than traditional banks. I contacted the customer service once and it responded.

I have not used the API, but I looked at it at some point and it seemed capable of doing what you could do in the official app.

No sorry, I went on a tangent and generalized without stating it clearly.

I just wanted to argue that by my definition, we are already in a tranhumanistic (and eugenistic) society, so we should not spare ourselves these debates instead of blanket statements and be afraid of concepts.

I probably appeared as pro go-nuts-on-brain-generics, whereas I actually agree we should be very cautious. The law of unintended consequences is indeed a strong argument.

I get that, I understand very well it's a slippery slope. For me it's just a cursor, whereas I think that people pretend there is no cursor, only absolute values.

I guess it's a question of semantics. Because by reading you, using my definition of transhumanism, you're implying that wearing glasses is already a step too far (because it's using technology to improve/fix yourself). But of course I don't think that's what you believe. So clearly, these words are tainted, because we're not talking about the same thing really.

I don't know why, but the word 'eugenics' is enough to trigger a thought-terminating cliché. Maybe the GP was being tongue-in-cheek, maybe not, but it's always a strong reaction to this word.

I understand it was used as an excuse to justify genocide, but I don't understand why the concept of eugenics is viewed as profoundly immoral by itself. I get that it's a slippery slope, and that's a valid reason to ban it, but I never see it formulated that way, only a "NO! NEVER!!" non-argument.

We've always been fighting diseases, tried to better our condition, but if we're using genetics to prevent lethal diseases it's suddenly immoral? (Not saying it's what was talked about above, just using a clear cut example here). I really don't get it. I find on the contrary that not preventing horrible painful diseases on purpose, on the basis of us not wanting to feel uneasy, is what could be called immoral. I think that at least for clear cut cases, it should be debated.

It's a little bit like transhumanism: a lot of people use glasses, or prosthesis without any issues. It's already transhumanism IMO, but people do not label it that way, so that's accepted, while the word transhumanism itself is vehemently rejected.

I think it has meaning after all. I would rewrite as this: "HEX directly targeted investors globally, using advertisements placed in football stadiums (especially those involved in the English premier league). These ads boasted about an 11,500% asset price increase in 4 months"

I like to translate improbable phrasing into proper sentences. It is a fine hobby, like archeology, but on other people's mind (or maybe AI output, who knows in 2023). :)

I think you are enamoured with the idea of being neutral, like a pure-wisdom spirit above the melee, wisely noticing the hypocrisy of the west and reminding us the right for any people to live as they see fit.

Well I think this is just your ego flattering yourself.

Because this is such a clumsy false dichotomy that it's frankly hard to accept that people can actually think sincerely what you said.

How can you not see that the ancient way the talibans want to enforce is just another oppressive standard forced on the population, especially women?

What if I am an afghan woman who wants to live based on another perfectly valid ancient way of life, but different than the talibans'? Must I shut up or be killed? Who decides exactly? Whose ancient way is the most legitimate? Could it be perhaps _any_ that does not oppress to death people?

Perhaps people are just saying that anything less oppressive than this horror is what should be? Perhaps that's what people mean when they talk about human rights? And perhaps that reality has NOTHING to do with the west's hypocrisy or any misuse of the term 'human rights' you might encounter?

Yes, I think it's a fair assumption unfortunately.

"Honey, you are so important to me that I decided to dump you."

If you tried adapt the corporate wording in your everyday life, you'd be judged by everyone as one of the biggest a-hole there is, and rightly so.

I wonder the proportion of people like me who are aggravated by this bs...

Indeed, thank you, I was not aware of this example.

If I did start an open source project, I think I would do a very simple licensing that I have never encountered, like: "Dual licensing: Paid software now, and GPL starting 2032". I guess in the oss monetization list it is covered by "paid early access: Delayed open-sourcing".

The software source code is released day one, but it won't be a FOSS license until YEAR+N. The license switch will be automatic after the deadline.

That way I think I can have the best of both worlds: making sure development is paid (which is often necessary to sustain any large project) and any additional valuable development being be paid for, but also giving your customers the guarantee that they'll have an exit against vendor lock-in, and releasing in the long term to the FOSS community.

Basically I sell software normally, but commit to a future FOSS license at the same time. It's not unlike patents actually, at least what they should be.

First of all, _most_ services is not _all_ services, so you have a use case here.

Also, you could make FIDO keys that support restoring but not backing up. If you could set up a FIDO with custom random seed _as an expert option_, then you could have a secure key, and keeping the seed private would be your expert problem.

I would adopt such a solution, whereas now I don't adopt the proposed solution because I cannot add a new service while having the backup key remaining off-site.

Maybe another solution would be to be to have _absolutely all_ services accept several keys (enforced by protocol), in addition to be able to accept adding an off-site key with only its fingerprint, but without requiring to have it physically.

> But none of those drugs will result in the long-term change that you’re looking for.

Sorry to be blunt, but this is clearly the morally infused cliché of "healthy people do not take drugs because drugs are bad mkay.". Cliché which seem to automatically give people the status of the most responsible person in the room for some reason.

Well I'd like to give a rebuttal. Saying no to drugs is saying no to the risk of taking the drug, that is true. But it is _also_ saying no to the potential benefit.

If, for the sake of argument, someone took that risk at 20, but had some incredible epiphany and radically changed their life for the better during the 30 years following the experiment, you can't say in good faith that it was _bad_. You _have_ to take into account that a better quality of life was exchanged for that risk. And in my opinion, refusing to see that is not automatically the responsible position, even if it is always portrayed as such.

Exactly, you can search "motus france 2" on youtube and you'll see the tv show that existed for decades in france.

I have a similar problem, and when I finally allocate bandwidth for a project, I can't find relevant objects when I need them.

So I bought a commercial label printer, I made a web app with a database representing a tree of objects/containers with photos and search function, and I am in the process of completely inventoring my stuff (consumables, tools, books, etc).

It's very long to do the inventory, and you have to be very consistent in maintaining the current location of objects in the tree, but the power to find every physical objects as fast as a google search is incredible. When I'm finished I'll be able to start any project and fetch "that old arcane microchip module I bought once 5 years ago" instantly.

And I think not seeing the accumulated mess of dozens of stalled projects will help for my mental clarity.

Well, adding "obviously" to an argument does not add anything to the argument.

I can see how you _might_ think this some type of mental health issue, but seeing a behavior that is weird from your point of view does not make it a medical behavior automatically. It might, it might not, and you can't tell for sure.

To push another armchair diagnosis with exactly the same value, I'd say it looks someone who plays the game of life at a high level, which can sometimes looks like lunacy from the outside. But that's just like, my opinion, man.

It is sad that you would rather believe the parent has mental health issues, rather than entertain the possibility that yes, someone is actually doing something effective against powerful corrupt people, and that requires creative thinking.

To me, it echoes "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by La Boétie. Powerful people are just people. They are powerful because we are collectively granting them that power. This is not a case of delusion of grandeur, but a case of saying no to learned helplessness.

So thank you byecancer21 for what you're doing against corruption, from a stranger on the internet.

Obligatory meta TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o

Personally the TED talk I liked the most. It's funny but I actually find it interesting, showing that appearance of meaning is not actual meaning.

If you happen to compare what are (argued as) early weak signals, with the morality of the nazi holocaust in its last stage, then sure it's disrespectful. But this a kind of a strawman argument.

Alerting the possible bad outcome much later down the line, is not comparing the morality of these present-time signals to the bad future-time outcome that one could fear.

It's only with historical hindsight, that you're able to say that _of course_ these weak signals in Germany were early signs of a fatal spiral, and people should have known better. From the point of view of someone living at that time, it would have been much harder not to view these opinions as exaggeration.

All that website inspires me is the American Psycho business card scene. Sometime reality is stranger than fiction.

I think you basically ask the right questions. But when you have progressed in your understanding, and you're confronted with the next problem caused by PoS, you seem to assume that PoS is flawed, because you can't immediately think of a solution (which is expected, that's quite a hard problem). The reality is that the issues you mention are well identified and they have solutions for them.

About VDFs, there is a tolerance, you need to be in the same ballpark as the fastest, not _the_ absolute fastest. The more tolerance you need, the less snappy the PoS blockchain will be. They plan to make a low-power asic for that task, to be as close as the theoretical max speed for that, and have the lowest tolerance margin as a result.

Also, there is a way to reduce all VDFs results so that only one of the whole set of VFS-ers need to be honest.

So it's not one volunteer, but a pool of volunteers, using low powered asics so close to the theoretical max (ie speed of transistor switching) that you couldn't outrun them enough to profit from that speed up. I am not sure if they are incentivized, because it's not costing a lot, but maybe.

> Edit: I suppose the VDF's input might not be "the block being computed" but instead "the previous block", and the output then used to elect participants who are then trusted to build the new block. This would allow the new block to indicate whether the VDF actually took longer than expected.

Indeed, that's what I thought I was saying, but maybe I was not clear enough.

With VDF you cannot rebuild the 100 minutes worth of blocks in less than 100 minutes, because with the VDF logging, you just proved that you would need at least 100 minutes to go from block n to n+(100 minutes). You can check in 10 seconds, but can only produce in 100 minutes, just like you can check in an instant that a bitcoin block starts with enough zeroes. So it defines the rate of generating blocks.

Of course, nothing can stop anyone from creating parallel 100-minute long branches if that was the only thing, as, unlike PoW, it does not cost anything (except time) to create branches.

So you still need a consensus mechanism, a way to, as an agent of the network, decide what is the right branch. On bitcoin, it is very simple: go to the longest chain, it's where the majority of mining power went, so that is clearly the consensus (with 1 joule = 1 vote).

On ethereum, it's much more complex, involving promises with money at stake locked somewhere, so that anyone can detect cheaters, automatically unlock and take their money as punishment, and reward the whistle-blower with it. So, unless everyone is foolish enough to watch their money seized by the network, it does not happen.

The exact way the correct branch is decided is by random election of one staker, where the randomness is proved to be actually random. After all, using a VDF, you can now prove that its output won't be known until x seconds have passed, if you put the most recent block hash as input. So during that time, you can agree on an fair pseudo-random election algorithm that will take this VDF output as a seed when it becomes available.

It's incredible how people who read a few articles think they have found the smoking gun, against a technology on which a lot of crypto researchers devote years of their time to make and analyze. They must think themselves are geniuses, and researchers are fools. Oh well, nothing new under the sun.

The clock issue is an excellent point, but the ethereum PoS have a nano scale PoW mechanism for this exact problem. Look at VFD "Verifiable Delay Functions" [1].

In short:

If you take the pbkdf2 key derivation function: its job is to slow down hashing a thousand fold or so, so that hashing an entire search space becomes impractical. You give your secret in input, and it gives you a hash, let's say, in 1 second. You'll have to spend the time again to recompute the hash. With a faster machine, you can compute in maybe 100ms, but still, there is a limit in how fast you can obtain the result.

Now change the cryptographic properties of pbkdf2, so that you can go back from the output to the input in constant time, so you can find the secret from the hash in O(1). Then, it becomes useless for actual secrets, but you now have an instantly verifiable proof that a certain amount of time (or serial computation) had to pass to get from the input to the output. Plug the input to the previous block hash, and embed the result in the next block, and you have your clock, based on physics and provable historical facts.

[1] https://vdfresearch.org

I agree, that is exactly what I think people always misunderstand about tolerance: You cannot tolerate something you agree with. That is called agreeing, not tolerance, by definition.

Tolerance is the wise behavior you should have, reserved for things you don't agree with, or even detest.