As much as some on HN like to criticize Moxie/Signal for their decisions (Intel SGX debacle), seeing these kinds of sentiments get cheered on in the media makes me really glad they exist. Same for the Tor Project, Matrix.org Foundation, EFF, etc. Can’t be easy being in their positions ever, but especially right now.
What? There’s a finite supply of gold just like there’s a finite supply of Bitcoin. You can mine more Bitcoin just like you can dig up more gold, up until there’s no more to be mined.
Another thing that was put in place for corporations with lobbying power and wealthy people is the current US monetary policy of quantitative easing to infinity. This makes the rich richer and decimates the purchasing power of those who have few assets (poor and/or working class), and the government which you seem to have so much trust in does this knowingly. Note that even outside of the US, this does matter, since the USD is the de facto global reserve currency.
“crypto consumes more electricity than country X” is such a tired and low-effort talking point. There are things more useless than crypto that consume more energy than certain countries.
This trend in combination with the new wave of everything being a subscription really has me worried as a recent college grad who therefore does not own a home or have much in the way of savings. If you don’t own anything and your access to essential items is decided by some megacorp like Google or FB, you bet people will fall in line with the latest recreational outrage real fast. Connected cars with subscription features that show you ads even if you do own them (see the Ford Mach-E), and financial institutions buying up single-family homes to keep as many people as possible renting forever and never gaining equity in anything. The World Economic Forum came out and said it blatantly: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” That’s starting to read more like a command, not a prediction.
This looks awesome, but as someone who knows nothing about analog computing, what’s a good educational resource to go along with this so that I can use it to actually learn?
To me this is a naïve and overly-charitable view of the institutions we rely on to tell the truth about things we don’t directly observe. I’m fine leaving this as a disagreement, though, and honestly hope you are right.
Users are currently being banned for even asking legitimate questions about the vaccine. Nonsense is nonsense, but labeling anyone who even questions vaccine safety as “promoting vaccine hesitancy” is overreacting and arouses suspicion.
Oh of course not. My comment was only meant to say I think they did the right thing in this situation. I’m aware of Reddit’s actions in other situations and agree with you that they are inconsistent.
I received the full two doses of an mRNA vaccine and I’ll get a third if it’s recommended. I’m confident it’s safe and effective.
I still take issue with your inclusion of “known misinformation” and “known factual information”. Sure, in the case of the vaccines, the known facts and misinfo seem to be pretty clear cut and that in this particular case, the people spreading the misinfo are wrong. That doesn’t mean that at some point in the future we won’t face a situation where the facts are less clear and the debate IS legitimate. We saw this with lab leak, and we even saw this with the use of masks early on.
Props to Reddit for not caving to this. I really do not understand anyone that calls for this kind of heavy-handed moderation. I certainly understand the impulse to want it, but upon thinking for like, 30 seconds about the precedent it sets and what the long term effects might be I realize it’s a pretty bad idea. Next time around, it might be the speech that they DO agree with that other people are wanting to clamp down on, and I don’t think they’ll just roll over and take it. That tells me a shocking number of people are not doing the basic due diligence of thinking through an idea even a little bit before jumping to support it.
I would argue the average human driver is actually a good driver. People argue that Tesla training their system to mimic a human driver is a bad idea because then it will replicate bad human driver behavior, but the fact is that human drivers don’t end up killing themselves or others the vast, vast majority of the time. George Hotz of Comma.ai brought up an interesting point about this on one of his Lex Fridman podcast appearances. He said from the driving data they’ve gathered, it seems that average drivers are good in the same ways, while especially bad drivers are bad in unique ways. The result is that the bad driver behavior in the data is pretty much overwhelmed and washed out by the abundance of good driver behavior in the data. Add to this the fact that self-driving systems still have things like automatic emergency braking, and I’d say you’ve got a pretty safe driver.
Unrelated to the article, but as a young SWE (finished undergrad in December 2020) who’s always had a side-interest in physics, how do I end up working at a QC company like DWave? Right now I’m working in embedded systems programming at a semiconductor manufacturing equipment company, and I assume at a company like DWave that also makes hardware the possible SW roles are somewhat similar (embedded, metrology, monitoring, algorithms, etc.). Do you look for physics knowledge in your SWE applicants?
As a Gen Z’er that graduated college in December 2020 and was fortunate enough to have (and not lose due to COVID) a full time software engineering job lined up, I’m not sure how much this should worry me. Unlike a lot of US high schoolers, I was lucky to have a pretty solid personal finance class that taught me about Roth IRAs and 401ks and how index funds could set you up nice as long as you had some discipline. Although, in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think that something would have to give eventually and that the average rates of economic growth we were being shown in class couldn’t continue. Despite this, I still started contributing to retirement savings as soon as I turned 18 with what little money I made from internships, because I thought at the very least having SOME savings would be good even if I was looking at getting 3-4% return instead of 5-7%.
I guess the point of this post is that even as a Gen Z person being told straight up, “You’re fucked”, I’m still of two minds about whether that’s really true. The company I work for is in the area of semiconductor lithography, and the technology is absolutely astounding to me. I simply don’t believe that an economy that produces this kind of equipment and is STILL innovating is going to slow down enough to screw over an entire generation. Battery tech for EVs, solar, RISC-V and the stuff SiFive is doing, fusion power (maybe?), biotech and health-enhancing tech in general, and so many more things give me the feeling that we’ve still got plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Curious to hear what others think.
Could you expand on what you mean by a variation of Signal? To me, Signal’s main feature is just that it’s a reliable E2E encrypted messaging app, implying two ends to communication. A blog post interface implies one-to-anyone communication, so I’m confused what part of Signal you want to emulate.
Yeah, I read the article. My question was what really prevents the existence of some cryptographic operation that would allow us to "port" the laws of physics to the digital space, so that when information moves we could enforce that the sender no longer has it and the receiver does.
The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nuclear fusion takes a ton of energy, and gold is one of the heavier naturally occurring elements. As the article mentions, all physical assets can retain value because they're impossible to copy. If I give you my gold, the transfer of value is being held up by the laws of physics. You now have it, and I don't. There's no ledger keeping track of all the gold atoms in the universe, therefore it's trivial to transfer it from one part of space to another. What keeps us from having some cryptographic primitive that enforces the same thing?
Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.
I agree it’s gone downhill, I’m finding it really bizarre and somewhat sad to watch. It seems to me the pillars of legacy media like the NYT realized in the past decade they’re going to be outdone by newer internet-native ways of obtaining information (Substack, Twitter, etc. which do have their own issues), and their recent wave of SV tech industry bashing reeks of desperation. I’m not sure what’s going to rise to replace the idea of a “Paper of record”. Balaji is big on the idea of a “ledger of record” on some blockchain, but implementation difficulties aside, I’m skeptical that such a system would really solve the problem here.
I’d point out that child sexual abuse content is not an “easy to solve case”. The extent to which Facebook, Google, and more recently, Zoom look the other way on this issue is horrifying and it seems to be a very hard problem due to the laws surrounding the handling of such material. I’m not faulting the laws, I just think this is an inherently hard issue to crack down on. Gabriel Dance and Michael Keller at the NYT did some very high quality reporting on this whole issue in 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...).
> The whole point of HIT is that you get all of the cardiovascular benefits of endurance sports without the repetitive stress injuries.
And the current evidence is that your maximum exertion is what matters, not time spent exercising.
This cannot be true, it contradicts literally all the best training knowledge for distance runners. NCAA cross country coaches and professional distance coaches have their runners doing high mileage easy days and intervals on hard days, and as someone who has experienced this training first hand, you absolutely cannot do the hard days at a proper intensity if you haven’t built up your aerobic capacity through a LOT of easy to medium effort long runs. If they could get all the cardiovascular benefits from HIT, they would only be doing that. The teams that win college championships and the pro teams sending athletes to the Olympics are the ones with the fittest runners, the fittest runners are the ones with the best training. They are doing the majority of their mileage in long easy efforts.
Anecdotally, myself and many teammates I’ve known have seen our biggest jumps in performance come from increasing weekly mileage (more easy miles) and while keeping the volume of hard efforts the same. Time spent exercising matters very much.
> devoting instead a portion of my time to non-proliferation work
This is very interesting to me, what line of work are you in such that you are able to devote a portion of your time to non-proliferation work? Having previously worked at one of the NNSA labs it's my understanding that non-proliferation work is often classified, but I'd be interested to hear how normal technically-minded folks can contribute.
Not to mention the fact that the government is one of the only funding sources for blue-sky research nowadays. Pretty much the only surviving research institutions that rival Bell Labs are the national laboratories. Getting to work with insanely bright people at the frontiers of your field (without the funding problems of academia) should be considered a benefit on its own. Also, many of the national labs pay quite well. They don’t use the USG pay scale which is a misconception I see very often in these discussions.
I agree that the potential impact of ML on the theoretical side is very exciting. I think there’s a lot of bridging to be done between the most advanced mathematics and the most advanced physics that could lead to new insight, but it’s a hard problem for humans to tackle since we have very few people who are deeply proficient in both—although it is becoming more common. I’m thinking something like GPT-3 trained on literature in both fields could be the kind of thing we want, but like you I still doubt that a DL system is likely to come up with any real insight. I’d like to be proven wrong, though.
> watching him "smoke" weed or pronounce the name of his kid is pretty boring.
Agreed, but those were not the only things Musk did in each of those episodes and they contained a lot of content (that didn't involve just smoking weed) that was probably interesting to people outside of the HN crowd who wouldn't watch Musks's actual Neuralink presentation or the original MCT/ITS talk.