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synctexton Artificial Life Creation T-0 and Launching [video]

> I don't have any outstanding objections to the general ideas proposed, but as you have pointed out, the paradigm as a whole goes against almost all of the presently accepted practices.

Indeed, as a professor in fault tolerance, distributed system, and parallel programming I can confirm that almost nobody work on this. This work is quite fascinating and complete with operational hardware/software combo. Never seen that before! My university has done work like: "Cellular automata based S-boxes", nothing as ambitious as a post-Neumann paradigm.

Hopefully this work leads to a breakthrough on the ease of asynchronous software development. Academia never seriously looks at this due to the difficulty of coding for exotic parallel async architectures. Numerous people dedicated their lives to making coding easy. Centuries of human efforts and we now have Javascript, 1+ million people know how to code in that. Efficient coding using VHDL? Async FPGA stuff? 2D grid tiles? Not many.

synctexton The Need to Read

"Writing is Thinking"

  - my master thesis professor.

synctexton Ask HN: I've Built a DHT Torrent Sniffer and Search Engine. Should I Release?

See the latest 2022 algorithm called MeritRank [1]. Improves on the prior work developed together with Harvard. We deployed roughly 5 generation in the past 17 years. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09950

synctexton Ask HN: I've Built a DHT Torrent Sniffer and Search Engine. Should I Release?

these things need spam measures to work. That was not listed as a feature.

synctexton Ask HN: I've Built a DHT Torrent Sniffer and Search Engine. Should I Release?

We tried too. Several people have made DHT sniffers, including our lab. You see lots of spam and get stuck. Filtering out the noise is weirdly hard.

synctexton Ask HN: I've Built a DHT Torrent Sniffer and Search Engine. Should I Release?

indeed, bit different. lots of people worked in this field and made these tools. Around 2014 the state of the art was 20k DHT responses per second, see '100 million DHT replies'. https://doi.org/10.1109/P2P.2014.6934318

synctexton Show HN: Chitchatter – P2P chat app that is serverless, decentralized, ephemeral

Yes, not many people measured NAT boxes at scale. "UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild" [1] this scientific article from our lab might be helpful. We also have UDP puncturing also working in a 3G or wifi setting with Android-to-Android mode, see "Kotlin-IPv8" link in here: https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp

[1] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01597969/document

synctexton A simple guide to quadratic voting

Sadly there is a showstopper.

Quadratic voting can be bypassed if whales can make a large amount of identities. The lack of strong identity and Sybil attacks is the biggest unsolved problem in distributed systems of the free-to-join class.

synctexton 'Sand battery' could solve green energy's big problem

Fascinating stuff. Some numbers from the startup website[1]:

- < 10 eur/kWh of storage capacity (piping is now dominating cost)

- The storage has 100 kW heating power and 8 MWh capacity.

- three times superior to water-based storage and beyond boiling point [2]

- related scientific work, using granite [3]

[1] https://polarnightenergy.fi/technology

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm7spMG0ch8&t=871s

[3] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/21/5662/pdf

synctexton Hertzbleed Attack

The scientific article URL is broken, see correct link:

https://github.com/FPSG-UIUC/hertzbleed/pull/4

19 pages of detail, "Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86 (USENIX 2022)"

synctexton Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq

All these attempts are not as easy to use as the dominant network. Friction-free is very hard. Are the masses going to switch purely for privacy preservation?

See our Internet-deployed social network from 13 years ago. Without any server and no gatekeepers. Its fully self-organising. It lacks polish. You simply can not compete against the thousands of engineers which polish the dominant social network. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221015322_A_Gossip-...

synctexton Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?

This essay introduces Self-Sovereign Identity very nicely! Even deeper deep dive into this topic :

Sybil attacks are not solved with the "Soul" bound reputation approach. This was mathematically proven some years ago by Harvard University phd student Sven[0]. See his impossibility results on "weakly beneficial Sybil attacks" and "single report responsiveness property". The blockchain crowd has not yet discovered this, fake identities are an unsolved problem.

Startups be aware. European Commission now has an official "26 000 000.00 EUR" "estimated value" open offer for SSI wallet solutions [1]. Prior for basic service called "EBSI" was 35 million, won by IBM Hyperledger. That now works, Dev API [2]. Upcoming Europe directive states that by 2024 all citizens can apply for a digital identity, if they want one.

(self-promotion..) State-of-the-art: Delft University trustless SSI solution with running code and field-tested zero-knowledge proofs. Scientific publication "A Truly Self-Sovereign Identity System", published at IEEE LCN conference[3]. Disclaimer: we got the government contract for doing privacy-first digital identity. We integrated our own Tor-fork based on UDP for solid privacy with verifiable credential stack, see Github deep link [4].

[0] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4907301/Seuken_S... [1] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:309685-2022:TEXT:EN... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E... [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00415.pdf [4] https://py-ipv8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basics/identity_tut...

synctexton BitTorrent Site Magnet Database Archives Available via Torrent and Direct DL

use Tribler? The torrent client with own Tor-fork for bulk tunneling and support for search.

synctexton Just Say No to Central Bank Digital Currencies

Rebuttal from responsible professor deploying such systems:

- Do you trust your bank? (to never get hacked, go bankrupt, etc.)

- Do you trust Big Tech to run the global financial system? (search: "Google Cloud for banking" or read "Cloud Computing in Banking" by capgemini).

- Do you trust the government with critical infrastructure?

Central bank digital currency could indeed be evil. The way Delft University is building it gives more power to the people. Here in Europe the digital Euro is coming. We've done some open source Internet-deployment test, with live connection to the IBAN system[1]. [1] https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp#digital-euro

synctexton A Call to Build Models Like We Build Open-Source Software

Running code state-of-the-art for federated learning on mobiles: https://github.com/jverbraeken/trustchain-superapp/commits/m... (Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11006)

People like to code their own work, instead of contributing to others. Incremental work does not count. This is more of a flaw in scientific output counting I believe. Also, our technology stack is completely "zero-server" that makes everything on Android much harder and complex. Disclaimer: I'm the thesis adviser of this student

synctexton Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

It is not some amount of centralization. Our experimental university work sees all startups cheat with servers. They still sell it as Web3. If you run the servers, you need to police the service! You simply become Web2 again. It should be self-organising and pure, like Bitcoin.

Scientifically Web3 consists of: peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent) with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github). This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).

synctexton Embodied Intelligence via Learning and Evolution

The non-broken link to the Python code: https://github.com/agrimgupta92/derl

Copied: "The code consists of three main components:

- UNIMAL Design Space: A UNIversal aniMAL morphological design space that is both highly expressive yet also enriched for useful controllable morphologies.

- DERL: An efficient asynchronous method for parallelizing computations underlying learning and evolution across many compute nodes.

- Evolutionary environments and evaluation tasks: A set of three evolutionary environments and eight evaluation tasks."

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

Crash reporter uses sentry. We don't want to know anything else about our users. When Tribler crashes the core dump (e.g. Python TraceBack) can be inserted as a Github issue, using Sentry. Requires the user to opt-in by clicking "send" on crash reporter.

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

Malicious relays have the option to give you bogus content or real content. The block-level hashes of Bittorrent prevent anything bad getting through. So just avoid relays which are not giving you good blocks. At another level, if relaying as honest, but curious (e.g. spying) you need to randomly select several relays and use them all in a long relay path. Pioneered by Tor team, results in excessive bandwidth usage.

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

Yes, there is a core+GUI split.

Docs REST api: https://tribler.readthedocs.io/en/latest/restapi/introductio...

Search and all features are exposed there: https://tribler.readthedocs.io/en/latest/restapi/search.html

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

Crashes are optionally reported to Github for fixing. What could we use instead of Sentry to understand bugs and causes?

  - Tribler team

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

this.

To make decentralised search work you need to solve the trust problem. Strangers sharing content with you without spam, decoys, and malware. You need to create trust without any central coordinator. Crawling the DHT for content is not going to get you Google-quality search. The Tribler lab is working on the web-of-trust problem and decentralised (ledger) accounting since pre-Bitcoin days. Its a stubborn problem. But we're making consistent progress. Latest peer-reviewed science: https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2021/pdfs/p1263.pdf

  -Tribler team

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

  Scihub test :-)

Note our scientific progress towards "The Global Brain" https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3615#issuecomment-...

Specifically designed to improving science

-Tribler team

synctexton Tribler: Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship

Tribler founder here, great to see people still care about cute old P2P file sharing.

My lab has been trying to get sharing, searching, and crowdsourcing to scale towards millions for 16 years now.

The fundamental science is making progress to re-decentralise The Internet. Decades of work left obviously. Lots of progress on creating non-profit versions of all of Big Tech services (well in principle that is). Even Amazon can be decentralised, see a recent phd thesis from the lab, https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Aa4f750...

European Commission might come in and allow open source clients of Facebook, instagram, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Our trustchain technology is specifically designed to be the superstructure for this. So EU might break down the defensive moats around 10 T$ of market cap. The legal foundation is already there, the new eIDAS Regulation is designed to _enforce_ login using the upcoming EU digital passport for all of Big Tech. So Open Source EU Metaverse, connecting all Big Tech protocols into a single repo and identity management solution with true privacy protection..

synctexton Thirty Tesla crashes linked to assisted driving system under investigation in US

https://www.tesladeaths.com/miles.html

Is this looking accurate?

synctexton Introduction to Robotics

It takes clicks to escape the intro material.

Then this: "We previously learnt how to derive a Jacobian which relates the velocity of a point, defined relative to one coordinate frame, to the velocity relative to a different coordinate frame. Now we extend that to the 3D case." https://robotacademy.net.au/masterclass/velocity-kinematics-...

synctexton Introduction to Robotics

"Velocity kinematics in 3D" https://robotacademy.net.au/masterclass/velocity-kinematics-...

The introduction is clearly to get the students interested. There are courses with great depth there, good open education & open science!

synctexton Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

Wormhole requirement: "the URL of a publicly-available Rendezvous Server"

This means its not a self-sovereign system, like Bittorrent, GIT, and Bitcoin. Its no different then a central Napster server, the one that got dragged into court on November 1999. Scientists are still working on creating self-sovereign peer-to-peer systems. Its hard, but we're going to solve it in coming years.

Scientific community: "International Workshop series on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good", https://dicg2020.github.io/ (disclaimer: involved scientist)

synctexton A long-lasting, stable solid-state lithium battery

Indeed, not a working product. Working lab-only 'hardware'. The "methods section" in the Nature paper is fascinating:

"The anode-solid electrolyte-cathode for half-battery or anode-solid electrolyte-anode for symmetric battery were pressed together in a homemade pressurized cell at 467 MPa and kept at 50–250 MPa during testing." "All batteries were assembled in an argon atmosphere glovebox and the galvanostatic battery cycling test was performed on an ArbinBT2000 workstation."

synctexton Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infrastructures (2020)

> That's more important than this paper.

Author here. Deeply honoured that you carefully analysed our work. Yes, I agree that progress on the Sybil attack would be of high impact. We are in the process of strengthening our graph theory result. After already spending 18 year on it, we're getting close to a general "Universal Trust Machine" level result.

Recent science: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138912862... Recent thoughts: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-trus...