troymc

The distance between Earth and Neptune oscillates with a period of about one year because Neptune moves around the sun much slower than the Earth does. The Earth-Neptune distance oscillates between about 29 AU and 31 AU.

I checked your calculations and I get similar numbers. I don't think that tens of thousands of layers of encryption is a problem: a modern computer can store that many private keys with no problems. In fact, it should probably store three copies of each one, or do something to account for random bit flips.

These are all good improvements. Thanks!

My thinking now is that you could send the spacecraft out to Neptune and do a gravity-assist maneuver there, sending the spacecraft into a large orbit around the Sun, with a high perihelion.

I wrote that the proposed system was inspired by the TOR network, not that it literally uses the TOR network. To send a message across the TOR network, you wrap it in a bunch of layers of encryption, and then each TOR node removes one layer: that's the similar aspect.

Your other critiques are all valid. There's still a lower bound on the total time required for full decryption. I was just trying to show that that is possible.

The up-front capital expenditure might be high, yes, but it might be possible to recoup that by charging fees for the service once it's working. The Chunnel had a high capex too.

In any case, I just wanted to show that working timelock encryption system is theoretically possible. Some people claimed it wasn't.

Here's a way to encrypt something with an actual timelock, which works because physics. More specifically, it works because there is a maximum speed that information can travel through space: the speed of light.

Step 1: Generate a large number of named public/private keypairs and put the private keys on a spacecraft. Also give the spacecraft a communication system and a long-lived RTG (an energy source getting its energy from the decay of some radioactive materials).

Step 2: Send the spacecraft to land on the surface a distant body in the solar system, such as one of the moons of Neptune.

Step 3: To encrypt a message such that it's guaranteed to not be cracked in less than some specified time, encrypt it several times, using the known named public keys.

To decrypt the message, you've got to send it out to the distant spacecraft and ask it to decrypt the outer layer of encryption, using the private key corresponding to the outer layer's public key. It does that and you get back a message but it might still have several layers of encryption. Repeat until all those layers are removed.

There are tricks to speed things up by sending a spacecraft out towards Neptune, but they don't speed things up too much (because spacecraft travel much slower than light). The amount of speedup possible is left as an exercise for the reader. There's still a lower bound on the required time until full decryption.

Inspired by the TOR network.

Everyone keeps nattering on about AI, but this is the big story.

I always suffuse Audacity with Academy

They have light sources on the inside of the plane, like lamps and stuff.

All new cars, including Toyta Corollas, have a lot of software in them, and it should be updated from time to time, e.g. to fix bugs. For example, see:

https://www.toyota.com/firmware-updates#

When I first heard the term "Windows Copilot", I assumed it was something like this, but so far it seems way less useful.

That's the cheesiest link yet.

It seems that the thing they're measuring is the amount of instantaneous power that all the new "sources" could deliver at once, assuming they're able to deliver right then, and at max-output-power. In other words, it's an optimistic measure, but it's not meaningless.

You must have signed an employment contract when you accepted your job offer, and you should have been given a copy. If not, just ask for a copy. You don't need to say why.

I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. This is not formal legal advice etc. etc.

You should re-read your employment contract, and any other official company terms and conditions of employment. Some employers do say that you can't have a side hustle, or maybe they just prohibit certain kinds of side hustle. Others say that you just need to inform them if you have one. Others say nothing about side hustles.

You'll probably want to create an LLC for your side hustle. If you get a lawyer to help you set up the LLC, then it wouldn't hurt to ask them about any laws you should be aware of. The cost of a real lawyer's advice could save you a lot of money and trouble in the long run.

I guess the artist could just give a link to their external e-commerce store hosted by e.g. Lemon Squeezy or whatever.

Another solution would be to hire some folks with proton packs to lasso the ghosts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack

Here's an even crazier idea: get the players (i.e. the people bowling) to reset the pins by hand, manually. To make that safe, just let them deploy some walls along the lane while they do that. The person currently doing the resetting could sit in a little view station above the pins during normal play, protected by plexiglass.

Santa Claus calls them reindeer, therefore Santa must be Eurasian. Everyone in Finland knows that he lives in Finland. Canadians, however...

Fun fact: Reindeer and caribou are the same species, Rangifer tarandus.

Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

I don't think I've ever seen the ⏼ symbol, only ⏻, but maybe I'm weird.

Snow tires are something you drive around with every day, in the winter months, to improve traction, whereas snow chains are something you put on when there is a layer of compacted snow & ice on the road. You definitely don't drive with snow chains when the road is clear or has a scattered icy patches; that would wreck the road. Also, you can't drive very fast with snow chains on, maybe 50 km/h max.

Pierre Auger Observatory is a project with scientific collaborators from all over the world. The initial construction costs were shared by 15 different countries. Ongoing work and upgrades are paid by a variety of international funding sources. To get some sense of that, see [1] and the Acknowledgements section of journal papers arising from work there, such as [2].

[1] https://www.auger.org/collaboration/funding-agencies

[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acc862

No, I haven't tried to run Affinity apps on Linux.

I do use Linux (desktop) quite a lot, but I haven't found anything quite like Affinity Designer for Linux, i.e. GPU-accelerated vector graphics rendering. For simple projects, I often use BoxySVG (which is free on Linux).

For photo / raster graphics editing, I find that Krita meets all my needs on Linux.

Affinity makes some great alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator (and you only pay for it once rather than monthly). They have a 40% off deal for Black Friday. See https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

419 I'M AN AGI

I was thrown into a bottomless pit, but I reasoned that it must have a wall, right?

So I said that I maneuvered like a skydiver to get to the wall, and then climbed out.

But the AI didn't seem to think that bottomless pits have walls.

I died. How? It didn't say.

One of the requirements is 500GB of available storage space on your computer?

Kevin Scott (the CTO of Microsoft) interviewed her in an episode of his podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/simone-giertz-inventor...

An observation: Computers are already really good at chess, better than most people. You might say that we've passed the "chess singularity." But many people still buy chess boards, play chess against each other, travel to chess tournaments, and so on. There's still a vibrant global "chess economy."