Fredkin

Lots of other point collisions too: {{{-1, 3/2, 13/2}, {1, -3/2, 13/2}, {0, 0, -1/4}}, {{0, 7/8, -(3479/1152)}, {48/7, 0, 49/1152}, {-(48/7), 7/16, 539/2304}}, {{-1, 7/8, -(40523/648)}, {160/7, 0, 49/5184}}, {{-2, 7/8, 2989/1296}, {32/21, 0, -(49/192)}}, {{1/63 (-120 - 16 Sqrt[3]), 7/8, 0}, {4/7 (-1 + 3 Sqrt[3]), 0, 49/288 (5 + 3 Sqrt[3])}} }; Next steps would be a simpler counterexample or family of polynomials where the conjecture breaks.

If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.

Maybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?

You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.

1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.

2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.

3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)

4) Bob sends the image to Alice.

5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.

(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)

Really?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scra...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage...

Zia Yusuf : "... criticised sections of the legislation that allow ministers to direct regulator Ofcom to modify its rules setting out how companies can comply with requirements to crack down on illegal or harmful content, saying it was “the sort of thing that I think (Chinese president) Xi Jinping himself would blush at the concept of”."

And the more radical Restore say this:

https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties

Conservatives drafted the OSA in 2021.

Reform are against it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

Even the more extreme Restore are against it, and against Digital ID https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties

The Greens are ... well they wanted to amend it in 2024 to include a ban on fake news, but that could turn into a mechanism for censorship.

And Lib/Lab/Con were all for building even more on top of it in 2024: https://www.handleygill.co.uk/handley-gill-blog/general-elec...

There are no 'liberal' parties in the UK.

Where is the evidence for that? Though I grant they may get into power and suddenly change their mind, at the moment those parties are against digital dystopia, most likely because the centrist parties are most interested in using those tools to silence criticism of current immigration policy and other failings.

-Reform UK vows to repeal ‘borderline dystopian’ Online Safety Act https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v...

"Block the Introduction of Digital ID." "Repeal the Online Safety Act." https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties

And the left are also being surveilled and censored, e.g pro-palestine / anti-war / anti-capitalist groups, though the strategy used there is less censorship and more often bogging those groups down with infighting about identity issues. What seems more dangerous is letting the increasingly tyrannical centrist establishment, dead set on stagnation and "managed decline", give legitimacy to censorship tools (which will be available to future extreme governments!) rather than fixing things properly.

"Commissioning the battery requires a device capable of running the BYD Be Connect App - available for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store." - No thanks. Just have a control panel on a lcd screen ffs. They also do an inverter "Fronius Primo GEN24 Plus" that requires an internet connection. Completely unnecessary.

Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...

They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.

Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.

Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.

Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.

I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.

'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/what-does-the-labou... :

"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...

Sure. Nothing was said directly right now, but to just take Labour's word for it that they won't go further with these restrictions is really naive.

What does it mean to train using an 'open ended' process? Is it like using a genetic algorithm to explore / generate _any_ image resembling something from the training set, instead of adjusting weights according to gradients on a case-by-case or batch-by-batch basis?

This is cool. How do you change the voice? Do you have any other English accents besides the American female one?

^This 100%. And sometimes I get the argument back: they've become so commonplace now that you're just being unreasonable.

I'm required to wear clothes in public (Indecent exposure laws) and I need to have at least a pen or pencil to sign documents and do tax returns demanded by law. But I have a vast array of options when it comes to clothes and stationery, and most importantly I'm not required to agree to a foreign company's EULA to use them, unlike smartphones.

I've never had a smart phone and all my work is in front of computers. I was a bit worried during COVID lockdowns that I'd be forced to get one, but didn't have to in the end. Occasionally it can be annoying in other ways for example:

1) you buy a piece of hardware (printer, cctv cameras etc.) that can only be set up with a phone or you have to work harder to find the web interface.

2) Banks - banks really suck.

3) Companies I work for who use VPNs where you need a SMS or authenticator, however this is usually easy to get around with a web authenticator and some companies have let me use a YubiKey instead which is actually much less hassle.

4) Car parking meters where they discriminate - I tend to avoid these ones.

5) QR code restaurant menus - hate these but usually can get around it by just asking somebody for a paper menu.

6) Phasing out of 3G causing low reception - this is annoying because there are fewer good dumbphones that have 4G modems. Also I hate Android and Android based phones which come with facebook app and social media stuff installed so I'm a bit more limited in options. However, I managed to get an Alcatel flip phone which has 4G and it's a bit buggy but reception is now good.

I'm surprised that I'm able to get by, given the enormous pressure everyone is put under to use a smart phone, but it gives me hope that it hasn't worked and you can still get by in society without them. It would be pretty terrible if everyone HAD to agree to a google or Apple EULA just to be a functioning citizen.

No I definitely don't use GitHub. Everything is entirely in-house.

But even if I did, there's a much more solid foundation of trust there, whereas these AI companies have been very shady with their 'better to ask for forgiveness, than permission' attitudes of late.

Yes and even if they were squeaky clean and didn't do anything bad with your code, there's also the possibility that they've been hacked and code is getting siphoned off somewhere.

My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code.

I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to use the agentic stuff but from what I've heard it's still too slow to run on a high end workstation with a single 4080.

Or have things got better lately, and crucially is there good VisualStudio integration for running local agents / LLMs?

Site doesn't load: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

It's like the CDO of science.

I get SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG when trying to visit this site.

The radix msd sort seems to do well on valley and mountain.

Math.sin(x)/x (the sinc function) for 7 terms over [-3,3] gives coefficients c0...c6 that are all NaNs. Is this a bug?

To work around it, I handled the x near zero case by just forcing to 1.0.

if(Math.abs(x) > 1e-8 ){ Math.sin(x)/x } else { 1.0 }

It absolutely does impact the national debt. The FFR is the range on inter-bank lending which the FED themselves state attempts to influence other interest rates. Also, the FFR is really just a target range; they still have to adjust interest on reserve balances to bring the actual rates down and you'll see they've done this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IORB

When a bank gets less return on excess reserves, it will want to make more loans. For regulatory reasons they have to hold some treasury bonds as collateral which again puts upward pressure on treasury prices. Rising bond prices pushes down treasury bond yields. Low yields on treasury bonds makes it easier for the government to borrow and rack up even more debt.

Generally, more liquidity to bid up assets, including treasury bonds (which are still attractive while yields are relatively high), will push down yields everywhere.

To most it's a blunt shorthand for radical progressivism to the point of an obsessive panic about who's the biggest victim and the biggest victimizer. It typically points to somebody who holds an ensemble of ideas surrounding race, gender, diversity, feminism, safety, sometimes mental health, disability, obesity etc with particular emphasis on performative acts of policing the language people use to refer to groups of people.

The terms 'whiteness', 'white privilege', 'diversity', 'social justice', 'equity', 'equality' are poorly defined too, and mean different things depending on who you ask. Our language is full of these poorly defined umbrella terms. But I know what to expect when I hear somebody described as 'woke'. In fact you use 'conservative' this way in your comment, but conservatism encompasses a very broad range of thought too.

Apart from it admittedly seeming out of place, what is the problem with this comment? Any ideology has the potential to become too oppressive and thought-ending and there are definitely examples of the prevailing culture going this way, especially in universities and corporate culture. I'm no Marxist, but 'wokeism' clearly distracts people from class, instead focusing on gender, race and safety, and that's why it has been embraced by HR departments everywhere; it just doesn't threaten the c-suite and shareholders like 'traditional' class divide rhetoric did.

And with that last line are you implying you want his thoughts policed? ... to subdue his rebellious spirit? This will surely backfire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity Near zero time spent working to produce infinite goods - so yes it would be infinite as per the definition.

The average productivity per person today is vastly greater compared to subsistence farming times. We have much more leisure time now made possible by an increase in productivity due to machines, technology, and better division of labour. (Though I argue our current debt based money system which requires constant inflation is stealing our productivity and that's why we still feel like we're on a treadmill despite massive gains in production). This greater productivity is what allows us to consume not only more stuff, but a wider variety of stuff, and stuff of better quality than in the past.

As for 'the change from serfdom', if you're referring to the improved working conditions following the peasants revolt, remember it took the Black Death to wipe out 50% of the population in England, consumption went down, but the potential productivity of survivors would not have changed much, so landowners had to pay more for laborers to attract manpower for farming.

A decrease in productivity relative to consumption is not good, as it just causes low-supply driven inflation and makes everybody poorer. That being said, I believe the quality of productivity / consumption also need to be considered, not just aggregates. It's entirely possible a lot of productivity is just garbage products and irrational consumers are happy to consume or are tricked/bamboozled. ZIRP and excess monetary expansion facilitates these distortions, giving investors cheap money to stimulate production in dubious industries, and giving consumers cheaper credit to purchase products of dubious value.

You may also be branded far-left too. The authoritarians in the 'center' are also afraid of a strong leftist movement taking their power and money away, not just a rightist one.

You can tell because different pro-surveillance arguments are concocted depending on the audience: for conservatives they say "think of the children, Islamic terrorism, drugs, etc." for leftists they say: "toxic content online, disinformation, right-wing-terror, hate crimes". And because everyone is terrified of the other side, and the Internet and mainstream media can be used to target these messages, we have what we have today.

There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.

Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.

Derivatives of Firefox can take or leave features that Mozilla is pushing. For example Pocket isn't in LibreWolf. Google and Mozilla have less influence over what derivatives do - well that's my hope anyway. It's still not ideal. Can you recommend any alternatives that have good fingerprinting resistance and are not Chromium / Gecko / WebKit based?

Firefox receives funding from google.

In 2022, 81% of Mozilla's revenues were derived from Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

Use LibreWolf instead.