mareko

Interesting approach to put a lot of emphasis on the spec.

Does this only work on existing codebases?

Finally, wifi 7

@Gavriel if you're here, have you looked into filing a trademark for NanoClaw? Once you have a registered mark (or even a pending application), you get much stronger leverage with domain registrars, Cloudflare, and Google for takedowns.

UDRP disputes become straightforward when you can show the other party registered a domain using your mark in bad faith. It won't fix the Google ranking overnight, but it gives you real legal teeth beyond just SEO whack-a-mole.

The solution is zk verifiable credentials, which would let folks prove their age without revealing their DOB (or anything else on their ID) to third parties.

This is possible today with complete privacy for people with biometric IDs and biometric passports (ie most passports, EU IDs, Aadhaar IDs, and more) using a service like self.xyz

I'm impressed by your determination.

A while back, I had a big paper deadline a week away and knew I didn’t have enough time to finish without sacrificing sleep.

Rather than cutting my sleep short, I decided to stick with 7–8 hours of rest and instead lengthen my wake window. I worked out a schedule that gave me six nights of sleep across seven days. It meant waking up at stranger and stranger times as the week went on, and getting some odd looks from my roommates when I emerged from my room. But in the end, it was totally worth it. I was waking up well-rested and ready to tackle those extra-long days.

The effort paid off 100%. Not only did I make the deadline, but my paper was accepted as well. A year later, that same paper helped me get into my PhD program of choice.

It’s funny how these short bursts of intense effort can sometimes have such a big impact.

Best of luck with your side hustle!

What a fascinating and detailed post. Thanks so much for sharing!

I wonder whether it's possible to achieve similar performance but with a simpler design that uses scalable reader-writer locks. They can be made a lot more efficient than what's commonly out there using the C-SNZI lock-free data structure:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/mareko/spaa09-scalablerwlocks.p...

If anyone's interested in this general subject matter, a while back I did some academic research on highly scalable locks where we came up with some very high performance reader-writer locks:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/mareko/spaa09-scalablerwlocks.p...

I love this. Many a moon ago, I worked on a system called Aikido at MIT, which combined a special built hypervisor with a binary rewriting system (DynamoRio) to enable efficient time travel debugging and race detection of parallel applications.

If anyone's interested, here's a publication that talks about it in more detail:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/72082

The use of performance counters here also reminds me of another project I worked on called Kendo, which was a posix thread like replacement that used performance counters to enforce a deterministic interleaving of synchronization operations (mutexes, etc). The system could guarantee determinism for programs that didn't have race conditions. Back then, I found that counting instructions wasn't deterministic on the processors of the time, but counting store operations was. If anyone's interested in that work, here's the publication:

http://www.cag.csail.mit.edu/~mareko/asplos073-olszewski.pdf

Not right now. Sounds like they are working on lenses that could one day work with colored light for cameras. Maybe after that, they could be used for specials?

This article describes how nano metalenses work and what they can be used for.

Spoiler alert: they can't be used to replace your smartphone's camera lenses yet, but can be used for IR distance sensors used on drones and soon, polarization sensors that will be able to tell materials apart and even detect cracks in concrete.

It's interesting to see how polarizing this topic is. I'm curious if people are just reacting according to the "party line" so to speak, ie based on whether they are iPhone or Android users.

We can do a poll to confirm this without revealing your phone preference.

Just respond with "Affirmative" if you are an iPhone user and dont like this OR you're an Android users and like this. Likewise, respond with "Negative" if you're in the opposite camp.

Spam bots can already use the Mac version of iMessage. I doubt Beeper will change spam levels for iMesssage users.

That's a lot of silver. 50 talents could be up to 1800kg in silver.

"This means processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds, a million times as fast as the speeds achievable with current gigahertz electronics"

That seems like quite the discovery.

Glad you like the Celo space

Or the days before GPS where taking a road trip inevitably resulted in a big argument with your partner about directions

For 2) it looks like they partnered with duckduckgo.

Definitely an awesome idea. If you ever need an example, cLabs.co is a US corporation that has an employee board seat.

This reads to me like an argument against the internet because everything can still be done on intranets or other permissioned networks. After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it!

The author fails to see that people want to build products and companies on open networks, and so the closed ones will struggle to compete.

On the cutting edge research point, one of the reasons universities are structured this way is because students want to learn from leading researchers in their respective fields. This ensures that the education they are paying for is not out of date. I agree that this isn't that important for the first year or two as an undergrad but it can be pretty great later on in your education.

Valora | San Francisco, Berlin, and Remote | Hiring Software Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers | All Levels | 100K - 200K + equity | FULLTIME, ONSITE, REMOTE, VISA | https://valoraapp.com

Spun out of cLabs, Valora is building a decentralized Venmo-like mobile crypto wallet on top of the Celo blockchain, a mobile-first decentralized platform focused on mobile payments.

Valora uses a novel decentralized PKI that lets you send cryptocurrency to phone numbers in a fully decentralized way. This feature makes it significantly easier to use than other crypto wallets and has resulted in organizations like the Grameen Foundation, ImpactMarket, and many DeFi applications built on Celo using it for their wallet needs.

Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain, and NFX

Stack: Typescript, Solidity, React Native, Android, iOS

Team backgrounds: Google, Twitter, Spotify, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley (~30 people today)

More about us here:

https://valoraapp.com/careers

https://a16z.com/2021/07/27/investing-in-valora/

https://github.com/valora-inc/ (Valora is open source)

Luckily there is a whole new generation of PoS networks that don't rely on proof of work. Some even automatically buy carbon offset credits to maintain a carbon neural footprint.

Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Many newer ones run PoS which doesn't 'waste' energy. The Celo network goes even further and is carbon negative. It sends a portion of block rewards to Project Wren, which uses them to buy carbon credits to offset more carbon than the network emits to run.

https://medium.com/celoorg/celo-to-go-carbon-neutral-with-pr...

I think you're missing the fact that with PoS, you can use positive _and_ negative incentives to incentivize desired behavior while with PoW, you only have positive incentives. Once you can slash bad actors for enabling a double spend attack, you can significantly change their calculus.

For newer PoS protocols, they would need over 66% and they would lose money if they misbehaved making it likely uneconomical to do so. This is the big advantage of PoS over PoW. There are both positive incentives (e.g. block rewards) but also negative ones (e.g. getting slashed for trying to stage a double spend attack).

No. Funds are still protected by a private key once you create an account, so stealing a phone number doesn't help you spend someone's money.

What about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2?

Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number.

Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com

You can find the React Native-based source code here (Apache 2 licensed):

https://github.com/celo-org/celo-monorepo/tree/master/packag...

These are great questions. Here are my thoughts / answers:

1. Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain

For FB, you're 100% right. FB could have likely just used a relational DB in the short term. However, if you don't want to tie this to a single company (your second question), then a blockchain does make it easier for multiple entities to agree on the state of the db. I would argue that modern Proof of Stake protocols are starting to be competitive with Proof of Work in terms of security, in large part because unlike Proof of Work, they allow for both positive _and_ negative incentives for incentivizing behavior. For example, we've yet to see the types of double spend attacks on newer PoS chains (e.g. Cosmos) like the ones we saw on Ethereum Classic a few years ago.

2. Is there a reason this would be tied to a company

No, and in fact, this is what makes most permissionless blockchains so valuable. The problem is that most of them are not useable enough for what Facebook wants to accomplish. I say most because, in my view, Celo (https://celo.org and https://valoraapp.com) does. It's permissionless, programable, highly scalable, has a built in stablecoin and identity protocol, and most importantly, uses new zk-SNARK cryptography to let mobile apps sync trustlessly and near instantly. It also offsets 100% of its carbon emissions by buying carbon credits using block rewards.

3. Why a "new currency" ("stablecoin")?

I agree 100% and already the market is starting to tell us that USD pegged stablecoins are the most interesting of stablecoins.

4. I'm sure there are many issues with fraud/reversible transactions/KYC/anti-terrorism/anti-money-laundering that would need to be resolved somehow

Yes! This is an interesting read on the topic: https://www.coincenter.org/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-an...

cLabs | San Francisco, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Remote | Hiring Security Engineers, Data Engineers, Dev-Rel Engineers, Product Managers, Cryptographers, SRE/Infra and Mobile Engineers | All Levels | FULLTIME, ONSITE, REMOTE, INTERNS, VISA | https://celo.org

cLabs is one of a number of companies working on Celo, an open-source permissionless platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. Using a novel decentralized PKI, Celo lets you send cryptocurrency to phone numbers in a fully decentralized way. Additionally, Celo uses stable-value tokens pegged to fiat currencies, like the US Dollar, to minimize volatility, and crucially allows transaction fees to be paid with these tokens. To make sure that the platform is scalable and fast enough for day-to-day use, Celo uses a new Proof-of-Stake protocol with fast block times and one block finality. Further, it uses SNARK-based proofs to allow light clients to sync with the chain near instantly. The protocol is now live (run by hundreds of entities) and we are now working with organizations such as the Grameen Foundation on an open-source social payments app (Valora) that looks and feels like Venmo, yet is fully decentralized. Celo is listed on Coinbase and many other reputable exchanges.

Backers: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain, General Catalyst, Coinbase, Reid Hoffman and Jack Dorsey, among others.

Stack: Typescript, Solidity, Go, React Native, Python, Android, iOS, Rust, zk-SNARKs

Team backgrounds: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Square, Zcash, QEDIT, MIT, Stanford (>100 people today)

More about us here:

Code: https://github.com/celo-org/celo-monorepo and https://github.com/celo-org/celo-blockchain

Blog: https://medium.com/celoorg

Chat: https://chat.celo.org

Mobile App: https://valoraapp.com

Mainnet Stats: https://thecelo.com and https://stats.celo.org