zakk

The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.

I find this deeply troubling. So the seeds were provided by the NSA and they said "don't worry, they were generated hashing a trivial sentence. Unfortunately we forgot it now, but trust us, it's just Jerry joking about getting a raise, nothing more..."

I can't believe this didn't undergo further scrutiny earlier, and I can't believe the seeds haven't been chosen in a more sensible way, such as combining random seeds provided by different parties with competing interests, also including hardware RNGs, etc...

Protons are non-perturbative, indeed, but this does not mean that there are no virtual particles exchanged inside a proton. It seems like your comment implies that, sorry if I misunderstood.

On the contrary, this means that there are too many virtual particles (gluons) being exchanged inside a proton, so many that perturbation theory is not applicable.

Part of these renewables are the so-called "biomass", which leads to pretty substantial CO2 emissions.

So basically they replaced a CO2-neutral energy source, with another which is pretty CO2-intensive.

Renewable does not mean good for the environment!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Still, cheating at chess is not murdering someone!

Nuclear wastes are incredibly small, the whole energy you would need in your life would fill a soda can of wastes, if only nuclear was used.

Geological repositories are an excellent solution. Those place are geologically stable, and can contain thousand of years of wastes. It’s not very expensive to collect wastes there, as well!

Please, please, please stop with the waste management taking point!

There are super-safe and rather cheap ways of treating and storing nuclear waste!

It’s essentially a scaremongering talking point.

researchers invented a fundamentally new kind of problem that a quantum computer should be able to solve exponentially faster

Telling of the status of the field.

It’s very cool, but every update of mac OS resets it! After a while I didn’t bother to reactivate it…

Is there a permanent solution, that does not involve cron scripts or other hacks?

Why does every company need to try to take over the world?

They make toy bricks, they actually make the freaking best toy bricks ever… Just stick to that!

I know I might be exceedingly idealistic, and as soon as MBAs and consultants take over a company things need to change, but have strong feelings towards LEGO and I am fine being idealistic here!

You look forward to mozzarella? That’s a very good thing to do, probably best food ever! :)

You’ll have my mozzarella from my dead hands!

Are you joking? You can easily find a very long list of conservative/right wing personalities banned from Twitter.

The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.

And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.

Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.

Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.

This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!

As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!

I sincerely hope you are joking.

People can discuss things that are not law.

One can point out, for instance, that Twitter is not a free speech platform, and this is bad for many reasons.

One can comment on laws, proposing to extend legal protections to different sectors.

I hope your conversations are not solely based on current law, that must be pretty boring.

(You interpretation of Section 230 is shaky at least)

Yes, you are mixing up two different ideas.

Free speech is a very well defined concept, as done by literally hundreds of political science scholars. The fact that the US Constitution applies it only to the Government does not mean it cannot be discussed in a different context. For instance I would like new regulations to extend free speech outside the scope of the First Amendment. This is an extremely well defined politica stance.

You seem to agree that Twitter is NOT a common carrier, and then it must be treated as an editor. This would imply that they are responsible for the tweet they decide to publish.

These are exactly the far-reaching legal ramifications of free speech (outside Government) that I was mentioning.

Elon’s flight records are public, but the account aggregated them and made them available to the public in a different form.

A better example would be: a Twitter account reports your position when you are in a public space every five minutes, including pictures of you at the bar, jogging, on a date at a restaurant, etc…

All of these are public informations, but the way they are aggregated amounts to stalking in my opinion.

I admit this is very borderline, tough!

Your are mixing up the first amendment with the broader idea of free speech.

The 1A (roughly speaking) limits the scope of the Government as not too limit free speech.

Twitter, as a private company, is not restricted by the first amendment. However, one can note that Twitter does not allow free speech.

This is quite important from a legal standpoint, because since Twitter practices censorship of ideas they don’t like, they are no longer considered a common carrier.

There are huge legal ramifications of this!

Free speech does not mean that private and personal data can be made public.

Posting your bank account statement on Twitter is not free speech.

Reminds me of Mikutap: https://aidn.jp/mikutap/

I suggest "What Is Mathematics?" by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Mathematics%3F

I cannot see any difference besides the icons in the Dock looking like those of iPhone apps.

I love Mato Jelic's channel.

Unironically chess is an e-sport and this recent explosion is because Hikaru, Botez, Hess et al. have woken up to that idea and embraced it.

Let me also mention Mato Jelic. His videos got me hooked!

I remember when DirectX was a huge obstacle to porting games to Linux. This feels like a great, great victory for Linux to me!

Try Quiver!

Did you read the full article? They give a detailed explanation of why the project is controversial.

You might agree, you might disagree, you might want to sit on either side of the controversy, but the article substantiates quite well the usage of the adjective "controversial" in the title.

Platform has ubiquitous and wonderful package manager (Homewbrew)

Probably "wonderful" is subjective (Homebrew to me is far from being a wonderful piece of software), but "ubiquitous" is factually wrong. MacPorts, even though less popular than Homebrew, has a large userbase.

This is absolutely fascinating.

Even just a demonstration that rule application on hypergraphs is expressive enough to potentially describe (for some rule yet to be found) Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is incredibly exciting in my opinion.

Arguably string theory is in a similar situation: a very powerful framework that could potentially describe reality if accurately utilized.

Also, notably Gerard 't Hooft has been working on a very similar topic recently: Quantum Mechanics described in terms of cellular automata [0].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548

Estimating a cost of 1 cent per core-hour, this cost more than 200k€. Since INRIA is a national research institute, I am guessing at least part of this has been paid with taxpayer money, either directly from the Institute or from grants.

I am wondering how such an expense can be justified.

It's an honest question: I find all of this very exciting and brilliant, however having written grant proposals myself, I am wondering how could they 'sell' factoring larger and larger numbers as worth funding.