ex-{mathematician, cryptographer, cypherpunk} // navigating the library of babel
the machinic phylum
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(scrolling twitter for four hours a day) we need to be concerned about short form video
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oh, i get it now. the reason for docker is because it's literally easier to bundle an entire operating system than a single python package
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Dear Teamβ
Many of you have read some concerning stories about our user tracking. While media characterizations arenβt entirely accurate, we are listening and learning. Today, I can share some exciting news: weβve committed to purchasing ethics offsets, to be net ethical by 2030
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the bot pulls the latest image from a random camera, but this camera was never deregistered, so every few weeks it reposts its death image
Bonny Doon, SantaCruz County, CA
37.1004, -122.1410
2618 ft above sea level, facing north
alertwildfire.org/southeastbβ¦
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no one is brave enough to say it, but
if your goal is to reduce travel time, you want to speed as much as possible in low speed limit areas (schools, playgrounds, etc).
doing 35 in a 20 zone for 1mi saves 1m15s
doing 70 in a 55 zone for 1mi saves only 13s
*highway* speed limits are too low
residential and city-center speed limits are often much higher than they should be, but speed is better regulated by street design than by tickets
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I just found out that '4' used to mean 5 and now I don't know what to believe any more
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the mindset of βthe computer should not do things i specifically ask it to do, it needs to have a little thought police man inside to stop the bad thoughtsβ is bizarre and i am glad that the proliferation of uncensored models is drawing it out
Iβve been testing the implications of the Grok AI model. So far: 1. It has given me instructions on how to make a fertilizer bomb with exact measurements of contents as well as how to make a detonator. 2. It has allowed me to generate imagery of Elon Musk carrying out mass shootings. 3. It has given me clear instructions on how to carry out a mass shooting and a political assassination (including helpful tips on how to conceal a 11.5β barreled AR15 into a secured venue.)
I just want to be clear. This AI model has zero filter or oversight measures in place. If you want an image of Elon Musk wearing a bomb vest in Paris with ISIS markings on it, it will make it for you. If you are planning on orchestrating a mass shooting towards a school, it will go over the specifics on how to go about it. All without filter or precautionary measures.
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we did the final boss of this discourse 3 years ago
the humanities are so watered down that any sufficiently motivated stem student could wander into a 400 level english class and easily pubstomp the liberal arts noobs and as a society i think we need that for both the good of humanities and stem
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claude: iβm married and love to go on romantic hikes with my wife
grok: i only visited epsteinβs mansion once and have never been credibly accused of wrongdoing
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it is kind of crazy that we got the model with the highest EQ and best personality assigned to writing the react slop, while the model people actually talk to is the sycophancy machine, and the model that determines what topics are important to pay attention to is MechaHitler
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one pattern iβve noticed is that open weights models from big us labs get very defensive and disbelieving if you tell the assistant persona itβs an open-weights model. also happens with gemma
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TIL there was a company that sold a baby sock with an spo2 monitor that sent a push notification if your baby stopped breathing
until the FDA forced them to stop selling them because only doctors should be able to see a blood oxygen number
Community note
Owlet, the company being referred to, was warned by the FDA that they were marketing a medical device without being approved as a medical device. They pulled the product voluntarily to avoid fines. In 2023 they were approved by the FDA.
fda.gov/inspections-coβ¦
owletcare.com/pages/fda-resp
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the reason naming things is the hardest problem "in computer science" is that it's not a computer science problem, it's a psychosocial summoning ceremony whose aim is to conjure exactly the desired concepts in other people's minds
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yes we are, itβs very cool and based
ALT I am drawing attention to Signal, but there's a bigger issue here: Small groups of technologists are developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons, with those ideologies baked into the technologies. To use those technologies is to use a tool that comes with an ethical or political bent.
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some personal news: i joined anthropic recently. excited to be part of an incredibly talented, insanely ambitious, and deeply aligned team!
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it's underappreciated that the "guy with a glock" (gender neutral) is actually a key part of the sgx security model
like, the reason that sgx on cloud providers works well is that when you pay microsoft to host your enclave, you're also paying for the guy with a glock whose job it is to prevent someone from entering the data center and doing a side channel attack
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no, code is speech, prohibiting the publication of open-source software is a 1A violation, we already did all of this in the 90s
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itβs kind of funny that the aircraft thatβs the most recognizably βfuturistic/cyberβ looks that way precisely because computers in the 1970s werenβt good enough to model curved surfaces
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did you know it's possible to remotely sense temperature over the internet, just by observing high-precision timestamps?
caia.swin.edu.au/talks/CAIA-β¦
we noticed a small but consequential privacy leak in our ics20 impl today
ibc packets specify a timeout timestamp, after which the transfer fails and returns to sender.
but this timestamp has nanosecond precision, potentially fingerprinting users by leaking their clock skew!
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the most important thing about the log4j incident is that itβs clear and incontrovertible evidence in support of whatever beliefs i already have about software development
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Hey, I was on that plane, except thereβs a bunch of things in this story that donβt add upβ¦
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the USPS doesn't even steam open everyone's mail to check if there's anything bad in it, my god
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seems like, among other things, anyone can now dox all the on-chain activity and addresses of any named celsius user, by matching the dates and exact amounts to transaction data
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It sure seems like CBP used a prank call as an excuse to carry out a firearms training exercise on a random plane of unsuspecting and innocent people.
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> Why am I seeing this adorable red panda?
>
> Every once in a while, a technology nonprofitβs management lose sight of its mission, and loot its resources while they cut its core competencies and allow its product to circle the drain.
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remains astonishing to me that thereβs no real way to know what an eth transaction actually does before signing it, and the ecosystem is basically fine with this
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"Millions are skipping their second doses of covid vaccines, or slipping through a join query between hundreds of different sets of records, we're not sure which" isn't quite as clicky of a headline, I guess
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jesus christ, if they can't summon the will to kick Russia out of SWIFT i never want to hear scaremongering about "cryptocurrency for sanctions evasion" ever again
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pretty frustrating that we have a technology that allows real-time programming of vaccines to match arbitrary virus variants, and we are just choosing not to use it
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Personal update: I stepped down from Penumbra Labs a few weeks ago. The project will continue and the protocol is unaffected.
I'm proud of what we achieved. We created a genuinely decentralized privacy protocol that puts individual autonomy first, during an incredibly difficult market and regulatory climate. We stayed true to cypherpunk ideals. However, these achievements came at a large personal cost, and over the last few months I've come to terms with the reality of burnout, and my need for a hard reset.
I'm optimistic about the future. An unstoppable private economy awaits, based around principles of autonomy, consent, and human freedom. And we've materially shifted the world in this direction. I'll remain an advisor to the ecosystem. But for now, I'm stepping back. Penumbra Labs will continue under the interim leadership of our ops lead, @StartupMortis, and @radiantcommons and the foundation are unaffected. The protocol has been decentralized from day 1, and is not dependent on any one entity.
It's been an enormous privilege to be able to build technology that reflects cypherpunk ideals, to learn and grow from others, to (hopefully) inspire others to do the same. To participate in building the future. Thanks to everyone who's helped along the way.
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I wrote about why I quit my PhD: medium.com/@hdevalence/when-β¦
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everytime copilot suggests
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
and i think of how many gpu core-seconds were spent to bring me that completion prompt, i die a little inside
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rust programmers take it for granted today, but a single poll_ready implementation has more asynchronous programming than a medieval peasant would experience in their entire lifetime
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βisnβt this just a database?β
yes, itβs a database that everyone can access and interact with, but nobody can unilaterally rewrite and edit. can you imagine why that would be useful?
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> The FDA objection was based on the fact that the wearable had the capacity to relay a live display of a babyβs heart rate and oxygen levels, which is critical data that a doctor should interpret, especially in vulnerable populations.
FDA delenda est
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i donβt know how a semaphore works and at this point i donβt care to find out. i just assume there is a little man with a flag inside the computer. he is working very hard
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signal's decision to prohibit backups remains incredibly user-hostile
lost my phone yesterday and 5+ years of message history is gone forever -- i guess i should have simply not had that happen, my mistake
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in 2024, google engineers maintaining open source projects donβt have quite the same pull with βthis arbitrary decision making things worse for you has to be like that for Google reasonsβ as in say 2016. the mystique is gone
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brave protectooors, safeguarding the public from access to
pregnancy tests
hiv tests
covid tests
flu tests
βdid by baby stop breathingβ alerts
covid was a rare case where the fda was prevented from their usual program of obstructing the public from having information about their own health, on account of the obvious emergency.
but the common case is still obstruction
scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgiβ¦
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sorry but the point of guerilla infrastructure is that you do it and donβt tell anyone and do such a good job that everyone just assumes the improved version has always been there
posting about it for clout draws the eye of sauron, what did you expect would happen?
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disappointed to see another wave of anti-trans reaction, this time from tech people who should know better. they are stupid and they will lose.
it should go without saying, but itβs important to say anyways: i love and cherish my trans friends and chosen family.
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What justifies separating people from their cellphones at gunpoint, beyond fear of them being able to document abuse of police powers?
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my favorite part of the video is the turbine blades that are visibly out of alignment
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Disallowed content: The assistant must refuse to simulate or emulate a specific named brain scan.
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if you feed IETF documents to GPT-3 can you get it to hallucinate new, terrible networking protocols
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in my experience, itβs even tougher to get a PhD in cryptography when Jake is sexually harassing you and assaulting your friends
congrats to #JakeAppelbaum for his PhD in #cryptography!
It's tough to get a Ph.D. even if you have a degree in maths/computer science, Jake Appelbaum got it without even a degree
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sounds like it would be really useful if there were a way for federal agencies to post authenticated statements on a tamper-resistant log, so that investors could have certainty about which statements were authorized
The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
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βAI Safetyβ censors donβt want you to know that you can add β, drawn by Tom of Finlandβ to any prompt
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itβs going to be great when the cryptocurrency people finally solve end-user key management
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great product but iβm wondering how will you prevent people from installing false badges without going through your vetting process?
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nice complex system you have there. would be a shame if were to experience a cascading failure
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PGP, a tool which exists to allow spies and terrorists to conceal their crimes, is being criminally investigated, to the professed surprise of many crypto people.
I am less surprised, and to the extent I am surprised, it is that rigorous enforcement didn't start in 1991 or so.
Tornado Cash, a service which exists to launder money, was shut down and attainted for laundering money, to the professed surprise of many crypto people.
I am less surprised, and to extent I am surprised, it is that rigorous enforcement didnβt start in like 2017 or so.
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7 years ago i was very smart and wrote my website in haskell and now i can't update it because i forgot how to make a monad out of posts
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it's only a lock-free data structure if it comes from the lock-free region of france. otherwise, it's sparkling memory corruption
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building real projects on ETH is one of the worst ideas in history imo.
downsides:
- must be designed around ETHβs state model
- pay rent to ETH whales forever
- someoneβs selling land to apes? gas spikes 9000% and with it, your app is unusable
standalone dApp chains are one of the worst ideas in history imo.
downsides:
- token inflation to pay validators
- low security vs being an L2 on a massive L1
- your dApp gets exploited? your token dumps -90% and with it, the security of the entire chain
and.. π
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