Tim Roscoe gave an interesting Keynote at OSDI '21 titled "It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo. He was involved with the Barrelfish project.
On the one hand writing logs can be tedious. Essentially logs are breadcrumbs signifying when significant state changes have logically taken place. From what I've seen, logs are added after every few lines and I always fantasized about creating a language where logging is "automatic".
On the other hand, writing logs is a skill worth mastering. Wrote too many and when a service crashes you have to shift through lots of noise and potentially miss the signal. I once went down a rabbit hole trying to root cause an issue in a Gunicorn application that had custom health check logic in it. An admin worker would read health check state from a file that worker threads wrote to. Sometimes a race condition would occur, in which an error log would be emitted. The thing was, this error wasn't fatal and was a red herring for why the service actually crashed. Of instead it would have been logged at the debug level a lot of time would have been saved.
Fine let LLMs write code but take logging seriously!!!
I've skimmed some literature on Quantum Crypto and from my understanding the outstanding issues currently are 1. How to make these work over long distances and 2. How to implement features found in PKI authentication (though QKD schemes are theoretically secure against MITM attacks, there still isn't a quantum cryptography scheme yet to ensure that you are talking to a non-adversary). There have been advances with the 1st problem, but the 2nd is trickier. Tbf, you don't strictly need PKE to have secure communication between 2 parties (look at Section 6 in https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/).
A lot of real world implementations of quantum crypto have been with respect to satellite communications, which makes sense. The satellite is usually built by the same actors who set up the communication links from the ground the satellite and quantum particles can be transmitted by laser. But as the article points out, it probably won't see widespread use for a while. There was a paper that came out recently called "How (not) to Build Quantum PKE in Minicrypt" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20295) and from my limited understanding of it, a quantum PKE system will likely have very little components from classical crypto incorporated into it. Not to mention that specially built devices have to be installed at ISPs, data centers, etc. for this to work.
Work in this space is valuable as a hedge against a world where all conventional crypto is broken. It also helps advance work in quantum mechanics more generally and other fields in physics and it's generally very interesting :)
My boyfriend woke up one day to find out they couldn't pee. After a few ER visits and an MRI, they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer. However, because they had the audacity to seek immediate medical treatment for a life threatening health issue, they have now been saddled with thousands of dollars in medical debt. I had to personally dip into my earnings from my Big Tech internship to help pay some of it off. Luckily through their job they have some of the best medical insurance in the state and have been getting treatment at UT Southwestern. They pay little, but there was an instance where one of their physicians had to appeal to insurance to get a scan done (thankfully the insurance acquiesced). It doesn't make sense and all this debate around single payer healthcare is just obfuscation and distraction from investigating actual solutions. The vast majority of doctors genuinely want to help people and are more I interested in practicing the skills they've honed for decades rather than deal with faceless automata at health insurance companies who deny claims upon a mere glance. As long as people like Rick Scott can not only get away with introducing inefficiencies in the system, but defraud people and get away with it with no consequences other than personal enrichment, we are doomed.
> The vast majority of doctors genuinely want to help people and are more I interested in practicing the skills they've honed for decades rather than deal with faceless automata at health insurance companies who deny claims upon a mere glance.
Not only that, but doctors also have to fight tooth and nail to get reimbursed by insurance companies (some worse than others... I have doctors who won't even take UHC anymore because the reimbursement rates are too low to break even on practice costs). So we end up with this bizarre arrangement where patients get their wallets drained and doctors have to hunt down their paychecks for services provided... all while the middleman gets richer.
I hope your boyfriend's doing okay. Dealing with a major medical issue like cancer is already hard enough on its own without the added financial nightmare in this country, but at least it sounds like they're in good hands between you and the doctors they're seeing.
Single payer would lower costs by greatly reducing liability insurance both for the doctors themselves but also for car insurance and business liability coverage. All those would still exist but not for the actual medical treatments. The estimates are it would start to save money nationally the first year, and once the medical industry reorganized around delivering care that plus savings from preventive care and less lags getting scans. It isn't just the insurance providers against single payer, all the big pharma and medical technology providers don't want that. The saving would come from having most every health care outcome in one place along with every treatment and medicine. We would start to really see what works and is worth the money. Second even the most affluent would benefit from less crowded emergency rooms that puts us all at risk.
Not an ad hominem attack or a microaggression, but hopefully constructive criticism. Your use of the "them" pronoun makes the post confusing. Does it refer to "they," presumably the doctors, the employer (job), the insurance, UT Southwestern, or to the gendered "boyfriend." Since you already decided to use a gendered noun, perhaps use it instead of the "they/them" or use a matching gendered pronoun "he/him" to distinguish the particular person from the other "them."
I'm glad that your boyfriend has a wonderful and caring person like you to lean on.
It's not the most common, but some people do go by they/them and still use certain gendered terms like boyfriend/girlfriend where appropriate. (Full disclosure that I'm one of them, lol.)
I think part of it is that there isn't a great neutral word to take its place. "Partner" is probably the best option overall, but it can mean anything from "person I've been married to for 15 years" to "person with whom I opened an LLC," whereas boy/girlfriend is pretty specific. And the only neutral term of that specificity I've seen proposed is "joyfriend," which I find unbearably silly because I'm not 15 years old :P
It would make it more clear, but in this case each Use of They was used right after the subject was mentioned. it stole only be confusing if They was used after multiple subjects are mentioned at once. But all pronouns can suffer from this.
Oddly, the writer used "he" in "they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer" because they had already used the plural "they" in the same clause – showing that they know how confusing the singular "they" can be. Sometimes ツ
People know what the singular "they" is. It has been a common feature of English for centuries.
It's just difficult to parse a writing where the same pronoun is used throughout for multiple different entities. This exact same issue commonly crops up with "he", "she", and "it" as well.
The solution in these instances is to limit usage of the pronoun altogether and just use the noun directly wherever there may be any ambiguity.
For example, don't say, "Julia wrecked Sarah's car; she was pissed!" The "she" here should just be replaced with "Sarah" or "Julia", even if it sounds a little odd to use the same noun twice in short succession.
This is a good example of where they is extra confusing too. It would be better if English had separate singular/plural versions of they.
If Sarah goes by ‘they’, “They was pissed” sounds wrong and most people would actually speak “they were pissed”… but now it is a three way ambiguity: Julia pissed, Sarah pissed, both pissed.
This feels like an example of a bigger failure mode, but I can’t nail it down. Something like ‘groups are resistant to short term change even if it is a clear Pareto improvement’
Ya. I preferred the sci-fi narratives with zir, zim, etc. But nobody asked for my opinion.
The history of pronouns for female, male, neuter, and none-of-above tracks with cultural notions. English's pronouns will mosdef evolve to accommodate the new norms. We're merely in a transitional phase.
> They pay little, but there was an instance where one of their physicians had to appeal to insurance to get a scan done (thankfully the insurance acquiesced). It doesn't make sense and all this debate around single payer healthcare is just obfuscation and distraction from investigating actual solutions.
Single payer is literally a complete solution to the problem you’re mentioning before.
So why is it obfuscation and distraction? Especially when single payer systems in Europe have proven to have better outcomes at a fraction of the cost?
I find the thought process here fascinating. Single Payer, which is actually delivering results in nearly every other developed country is an “obfuscation” and we need to find “actual solutions”. Doing what every other country that doesn’t seem to have the problem in question is not an “actual solution”. No, we must invent one out of thin air or it doesn’t count.
This seems like a Not Invented Here syndrome taken to its extreme.
It’s an ideology issue. I’m writing from the future. Here in Swerway we have transitioned to a health system that makes people twenty-five years old forever. On the other side of the pond, the last few US administrations have gotten elected on the basis of convincing Americans that it is evil and morally corrupt to live forever, specially if you haven’t earned an ethical dispensation by becoming a billionaire first.
Why with single payer would there not still be instances of treatment being denied?
>rather than deal with faceless automata at health insurance companies
Would this not be replaced with faceless automata in government?
Just look at how the VA is run and complains about it. Looking at that I have exactly zero confidence in the government being able to run things better than the shit show at the insurance companies.
Businesses do need to compete with and overthrow the current middlemen in the medical world. It's just difficult and a very slow process.
The government is mostly just there to manage contracts, the actual work would be done by the same doctors that are doing it today. You would just pare n profit-seeking entities down to one principally administrative entity. If you wish to pay for your own medical procedures out of pocket there will be nothing stopping you. That is not to say this does not have problems.
Insurance is anti-competitive on top of that. You have a Sophie’s choice of who you want to pay to buy into this crazy system. There’s no transparency in how services are priced or provided. You as a consumer have no insight into how prices are negotiated between the insurer and providers, nor how providers are paid out. Good luck making an informed decision.
> You would just pare n profit-seeking entities down to one principally administrative entity. If you wish to pay for your own medical procedures out of pocket there will be nothing stopping you.
Nothing except that it creates a monopoly and a monoculture.
There are many procedures you may not be able to afford out of pocket, so the only way to get them is to choose a provider that covers it. If there is only one provider and they don't cover it, you no longer have that option.
And because nobody else does either, that medical procedure stops being offered because there aren't enough patients to justify it if they all have to pay out of pocket and most can't afford it, even if you were one of the few willing to scrape together the money. Which might not have happened if some insurers had covered it, even if many didn't.
> You have a Sophie’s choice of who you want to pay to buy into this crazy system. There’s no transparency in how services are priced or provided. You as a consumer have no insight into how prices are negotiated between the insurer and providers, nor how providers are paid out.
The existing system is a dumpster fire to be sure. So why not fix it?
Eliminate even the concept of negotiating prices, as if medical pricing is something to be haggled over at a bazaar in Calcutta. Require every provider to publish their price, and then that's their price, and anyone can compare providers.
Which gets rid of the concept of "in network" and all of that nonsense. The insurance pays e.g. 90% of the median price of that procedure within 100 miles of your home, the equivalent of a 10% copay. Then you can choose any provider you want, anywhere you want, and pay their published price. The difference comes out of your own pocket, so you have the incentive to be price sensitive -- but if you want to pay a little more to save yourself an hour drive, you can do that too. And if you pick one that charges less than 90% of the median price you can put the rest in your HSA.
The thing about regulations is that the most important thing they can do is to ensure that markets are competitive. The existing healthcare regulations in the US not only don't do that, they do the opposite. But they don't have to.
This is a really thoughtful and useful comment! Worth calling your representative about. I love the observation that price transparency starts with providers, I so rarely hear that mentioned.
People keep talking about this and it's a clear sign that people don't know what they're talking about. Price transparency has been the law for 3 years now. [1]
Here's a 226 MB csv file from the Mayo Clinic with... lots of prices [2] and a human friendly search tool [3]
It is extraordinarily frustrating trying to discuss these things with people when folks just make things up and have no idea what they're talking about.
> Why with single payer would there not still be instances of treatment being denied?
The most common failure mode for single-payer is scarcity. You won't be denied, but you'll have to wait many months for an appointment.
> Would this not be replaced with faceless automata in government?
They are controlled by politicians, who are directly responsible to their electorate. Brexit is a good example, using money sent to EU for NHS was one of the more influential ads. Of course, the outcome turned out to be... different.
With the current insurance system, you don't have ANY levers. You can't usually change your insurance company because it's provided by your employer. And even if you want to buy medical insurance yourself via the ACA, you can switch it only once a year. With no way to tell in advance if your new company is going to cover your treatment.
You also can't even sue your insurance company if it denies you the treatment because _all_ insurance companies require binding arbitration. And arbitrators basically always side with the insurance company, because your contract says that the insurance company is always right. That's how UnitedHealthcare can get away with just randomly denying treatment.
>They are controlled by politicians, who are directly responsible to their electorate. Brexit is a good example, using money sent to EU for NHS was one of the more influential ads. Of course, the outcome turned out to be... different.
Calling out Brexit is an... interesting way to argue here.
If you're proposing my options for heath care are going to be taken away and given to the single option controlled by the electorate who are liable to do things like Brexit... no thank you, I'll take marketplace competition where I can "vote out" the idiots by making a different choice for myself.
People here are like "isn't it awful that personal medical choices are being made by politicians and popular vote" with respect to abortion, gender-affirming care, etc... and those same folks are damn near excited to give away all of their health choices to a government entity.
Do you want your health care options to be dictated by an executive order the first day a new president enters office?
> Calling out Brexit is an... interesting way to argue here.
Why? It's an example of directly affecting healthcare via political pressure.
> If you're proposing my options for heath care are going to be taken away and given to the single option controlled by the electorate who are liable to do things like Brexit... no thank you
That's the thing, it can also be fixed by the electorate.
> I'll take marketplace competition where I can "vote out" the idiots by making a different choice for myself.
Except you can't. Go on, read your insurance contract if you don't believe me. You're at the total whim of death panels, who can just tell you to go and die.
> That's the thing, it can also be fixed by the electorate.
In theory it can but in practice it usually isn't, especially for things like this. It's all too easy for some bureaucratic rule to be killing people who have e.g. a particular type of cancer, which makes that 0.5% of people care about it very much, but it takes 51% of people caring about it to change the law.
Meanwhile some other rules are each killing some other 0.5% of people and when you add them all up it's a large-scale disaster but it's also many independent problems. The details matter but the electorate doesn't have the bandwidth to even understand, much less solve everybody's different problems.
You want as much as possible for people to be able to affect their own circumstances rather than relying on the bureaucracy to care about them.
Those rules are completely hypothetical and borderline reductio ad absurdum, since they have never been in place anywhere in the world, and you could make the same argument about anything the government does.
You seem to pretend that people in countries with universal healthcare don't have any agency, but of course they do. Public healthcare doesn't preclude private healthcare. We see this in Western countries that have high-quality universal healthcare, which have successfully managed to strike a balance.
There will of course always be gaps not adequately covered by the public option — new, unproven modalities that aren't offered, or unacceptably long wait lists, or a certain drug being denied that might help improve quality of life over a more conservative drug. In those situations you always have the option to seek alternative private healthcare at higher cost, and you always have the option to get private insurance. So many commenters on HN (presumably American) paint universal healthcare as some kind of draconian Big Brother regime where it's either all or nothing, and the public option will "take away my rights," when nobody has ever proposed such a thing.
In the US, you are under the thumb of private insurance companies whose profit motive is, indisputably, not aligned with patients' healthcare needs. Sure, you can shop around for insurance plans, but realistically, when faced with a health crisis, that's not an option. Which means you have to deal with a system that doesn't care about your health and tries to wriggle itself out of paying anything more than the minimum they're obligated to cover, and that minimum isn't known until the bill arrives. To my mind, having lived under both types of systems, the American scheme is much more restrictive.
Under a universal healthcare scheme, there's no profit motive to cloud the quality of care. There's a cost reduction motive that can affect quality of care, but as the other commenter points out, the democratic model helps balance that. The world over, in places like Scandinavia and the UK, funding of healthcare is a big concern that gathers a lot of public debate and figures heavily in election campaigns; it's not swept under the rug. It's not perfect, but it feels much more of a "we are all in the same boat" kind of environment than the American one where every day we have newspaper articles about huge hospital bills, health bankruptcies, drug epidemics caused by greedy pharma companies, and widening wealth inequality.
>when compared to commercial HMOs, Medicaid HMOs and Medicare HMOs.
That's not all private insurance, just some of it.
That's also talking about the average.
>although there is high variation in quality across individual VA facilities
...
>It's the usual "review effect", you only see negatives about the VA, not positives.
You're saying in rebuttal to a negative review of private insurance, which isn't even what's at issue. Difficulties getting things covered and being buried in beurocratic nonsense isn't really connected to "health outcomes on average".
It's worse than that. The VA can't be compared to the average insurer because all of their patients are people who could at some point in their adult life satisfy the military's physical fitness requirements, which is not the case for the population at large.
It could be argued that the veteran population had a higher likelihood of exposure to dangerous chemicals (agent orange, burn pits), higher rates of mental illness-triggering situations (leading to their own homeless, PTSD, and drug addiction epidemic), and physical wounds from shrapnel IED’s and gunfire.
> That's not all private insurance, just some of it.
There are other studies with similar results. Comparisons with HMOs is especially illuminating because of the similar models (vertically-integrated organizations).
> Difficulties getting things covered and being buried in beurocratic nonsense isn't really connected to "health outcomes on average".
Of fucking course it is! WTF you're even talking about? People absolutely get inferior care because they can't wade through bureaucracy.
So you've never used VA healthcare. Compared to the insanity of the rest of the system it's pretty amazing. Some locations are better than others though.
And it's a fair question; I'd guess you were met with downvotes because so much Pronoun Discussion is made in bad faith, but I don't get the sense you were. So I wish more people would use these moments as an opportunity to explain their points of view!
Part of what I mentioned in that other comment is the sparse availability of good gender-neutral words in English ("spouse" is a good one I should have mentioned—great on its own but sadly not applicable to the unmarried!), and something I didn't mention but should have is that it's not uncommon for people to use they/them pronouns while still identifying as male or female to some extent, whether by choice or upbringing or simply to make things convenient when signing paperwork.
You may have heard of the Kinsey scale for sexual preference; there's no widely accepted equivalent for gender identity, but in some cases it offers a similarly useful mental model. One person smack in the middle of "equally (or neither) male nor female" might swear off words like boyfriend and wife entirely, but another person who falls slightly off to the side into the "somewhat but not entirely /exclusively male" camp might use a mix of masculine and neutral terms, but probably not many feminine terms, if any. And then someone who falls into the "entirely and exclusively male" side of the chart would almost certainly object to being called someone's wife, lol.
it's pretty scary that comments that question such things get nuked before chance at a legitimate discussion even on fairly rational discourse sites like hn
Anything I talk about below is not financial advice.
Full disclosure: My crypto holdings consist of around 1 ETH and $5 worth of BTC on Coinbase.
Anyone remember Monero? A POW crypto using state of the art cryptography such as ring signatures and Bulletproofs to guarantee private, secure transactions? It's secure enough that almost half of all dark web transactions are done using it despite its market cap being a fraction that of BTC. So secure that the IRS put out a $675,000 bounty for anyone who could find critical vulns. There's RandomX which is Monero's POW algo which is designed to run best on general CPUs and actually run terribly on ASICs? And to top it off, it has transaction fees in the fraction of cents.
With all of the talk by many crypto hustlers about banking the unbanked, "digital freedom", etc., that Monero would be perfect! So, why aren't VCs pouring money into developing it like they are into new web3 stacks?
It's because it's old news. It doesn't get enough eyeballs like a listing on Coinbase. You can't build digital fiefdoms using Monero, no ICOs, no pump and dumps. You can't have middlemen like OpenSea skim off the top and gatekeep. There's no artificial scarcity of coins. Monero isn't "useful" for the vision of web3 that investors have.
Most people don't have the time to read through every single whitepaper put out. It's easier to join a Discord server waiting for an airdrop, to read a bunch of Tweets, and check what's on Coinbase. It's just more convenient.
True, Monero doesn't have smart contract support and there are things like Tornado Cash which can emulate what Monero offers. Monero is still a sizeable player in the space and a lot of developers behind it. On top of that are all the controversies around Monero such as certain bad actors abuse CI integration services to mine it. But as the article points implies, for the majority of crypto investors/whales it's mainly about making a quick buck before moving on to the next pump.
I'm optimistic for a crypto future. Smart contracts are a great idea (though there's polishing needed) and there are other decentralized technologies out there I'm excited for. The Ethereum Foundation, Starkware, and others have helped push new and exciting cryptography research. Hopefully when the next correction comes, all the noise dissipates from the space.
Monero isn't listed in lots of the most popular exchanges because, since it actually works and has a utility beyond speculation, regulators have threatened exchanges with retribution. See [0] in which Brian Armstrong (Coinbase CEO) does express passing interest in listing it.
If HN people are still interested in acquiring it, the most secure fiat onramp is through localmonero.co [1]. It's listed on some centralized exchanges [2] if you're ok with the really invasive checks they will run you through, and on some Dex's if you already have crypto [3].
The centralized exchange issue with Monero is over now because you can access Monero through bridges.
Secret Network has wrapped Monero, full defi functionality and and a bridge to the Monero network and vice versa. These are autonomous and permissionless, so the trusted swappers and goodwill of exchanges is no longer needed. Regulators were playing whack a mole with their relationships to exchanges that listed Monero and now the technology improved to make that approach irrelevant: Antifragile in action.
> True, Monero doesn't have smart contract support...
This is way more central to why people aren't building on it than you seem to give credit to: people simply can't build on it... I mean, even Bitcoin is programmable (which is how people have been able to build stuff like Lightning and bridges to contract side chains like rsk). Not being programmable--which sadly is kind of a trade-off for their core premise of being "actually private" (not that I am saying that is insurmountable, but it hasn't been solved yet)--means you don't see an ecosystem built on it and thereby no software dependent on it and thereby no "investment" in the platform is really possible. What makes the smart contract platforms potentially interesting is that actually DO SOMETHING problem might be willing to pay for: provide a trustless transactional data store on which you can build other more complex behaviors.
I probably am massively understating it yes, but I see no reason why an ecosystem around Monero can't flourish that enables sort-of smart contract capabilities. But like you said, it would take a huge amount of effort to enable smart contracts on Monero while not compromising privacy guarantees.
It does seem to be a tradeoff. Solana has smart contract support with low fees, but its network is very centralized compared to other ones and even went down twice. Despite being relatively young, they have flashy PR events in Lisbon and high profile VS backers to hype it up, but again so far most applications built on Solana go back to some form of tokenomics/financial engineering and NFTs.
Writing smart contracts is getting easier and easier with the barrier of entry being how much you're willing to spend on gas really. Hopefully they start expanding into more interesting apps.
Solana has a company behind it, Monero has a couple foundations I think but it's mostly a bunch of independent devs behind it (some of which, like Fluffy Pony, definitely have enough money to spend on marketing if they wanted to). It's the difference between something that is pseudo-decentralized and actually decentralized.
I don't see how you can implement smart-contracts in general on Monero because it's not programmable. You can write small arbitrary messages via tx_extra and in theory some other chain that looks at the Monero chain could read that, but because tx_extra messages are direct-writes and aren't automatically encrypted using the wallet keys or anything, there is nothing special about them besides them being immutable. In fact in some ways tx_extras could contribute to deanonymizing the chain if it created correlations between ring signatures, and Monero devs have discussed removing it several times.
There's a question of whether Monero itself could be extended to be programmable and actually do things with those messages, but I'm guessing the answer is probably no because it would bloat the chain and have questionable value (right now Monero is "unixy" in that it does one thing and does it well), even if it were possible to do.
Monero is also probably big enough with a $4bn marketcap. It is liquid enough for the problem it solves for people.
Some use it as a payment conduit, some use it as a store of value, both of those particular private-by-default use cases are solved in other ecosystems good enough, for now.
I won't comment about the gold rush aspects of crypto right now because they're pretty obvious but regarding the PoW algorithm of Monero, I think that's its fatal flaw long term. Any coin that doesn't have a huge moat of ASIC miners backing it up is vulnerable to attack. You can't attack bitcoin without coordinating existing miners but any coin that can be mined with general CPUs could be attacked by govts or corps which have access to large general compute resources.
Any government with large stockpiles of unused, general compute resources, could snap its fingers, and make large stockpiles of any compute resources appear.
The 'buy military gear' police budget of any medium sized US city, could be diverted for one year, and probably buy any specific compute resource you cite.
This just isn't a defense against governmental or corporate attack.
It's not even defense against a bored billionaire.
How long do you think it would take a government to develop ASICs that compete with what’s on the market, and build enough of them for an attack (would need to be >50 of the power of all existing ASICs!)?
How much do you think it would cost?
I think you massively underestimate what’s involved there..general compute resources are just not going to help.
That's easy to say in theory, in practice supply of these ASICs is much more limited than you might think. Maybe if they throw enough money at the problem they could buy from existing miners..
Even so, they would have to spend a very large sum of money on this, money which will simply be "burnt". If you would want to attack a coin that works on general compute then you can use that general compute for whatever you want thus that would be "free"
Good grief. Outside of pandemic supply issues, eg, in normal times, a entity (gov, corp, billionaore), would go to a large producer, and place an order.
I assure you, they'd pay less per unit, in bulk, not more.
You think they'd buy off of ebay?! Amazon?
No! They'd bypass the little guy, and get a large run done themselves. And yes, it isn't a big deal.
If they had to, they'd put out a RFP and get corps to submit quotes on qty whatever.
Here's a secret... people love money. If someone wants a large order of something, it happens.
Even in the pandemic, if govs want anything, gloves, masks, they get it well before you or I, before corps.
It’s not just “pandemic supply”..even in the more mature GPU market Nvidia isn’t even close to keeping up with demand. There is not a button you can push to spin up more fabs.
The fact that you’d compare gloves and masks to chips is telling.
That's true, but then again usually the miners using ASICs do so in large warehouses that draw lots of power and are part of large mining pools (some of which are publicly traded I believe) i.e it's easy to target a large portion of mining capacity with certain POW coins.
On the flip side, RandomX optimizing for general CPUs does mean that it can be easier for certain actors to launch a 51% attack on the network. However, it also means the network is more robust in a way. IMO it's a marginally better situation.
The privacy play is a supercycle aspect of crypto worth checking into every 4 or 5 years.
State level actions are hindered because even the state knows they can only make a move once before the anti fragility of crypto kicks in. Crypto becomes more resilient under pressure because there is no financial incentive to improve these kinds of boring technologies, and so the pressure galvanizes people to develop the boring thing they already knew needed to be done.
So you are not inaccurate, but it will come.
Check out SECRET network, its hide smart contract states which effectively means token privacy. They have a trustless enough bridge to and from Monero, and bridges to the broader defi ecosystem.
This is mainly based off of the 2 "founders" at the end talking about the project. When they go scout for locations and one of the founders starts caressing the top of a thatch hut and the immediate next shot is a piece of paper taped to a tree with the title "Mercle Tree", that's when it clicked that this was a parody.
I agree; I'll buy all 60 plots if it's real! I feel people are so overly keen on dunking on crypto at the moment, that they are blinded to agreeable satire. The proof that people claim makes it sincere isn't compelling.
I am a 3rd year undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas majoring in computer science (and dabbling in quantum physics).
I'm looking for Summer 2022 internships/part-time work related to cutting edge cryptography research and security (doesn't have to be related to cryptocurrencies). Work related to Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Zero Knowledge Proofs is ideal.
I'm currently taking a graduate course in cryptography, am working through the Cryptopals Crypto Challenges (https://github.com/TheEnthralled/cryptopals), and am currently one of less than 100 students nationwide to complete task 1-7 of the 2021 NSA Codebreaker Challenge (https://nsa-codebreaker.org/home).
If you would like me to do some "pre-emptive onboarding" by reading up on material, sharpening skills, etc., before Summer 2022, I'm sure I'm able to do so.
Hey there! Have a look at Zama's website: https://jobs.zama.ai
We are actively recruiting people to work on FHE-friendly models for machine learning, as well as cryptography researchers.
During my junior year in high school my mom was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer.
It took an emotional toll on my family. I went to a competitive public high school so after feeling tired from school I would come back home and see my mom with a wig on or hooked up to a pneumatic pump which she still uses daily even after remission. It just made me feel even more depressed on top of the feeling I had of not being good enough to my peers. I even shamelessly tried to use this event in my college apps which was a terrible idea in hindsight.
But I realized that this mindset that I had wasn't productive. At least for me, I try to think about how there are people out there who have it way worse than me: abusive families, poverty, etc.. When I saw on Facebook that a classmate I knew had their mother pass from cancer and they still kept a positive attitude, I realized that my family had gotten lucky and that, for me, the problem I was dealing with wasn't so much my mom's cancer but my mindset.
So I would say just try to find something, anything, to be grateful for everyday. These things are emotionally devastating and I wish the best for your family.
