This blog post from Cloudflare proved incredibly useful to me when I was trying to understand this stuff for the first time. The animated gifs about halfway down the page are particularly useful: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-...
Trying to render them in code, or with Desmos, is quite enlightening. Cryptographic tools are also helpful for testing it out in practise, such as OpenSSH. Then read up on the various forums and the Bitcoin Wiki, and try to make your own implementation to generate an address. Next step is trying out other cryptos and their algos, if that's the route you want to take.
Wikipedia, honestly. For background math you may want to rely on the citations or other provided texts but a lot of articles have great examples sections.
But... I think you need a more coherent goal than just "understand the math." You can superficially understand the math when guided, but without any reason to retain it I am not sure what you will gain from the experience.
On my journey into this secret world I sadly had to conclude that understanding of the needed math was severely lacking, and that I'd have to start far back to ever get a grasp on it. But on the flipside it has motivated me to learn a bunch of things I never thought I would when I was younger, and also to program things that I never in my life thought I'd be able to.
Bitcoin isn’t exciting because it doesn’t solve very many problems relative to the massive energy expenditure needed to create it. It’s like a fire at an oil well or a gas pipeline break. The arguments for why we should use it remind me a lot of arguments for why this year is the year of the Linux desktop. Bitcoin may be eating a lot of speculation but I can’t buy beans with it.
it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.
I did do the reading. It's an O(n) db insert. The blockchain's the DB and the insert needs PoW.
throughput of a blockchain is contingent upon tweaking but for the original bitcoin, still used, it's 6 mb/hour. electricity consumption is 14 gigawatts. if i were given 14 gigawatts of electricity i think i could do better than 6 megabytes/hour.
Do you understand the tradeoffs of why it works that way?
That for an open and fully accessible, decentralised system that exists in an adversarial environment there has to be a large cost to any attacks?
Of course there are much more efficient ways to store data, but those are centralised and vulnerable to the problems of centralisation. The blockchain's and proof-of-work's purpose is to be decentralised.
Someone was telling me that the general problem with HN is that they're all very technically capable, so they look at Bitcoin, understand it from a technical perspective (not always true) and deem it as inferior to other technical solutions, like a centralised database.
The bit that's lacking is an understanding of money, and what makes certain types of money sound or unsound. It's easy to overlook the problems of fiat money because its all we've ever known.
What was it about gold that made it the dominant form of money for literally thousands of years? Why was it abandoned? How does Bitcoin solve the problems of gold and fiat?
Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job of outlining this in his article.
This is a pretty clear case though, it's the same situtation in Norway.
The country wide standard BankAxept, that has low fees (0.024USD per transaction), is used for almost all other card transactions, but Apple use their NFC monopoly to charge stores exorbiant VISA network fees when people use their Apple devices to pay. If the blockage of BankAxept on Apple Pay is allowed to continue it could cost the Norwegian economy hundreds of millions of dollars in just monopoly fees.
An argument here is that it disincentivizes others from doing similar crimes. If the technology is so spot on that 99% of the time you commit the crime you'll get caught, then others will likely not take the risk.
Granted there's an easy counter argument there (all the more prescient these days) that they could wear a mask while committing the crime.
There's a similar (less discussed about) trend happening these days. Law enforcement is using DNA evidence from crime scenes, passing it through (sometimes private) DNA databases and getting matches.
Let's say those database continue to have more data – what are the odds that someone involved in a crime will leave some DNA behind, and will either themselves have their DNA in a database, or, a relative. The chances of you getting away with a crime converge to zero. And if you know you have high odds of getting caught when doing the crime, you might be less likely to do it in the first place.
> If the technology is so spot on that 99% of the time you commit the crime you'll get caught
And in 1% of the time[1], you are an innocent who had nothing to do with the crime. Now you have to spend your time: getting arrested, spending time with lawyers, getting people to collaborate your alibi (<- In the best case! Otherwise you're f'ed).
If you want to make a case for facial recognition, criminal justice is one of worst possible cases you could make for it.
[1] I don't accept your claim of 99% accuracy when this is applied on a massive scale. Maybe I'm wrong, so let's go with this number
False positives always exist in these systems along with the false negatives. There's no avoiding every case of false conviction if you rely on imprecise methods. That's admittedly already a problem without facial recog, but is a problem when using it, too.
> The 1% there is that “the criminal won’t get caught”.
So the 99% is for the facial recognition system to identify criminals?
What error rate does the best facial identatification have? If it's not zero then my original point still stands. You are throwing a lot of innocent people into the judicial system. Or at best being pestered by police for no good reason.
> Also what you described can happen to you today as well. It’s the imperfect system we live in.
That's correct. So instead of improving it, you suggest to automate it? This sounds insane to me. Why would you automate something that you know is defective? Check the user support of all the top tech companies who use "AI" to automate things. Now check the worst of the worst customer support of the top tech companies. There's an overlap. And if you want to expand (*censored*) tech support to the criminal justice system, people like me are going to get upset.
You brought up the fact that FR could identify criminals. I
brought up the fact it could also identify innocent people as criminals. When innocent people are accused of crimes they didn't do, they usually get upset.
I didn't say I personally was upset with your message. I said they would get upset. I'm not a "people" person, but this should be obvious. And I think I would be upset too if I got accused of something I didn't do.
You still didn't tell me how you would resolve an innocent person being misidentified by a facial recognition system. Can they sue the company or person who developed it?
A claim of 99% sensitivity sounds good, and is often achievable. Any real system will also have false positives, so let’s say that we have a specificity (test true negative rate) of 99% as well. This is probably unrealistically good, most systems will false positive more. This sounds great.
However, Bayes’ theorem paints a very different picture.
If the prevalence of wanted criminals in the population is say 1/10000 (this is hard to guess), what are the odds that a person that is flagged is a wanted criminal?
The unintuitive answer is less than 1% of the time (~0.98%) will the suspect actually be a criminal.
By far the most important term is the prevalence of the thing you are testing for in the population, in this case criminality. Any dragnet facial recognition is invariably going to get more innocent people caught in its web than true criminals.
I agree, it does disincentivise people from committing similar crimes to a certain extent, but I think what it often does is shift people to different kinds of crime. In the pandemic, burglaries dropped significantly, presumably because people were home and the perpetrators didn’t like the idea of being caught. However, scams have risen sharply.
How did the EU become such a bunch of luddites? Or does it only seem that way from outside?
I get that there are legit concerns about face recognition (as there are benefits), but the concerns _could_ be regulated. Granted, regulation is a much more work intensive process – you have to sit down with a large number of people, get educated on the subject etc. Is it laziness?
Or is this a negotiation tactic? Start asking for a permanent ban, and work your way back to regulation?
It is just a matter of time before stores and what not will track you via CCTV and spam you ads and adjust your credit rating depending on some opaque metrics. I rather have a ban on it before it happens.
But this can be disrupted, here it is a startup idea but probably Google and Amazon are already working on it
1 offer all shops free surveillance hardware, you will offer them notifications when a suspect enters the shop. You need some PR stuff with big numbers where you claim on how many of your partners/clients are marking suspects that commited theft and how many billions are saved with this AI tech.
2 collect all the videos, do face recognition and connect the people n the image with real identities , infer more personal data from the person facial expression, posture, clothing, stuff they look at
3 profit!
4 collaborate with NSA and FBI to make sure the government will not have an easy job shutting you down.
bonus , you can extend to clubs, schools,parks, bars. You can rent the hardware for private owners with a discount if they mount at least one camera pointed at the street.
Why do you think so? Because of bad Pr Google and Amazon will not do it ? but will some other company do it ?
It could be done with "google glasses" like devices too, why do you think it will not happen? Because of existing laws or because there is no money for a big corporation to extract?
Yea I think:
- Google and Amazon etc won’t touch it cause it is bad PR
- stores won’t buy it cause it’s bad PR; fear of boycotting etc.
- physical retail is already on the decline; why spend money in a dying industry
- the whole project would have one big flaw - people wearing masks
So if the masks will be here forever then this guys complaining they can't use face recognition anymore in public places do not know this or they are betting that masks will be gone soon.
1 some people complaining that EU will block innovation if it is not allowed to do face recognition on public places or without consent. This people want to "disrupt/innovate"
2 we have the theory that people will wear masks so facial recognition is impossible
So 1 and 2 can't happen at the same time, if the guys from 1 need to innovate then they need no masks , if 2 will happen then the guys from 1 are complaining for nothing because the virus fucked up their disruptive ideas.
This is a first step toward regulation. No PRC-style indiscriminate/"predictive" profiling, as a first step. Now let's come up with a way to use this tool to catch actual criminals when investigating actual specific crimes, with judicial oversight that protects our civil liberties without making the tool useless (by creating onerous obstacles to its use, or delaying it unacceptably).
It's a terrible headline, but this is regulation, not a ban. This would ban most police use, and would ban private mass surveillance, but would not ban, say, FaceID.
1. The mainstream news pushed numerous stories over the past years without those rudimentary truthiness checks.
2. I disagree with many points in that paragraph:
- echo chambers: when was the last time you heard a nuanced "from the other aisle" opinion from a NYT reader; an opinion that wasn't covered in the NYT. Same echo chamber, just a different format.
- news companies are small and irrelevant: Seems like this narrative has captured everybody's imagination today. Everybody is talking about it. It might even lead to action in Congress. Are news companies really that small and irrelevant as you claim them to be?
I read the times almost everyday and have plenty of conservative opinions. The Times has multiple conservative columnists and consistently publishes conservative op-eds.
These 'conservative' columnists do not reflect the majority of conservative opinion in this country though. NYT columnists tend to be members of the political or cultural elite. There is a large strain of anti-elite sentiment running through the country right now, especially on the right. These people do not feel their views are expressed in the NYT. For that matter, I know plenty of working-class dems who feel disenfranchised with the NYT, the media elite, the democratic party, etc.
Conservatives at NYT do not reflect the opinions of most conservatives or most conservative media.
If you want a taste of conservative media, look at what is collated on RealClearPolitics. NYT is very different, you won't see Ross Douthat saying the same things they say in The Federalist.
