> In fact, most cryptography only works off of probability. Not only keys or RNG, but also on routine algorithms like finding a prime number.
Usually in cryptography problems when we assume that our assumptions hold (e.g. there's no better method than a semi sophisticated brute force), you get that probability down to a negligible number. And I recall learning that some key generating systems will even have a list of known cracked large primes, and check to make sure what it generates isn't in that list (in case the systems RNG is biased.)
You're correctly inferring what JC is saying, but missing the point the other poster made; which was to imagine that history had gone differently, BSD was approved as the license, the source code was still publicly available, and how that would have benefited (or been detriment) to the widespread usage of the source code.
The relevant implication in it hypothetically having been BSD is that he would have convinced his partners, not that its usage would have made the project never happen.
> towards understanding natural intelligence, a prerequisite for creating an artificial one.
I've thought about this before, and I'm not convinced it's really prerequisite. Naturally developed intelligence in my mind may actually be highly constrained and inefficient because it was limited to what was biologically feasible. i.e. There may be simpler ways of achieving comparable results. Natural intelligence does however have the benefit of being an actual working model, but deciphering the blackbox may be just as hard as developing a working theory from first principles.
This is really a great lesson at always taking things in skeptically. I saw yale.edu and the great detail in multiple sections and the block of citations at the bottom that I let my guard down.
> If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business.
For every refund system you will unfortunately get people who attempt to game that system. They'll buy many negligible cost items without issue, then a single high cost item that they'll claim never arrived hoping they've outsmarted the store or algorithm. These bad actors are why honest consumers have a hard time. I don't know what a business can do to actually differentiate the two.
If you keep track of these categories and have amassed a large enough dataset, it sounds like a fun experiment to see if a NN can learn some feature of the papers text to predict if a paper is BS. Some combinations of citations may even be a telling feature.
> Why is Bitcoin made up of back-links to previous blocks? Isn't a block no more than a memoization of a event-sourced log at a point of time? That's just a really badly constructed journaling filesystem.
My understanding is that the chain of blocks, whereby each successor block is dependent on the hash of the previous one, acts as a self contained proof that a huge amount of work went into generating this. The rule that everyone needs to follow then is to simply always trust the longest chain presented to them (or the one that was most difficult to build depending on the amount of solutions at every difficulty.) By only looking at the last block, you lose this consensus mechanism. Not sure exactly how that isn't an issue with PoS though since they aren't verifying with work, and it seems that they can just keep track of the head of the transactions.
Then what happens when your comparison fails. There's no consensus mechanism. But then can't everyone just start using a fork from the last time you all agreed (ignoring that coming to a consensus on where to fork would pretty much be impossible)? Well since github is hosting that git repo, and they're the malicious actor, they just alter that as well. You could take them to court, but this would take a huge amount of time. Effectively if you have a central authority you gain nothing from a public ledger because you have to trust them in the first place. Maybe it makes it quicker to find out that fraud has been committed, but the individual(s) who suffered from it will probably be suing anyhow.
How can you know nothing was altered, even if you stay in constant sync with the git repo, if github wanted they could selectively send different copies to different people. The entire point is that it's a trustless system where malicious actors get drowned out by others, especially if they're uncoordinated.
Note the massive errata list which is very likely just the scratching the surface. Later editions tend to either implement these corrections, or have a more complete list.
The point is that the parent comment conflated validators with people, whereas one person or entity can control many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim that an attack needs to compromise so many individual people rather than potentially just a few entities that control vast quantities of eth.
Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
This sounds like a very interesting project, especially if it could be done just by taking pictures of both your ears (I'm not sure if that's sufficient to capture all of the topology.) Generating a sufficiently large dataset to learn how that topology relates to sound perception sounds incredibly expensive though.
> Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers.
Typically players get upset because they like the majority of the quality of life changes, and new content, but don't like that something was removed that they can't enjoy in that new version. Community knowledge also deteriorates over time; you can ask questions about recent versions, but antiquated versions require meticulous code diving / commit log scanning to figure things out.
At that point add a 2 to the end or change your username. Worst case you have to try a few times to get in, but eventually you'll remember it's one of those sites that uses the extra version information.
What kind of solution is there to this? Only trust studies which have been successfully reproduced several times? Raise the bar for an acceptable p value so it becomes less practical to p-hack?
I don't see how this conclusion could follow from a bill limit feature not ever being implemented. That would only make sense if this was about them removing such a feature.
I've had sites tell me when resetting a password that my new password is too similar to one of my old passwords (not even the previous one.) Far too many sites do something similar to substring searches.