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timschmidton GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

4 bits per 16 bytes is ~ 1/4 the cost of ECC, which is possible to implement with just an extra cycle or two of latency in the memory controller. MTE seems similarly lightweight. Costs some transistors and a percent of a percent of power budget, but much like ECC it seems a fair bargain.

timschmidton TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store

And it's not complete until it can send and receive email.

timschmidton TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store

I'm using async on esp32 with embassy, for instance, where there's simply no room and no need for a runtime as complex as tokio.

timschmidton Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk

I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.

timschmidton Starbase, LA

ITAR requires them to employ US citizens.

timschmidton Starbase, LA

They're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.

timschmidton NSA and IETF, Part 9

I can think of academic practitioners with doctorates who had wildly disastrous opinions about their field of expertise too:

Peter Duesberg, a Ph.D. in molecular biology / retrovirology who taught at Berkley and was a member of the National Academy, who maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good.

Walter Freeman, M.D. academic neurologist and first chair of neurology at George Washington University who believed that severing frontal-lobe connections could stabilize personality and stop pathological cycles of thought.

Charles B. Davenport, Ph.D. in biology, geneticist and founder of the Eugenics Record Office.

Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D. in psychology, intelligence-testing researcher and later professor of abnormal psychology who believed intellectual disability, poverty, prostitution, and criminality constituted a hereditary family type.

Clarence Cook Little, Harvard Ph.D., mammalian geneticist and prominent cancer researcher who insisted for years that the evidence did not establish a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Fun game. We could laugh at all of them, and your examples too, if not for the damage they caused.

timschmidton NSA and IETF, Part 9

Brings to mind this lovely quote from the Snowden documents:

“The road to developing this standard was smooth once the journey began... However, beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse ... After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft ... Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor.”

https://macleans.ca/society/technology/nsa-says-it-finessed-...

timschmidton NSA and IETF, Part 9

You're working real hard here to misunderstand his point and ignore historically relevant actions by NSA which have weakened and introduced attack vectors into previous standards, facilitating their adoption by orgs worldwide.

timschmidton Why ugly buildings create NIMBYism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame... is an excellent reference.

timschmidton Why ugly buildings create NIMBYism

> They want to keep out the poors

That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

Same to you.

timschmidton I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC

Yes, I'm aware. I'm also aware that Oxford Nanopore now sells a $5,150 MinION pack containing the sequencer, five full flow cells, and a sequencing kit. Admittedly it's not targeted at whole human genomes, for which Oxford sells PromethION. But I'm not going to say it couldn't be done. And for much less than the [inflation adjusted] cost of my first computer. Even starting from an empty bench you're looking at $7 - $10k.

timschmidton I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC

https://www.the-odin.com/

$599 for 30x coverage sequencing of any whole genome: https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/

Or purchase the equipment you need to DIY.

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

I don't much care what the man does with his free time. I'm more interested in the veracity of his statements. On that front he supplies copious references to peer reviewed research by numerous others and primary sources. Character assassination is for folks who can't argue on the merits.

You still haven't offered your own credentials.

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

You really like to stand up incorrect assumptions to argue against. Second time you've done so in this short interaction.

Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?

Enough.

> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.

What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

> relatively few domain scientists support that claim

I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.

One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.

timschmidton British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

> The lab leak people are probably wrong

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

timschmidton Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.

timschmidton Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

No idea what you're talking about. My local utility lit up 100MW of solar over the last year alone. Everywhere I look is doing the same.

timschmidton Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.

timschmidton Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.

timschmidton John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

Depends entirely on whether or not you think Amazon actually caring about the fine and bothering to do anything to prevent it recurring is part of the goal.

If it is, the fine must be large enough to matter against the backdrop of corporate P&L. Courts have an entire category for this type of fine: punitive damages.

timschmidton Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets

True. And also amazing how complex their interactions can be! Just because immune cells are often individually motile, does not mean they're not intimately interoperating within an incredibly complex social ecology of cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell is full of surprises.

timschmidton Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets

It's a very fuzzy line. But according to The Octopus Lady's video in the other comment, it's because separating them from the other zooids doesn't result in immediate death. They may die later due to lack of ability to swim, or eat, but that is a secondary cause which is considered important.

timschmidton Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets

You're thinking of Siphonophores like the Portugese Man-o-war. The Octopus Lady has a wonderful video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipDpbYQdFEA

timschmidton NSA tries to weaken mlkem standardisation?

Sorry, Daniel. I know better, but the fingers typed what they typed. I seem to be sick this morning so perhaps I was already coming down with something. :-/

timschmidton NSA tries to weaken mlkem standardisation?

There's a history and a 'pattern or practice' of behavior between NSA (sometimes using other TLAs or plausibly deniable intermediaries) and standards bodies and regulatory agencies.

Demonstrating a 'pattern or practice' is the legal standard one has to meet to bust qualified immunity and shift the burden of doubt on to authorities, so I'd say it goes a fair amount past 'reasonable suspicion', which in a court is itself enough to issue search warrants.

timschmidton NSA tries to weaken mlkem standardisation?

1: We were all aware of the default change before we became aware of the payment. But the payment is old news today. And the default change was fishy before the payment was discovered. Discovery of the payment confirmed the earlier suspicion. You're arguing a detail like a lawyer while missing the message entirely. Perhaps intentionally.

2: And? You're missing a second part to this statement. Did you intend it to support some conclusion?

> blind paranoia

Characterizing criticism this way, instead of listening, internalizing, and adjusting your position is exactly why DJB's references to previous NSA interference stick. Y'all don't just have technical differences, you're going for character assassination. DJB has been consistent and explicit about the technical nature of his objections. I find his prose on the matter clear and well reasoned.

Your arguments seem disjointed, unorganized, specious, and lacking, in comparison, and less credible for the way you respond.

> I just don't think it is sensible to attempt to "ban" the usage of pure ML-KEM by not standardizing it. It won't work! It'll just increase the risk of non-interoperable implementations.

I think it's entirely reasonable to dissuade people from building non-hybrid systems during a transition period, and refusing to standardize them is an entirely reasonable way to signal that people shouldn't build or trust such systems during such a time, even stronger than a recommended_to_implement = N. No one has attempted to "ban" anything, so that's another gross mischaracterization.