brian_cloutier

8 ms·

1.
by brian_cloutier 1y ago
You might consider reading Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. It gives an argument for studying math for the sake of math. Personally, reading a beautiful proof can be as compelling as reading a beautiful poem and needs no further
2.
by brian_cloutier 1y ago
how so? modern post-training uses RL and immense amounts of synthetic data to iteratively bootstrap better performance. if you squint this is extremely similar to the AlphaZero approach of iteratively training using RL over data generated t
3.
by brian_cloutier 2y ago
Bluesky does allow you to hold your own keypairs. Your identity must be registered at plc.directory, the central service they control, which allows them to stop clients from being able to verify your identity. I think they intend on decentr
4.
by brian_cloutier 2y ago
I have absolutely no context beyond reading this document but it appears they only did SSL decryption on their Facebook Research App where users were explicitly paid for running the app and giving facebook access to their network traffic. I
5.
by brian_cloutier 2y ago
URLs resolve not to ip addresses but to some form of static identifier such as the hash of the content. Static sites are retrieved via static identifier and are therefore incredibly easy to cache and even extremely popular sites are cheap t
6.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
If anyone wants to read this in book form, Linear Algebra Done Right includes it as an exercise at the end of a very short and readable chapter 5.C on eigenspaces and diagonal matricies. The treatment in thirty-three miniatures describes th
7.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Oh, I think I see the confusion. "proof of personhood" is something of a term of art which worldcoin did not invent. They are not literally claiming they can prove, in a mathematical sense, personhood. What would that even mean? S
8.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
It is of course possible to understand it and still be opposed. That's what makes it so frustrating that seemingly all of the negative coverage is ill-informed; I would love to read some informed criticism! Just some simple examples: &
9.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
It is literally impossible for a simple deadbolt to keep intruders from entering your house. Are locks scams? Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated purpose" is not something they have ever state
10.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq. You're _never_ sure that your counter-party to some communication is who you think they are. The definition of t
11.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
I don't believe they have ever promised that. One person = one account is not at all how the system is designed. It is definitely never mentioned or promised here: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/ and it is contrary t
12.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
I disagree that it's so easy to game but maybe you know more than me? I'm not sure what you mean by buying biometrics early, stealing them seems very uneconomical, and faking them is an engineering challenge which seems quite diff
13.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
What is the thing they are claiming which is different from the actual results and which they know is different from the actual results?
14.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
I said and I meant "more fair". We both agree this will not be a perfectly fair airdrop. Anything not perfect is feudalism? > What prevents a factory owner from having all of his employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim
15.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Try to imagine using a computer without any internet access to book an airline ticket. It doesn't really matter how many or which operations your computer can perform, it is not able to book an airline ticket unless there is another co
16.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
It looks like the airdrop gives you something like 25 WLD, or $50. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems to be around this order of magnitude. Your hypothetical spoon-wielding lunatic would be risking serious consequenc
17.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Most criticisms of worldcoin completely misunderstand/misrepresent how it works but this one does not. The GP is correctly pointing out that the iris hash is only necessary for receiving some of the initial airdrop. It is completely tr
18.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Why does that make it a scam? "Scam" implies some kind of fraud or lie, I don't believe worldcoin has ever claimed biometrics were required for later usage. The value of the biometric is in ensuring a ~ more fair ~ airdrop. W
19.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
What do you mean when you say scam? Are you claiming this is fraudulent in some way?
20.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Why would they have left no traces? Dinosaurs lived ~200 M years ago and left enough traces for us to discover them. Wouldn't an industrial civilization 50 mya have left some kind of refined metallic artifacts? Even if _most_ traces ar
21.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
This feature is not unique to cryptocurrency. Governments are our mechanism for deciding what is and is not allowed.
22.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
There's a great fanfic which attempts to explore these more and polish them up into a cohesive philosophy. In Star Trek the Ferengi are a foil, a caricature of capitalist excess. This fanfic attempts to paint a different kind of carica
23.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
Hilariously, those are the four parties. This sentence claims the voters will predominantly give their votes to one of the other parties.
24.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
This sent me down a rabbit hole; I would love to see your source I can't find any. The idea that someone might carefully pace their recital in order to keep accurate track of time across several hours is threshold-hard to believe. It s
25.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
This is clever but seems to work through brute force and my guess is that results should be accompanied by some kind of confidence measure. You're forcing the model to choose a path it wasn't particularly interested in going down.
26.
by brian_cloutier 3y ago
To reinforce this point, we have known for a very long time that better UX and data quality has innumerable benefits. Remember back when everybody was excited about web 2.0 and all the amazing mashups which would soon become possible? If yo
27.
by brian_cloutier 4y ago
I believe the implication is: why aren't we using the fed for our banking, this kind of bank run would be impossible. The fed provides guarantees to banks but not to retail and that's a policy decision we could change, if we wante
28.
by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Prisoner's dilemma is a situation where you're only playing the game once, and you have no way to interact with the other participant. To the extent that this is a single bank run and the other actors are mostly anonymous and ther
29.
by brian_cloutier 4y ago
To give everyone an idea of how solid the process is: consider that the opposition candidate widely considered most capable of beating the incumbent president was recently sentenced to two years in jail and removed from politics on the weak
30.
by brian_cloutier 4y ago
There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole while using these devices. It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. If you discover that Alexa is uploading information

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