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“The government was the primary source of misinformation during the pandemic, and the government censored dissidents and critics to hide that fact.”
—Stanford Prof Jay Bhattacharya

Excerpt from his recent speech at the MIT Free Speech Alliance:
▶️youtu.be/yF5G46kSKR4

Steve Jobs on how to resolve conflict.

Cycles makes something worth transacting on blockchains. It's based on peer-issued credit, not just tokens. If you feel let down that blockchains don't actually do anything economically new, this is the innovation for you

Precisely

Here's an unusual chip, a 7400-series decoder implemented with a gate array. It has over 1500 transistors in orderly rows, but most of them are entirely unused. Why build a chip in such an inefficient way? Let's take a closer look... 1/13

This week in DSL reading group, Bolton Bolton Bailey will present his new work with Or Sattath on PoW and Quantum mining arxiv.org/abs/2403.08023
youtube.com/live/vLY8cwvh7…

Freeman Dyson on how to understand quantum mechanics ✍️

For me, the important thing about quantum mechanics is the equations, the mathematics. If you want to understand quantum mechanics, just do the math. All the words that are spun around it don’t mean very much. It’s like…

Proactive Refresh for Accountable Threshold Signatures

I like the research agenda of making cryptographic protocols accountable, e.g., see this recent paper: eprint.iacr.org/2024/405

A lot of schemes still do not have an efficient, accountable version...

fc24.ifca.ai/preproceedings…

In other words, we run this process: github.com/oriansj/stage0… in a chain of zkVMs, starting with the hex0 seed.

Flashback Friday: Paulo Diaz, 1993 📸 Spike Jonze for Big Brother

Interesting post on identifying software.

Points out the differences between source code and binaries, the importance of reproducible builds, the need for full-source bootstrap, and provenance tracking.

guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2024/i…

Bertrand Russell's definition of mathematics ✍️

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this…

Whitfield Diffie running a Q&A at Financial Cryptography.

I asked him: “Do you think Bitcoin was a positive or negative contribution to the field of cryptography?”

He said: “Yes! It is wonderful and it has had an unimaginable contribution to the field!” (Paraphrasing)

Very…

Zac Williamson IMO TEEs are for people who trust their hardware, but don't trust their OS, which I think is fine. Trusting a TEE in *someone else's* hardware is an extreme danger zone.

When I was at Intel I did threat modeling for things like SGX, libtee, PoET, etc. This was a constant fuckup.

Zac Williamson An alternative way of thinking here is to view TEEs as a hard problem to solve.

Current TEEs are secure through economic incentives.
ZKP, MPC, FHE, etc are secure through mathematics.

The quest for TEEs is security through physics.

e.g.: black hole as a one-way function

Ada Lovelace, often considered the first computer programmer, wrote an algorithm in the mid-1800s for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This makes her algorithm over 170 years old, predating modern electronic computers by a century.

“I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people.”

- Richard Feynman, Fun to Imagine (1983)

Under every single CAD application that businesses use is a thirty year old CAD kernel.

Even OnShape and Shapr3d, “modern” tools use Parasolid a 30 year old beast.

We, on the other hand, are building a new CAD kernel. To use GPUs not just for rendering but for the math.

Yes,…

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