I interviewed at Stability AI a while ago and that interview was a complete shit show. They quite literally spent 40 minutes talking about Emad and his "vision". I think we actually talked about what they wanted me to do there for like 15 minutes.
I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a company I wouldn't work for.
In Skyrim they didn't send Alduin into the end of time, just into the future (also there is going to be an Elder Scrolls VI so V can't be the end of time, but will likely be the end of the fifth era). It was one of the reasons that the Felldir the Old was not onboard with the plan to use the Elder Scroll on Alduin. They didn't know how far into the future he would be sent. Most people on Nirn at the time of Skyrim didn't believe that dragons were real, much less Alduin who signals the end times. The Dragonborn ultimately ends up defeating Alduin, but because Alduin is immortal (in a way that the other dragons are not) he will return at a time deemed by his father Akatosh and actually destroy all of existence in that universe.
Going back to your original point it's a little different than sending him to the end of the universe, they sent him forward in time, but they actually had no idea how far or where there were sending him.
the unrealistic part of the whole narrative is: in that distant future he returns, another "hero" might step up and just kill him again, so he can't just "destroy all existence", or even Tamriel after some hundreds of years has modern/advanced military tech and will just obliterate a spawning dragon completely.
If something can be "killed" by a dude with an axe, it ain't a world-ending superpower for me. I get that Alduin could harass the known world by eating people or burn down villages if left unchecked, but "end of the world" for me is kinda different scale.
I think that is largely a difference between the lore and the gameplay. Alduin in lore literally eats all the matter in existence like a black hole. In the game he kinda goes against his purpose and wants to rule and feed on the souls in Sovngarde.
It really is. It's a fantastic show. The latter seasons did change a bit but that's the whole point of it. Well done by Hader and team. The end of it was wild.
This is an excellent point and I think that while most languages will fade away in time, if they even contribute one new idea the project is worthwhile. If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.
I played around with Vala (a C# style language that compiled to C on Linux) back in 2010 and while I never used it for anything serious, it was fun to try out new ideas and see how they could work. There is value in these projects, maybe some of it will carry over into other languages, in others they may be the dominant language in 10 years.
> If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.
> This is Python, an extensible interpreted programming language that
combines remarkable power with very clear syntax.
> This is version 0.9 (the first beta release), patchlevel 1.
> Python can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write
prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large
systems, you name it. There are built-in modules that interface to
the operating system and to various window systems: X11, the Mac
window system (you need STDWIN for these two), and Silicon Graphics'
GL library. It runs on most modern versions of UNIX, on the Mac, and
I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on MS-DOS unchanged. I developed it
mostly on an SGI IRIS workstation (using IRIX 3.1 and 3.2) and on the
Mac, but have tested it also on SunOS (4.1) and BSD 4.3 (tahoe).
> Building and installing Python is easy (but do read the Makefile).
A UNIX style manual page and extensive documentation (in LaTeX format)
are provided. (In the beta release, the documentation is still under
development.)
If the authors don't even make a value proposition themselves, I assume the language is a learning exercise and won't take it seriously. Also not really worth critiquing things I don't like about it. Indeed, I see on the introduction:
> It started as a toy language following the excellent book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom.
Nothing wrong with that! Sometimes the value is mainly for the author, and that's great. Probably not going to contribute any new ideas though.
This is a very realistic take on the subject. From an academic perspective it is a tool to be used as any other and gaining knowledge on how to better protect data is worthwhile and provides value to humanity as a whole.
DRM is one use that does not favor consumers, on the other hand we have encryption being used in apps like Signal to provide the same high quality software to every day consumers.
I'm very interested in quantum computers, specifically ones powerful enough to break AES and other types of modern encryption. What will that mean for humanity and individuals?
As far as I know, there are no known quantum attacks that break the security of AES. It is unknown if they are able to turn AES insecure, like they do to RSA and discrete logarithm problems. And there are several post-quantum candidate alternatives to replace RSA and crypto algorithms that would break under quantum attacks.
Quantum computers break several security assumptions. But not all of them and we usually can replace the broken assumptions. Discovering that P=NP, or that one-way functions do not exist, on the other hand, would imply that several secure cryptographic constructions that we want to use are in fact impossible and would be a much scarier discovery.
Grover's Algorithm gets you effectively a square root difficulty improvement. So, AES 256 is "only" as strong as a 128-bit symmetric encryption if you have equivalently cheap quantum computers.
Even ignoring that we don't currently have any usable quantum computers and there's no reason to believe they would be affordable, let alone cheap, this mean AES-256 is fine.
Grover's algorithm is not quite as powerful as popularly described. In particular, it (roughly) divides the number of times you need to run AES by the number of times you run it sequentially. So it effectively square-roots the time requirement rather than the difficulty, and those are very different if the attack is parallel.
Eg if you were planning on breaking AES-128 by running 2^30 cores for 2^98 AES calls, it now only takes about 2^49 calls per core (2^79 total effort) plus the overhead of Grover's algorithm itself. There are also huge overheads from running everything on a quantum computer, some of which are theoretically avoidable (100x cost for error correction; gates take one clock cycle) and some of which are probably not (you must rewrite AES so that all computations are reversible). So breaking AES-128 might eventually be feasible, but AES-192 probably would not be.
There is a theoretical barrier against efficiently parallelizing Grover: all generic quantum brute-force algorithms (the kind that would work against a random function in a black box) require Omega(searchspace / depth) queries, at least for some model that may not quite match reality. (Edit: Omega and not O, since it's a lower bound)
Of course, AES isn't a random function in a black box, so there may be better attacks against it, but I'm not aware of any.
Practical P=NP is a very real possibility (I am just testing a new algorithm) and (IMHO) not that scary. I am of the opinion that the advantages of P=NP far outweigh the disadvantages. People tend to focus on the latter, because that's the world we currently live in.
Even if we focus on crypto only, from the perspective of people being oppressed around the world, it would be far better for them to be able to see what is being done by the powerful publicly rather than not. This is essential for transparency, which is essential for democracy.
I don't reject the ideals of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independe..., but I believe that the technological solution through cryptography is not tenable, and if we got rid of cryptography, it would actually level the playing field.
Sorry, this sounds like serious crackpot territory.
Btw, if your polynomial algorithm for NP is any good, you should be able to break any encryption at all. The problem of breaking cryptographic systems is typically inside of both NP and co-NP. That intersection is suspected to be substantial smaller than NP by itself. (Of course, if it all collapses to P, that wouldn't make a difference.)
If everybody considers P=NP a crackpot territory, then it will never happen, by definition. On the contrary, I think to believe that the sets described by NP-complete instances are somehow inherently "undescribable" (as is implied by naturalization) is crackpottery also.
But regardless, it's important to realize that modern cryptography relies on a hypothesis. It might be effectively true for now, but it might not in the future.
> Btw, if your polynomial algorithm for NP is any good, you should be able to break any encryption at all.
In theory, yes, in practice, there is a pretty big difference between "I think I just discovered how to do Gaussian elimination to solve linear equations" and "I can routinely solve sparse linear systems with millions of variables". Historically, it wasn't done by a single individual in a span of couple years.
> If everybody considers P=NP a crackpot territory, then it will never happen, by definition.
Oh, sorry, that's not what I meant to say. To be less vague, 'Practical P=NP is a very real possibility' is fine. 'Practical P=NP is a very real possibility (I am just testing a new algorithm)' is crackpot territory.
> But regardless, it's important to realize that modern cryptography relies on a hypothesis. It might be effectively true for now, but it might not in the future.
Different parts of modern cryptography rely on different sets of hypotheses. Eg the discrete logarithm problem being hard for some specific groups is one popular hypothesis.
> In theory, yes, in practice, there is a pretty big difference [...]
That's a valid point, but to make that point the approach you defend has to be more mathematically rigorous.
Basically, if you say '(I am just testing a new algorithm)', then that algorithm better be fast in order to convince anyone. Otherwise, you say something like 'I'm working on a proof for my new approach.' or 'I'm working proving sub-exponential runtime for a new algorithm'.
Ideally, if you don't want to be a crackpot, it helps to be well versed with the literature, and what has been done before and why it does or doesn't work.
(The former is especially important, if you want to claim you have a new proof for P != NP, because researchers have already formally ruled out lots of different approaches; so you better be able to explain why your approach does not fall under any of the ones that have already been proven not to work.)
I see. I didn't really wanted to claim anything (or much) in this respect. I am working on a "candidate algorithm", that I believe could be in P with low degree (o(n^8)). (And if it's not in P, I think it will be very useful to understand WHY it is not; that's one of several reasons why I am testing it.) The reasons why I believe it's in P are complicated (I would have to describe the method), and I didn't wanted to go into that. Still, that's why people should take P=NP as a real possibility.
AFAICT my approach is novel, but if some expert genuinely wants to help me understand where it is not novel, I will gladly explain how it works.
> I'm assuming you are working on solving some NP-hard problem?
Yes, my choice of the problem is 2XSAT, which is a SAT class whose instances have clauses from 2-SAT and XORSAT. I proved (and I think that's where it becomes novel) that this class is NP-complete. This leads me to believe there is a clever generalization of polynomial algorithms for 2-SAT and XORSAT, and that's the subject of my interest.
The trouble is, algorithms for 2-SAT and XORSAT are wildly different. My first attempt to unify them, half a year ago, has failed. Since then I have made a lot of progress on the theory; now I have another candidate algorithm which generalizes them, and I am about to test it.
> Yes, that's a good approach!
I know, but it gets even better. I roughly follow what Krom did with 2-SAT in 1967. And it turns out, even if your attempt at polynomial algorithm turns out to be incorrect, the character of the exponential blow-up gives you at least some hint of what you need to fix.
> I'd be happy to take a look.
I wish I had written more on it, but the research got priority. For two months now, I am sitting on blogpost draft that outlines 2/3 of my strategy, as well as half of a proper paper; I was waiting if I can somehow conclude with a candidate algorithm, but I don't really have yet that written down in a formal way (it's new so some understanding needs to happen). I'll probably publish the blogpost as it is, and the actual algorithm (if the test implementation works out reasonably well) later as another blogpost. If you're still interested, I will send you an email when I publish the first part, probably this weekend, and you can tell me what you think.
Yes, I'm interested. There's an email address in my profile here.
My academic background is more on linear optimisation (and integer and combinatorial optimisation), but looking more into the various flavours of SAT would also be interesting.
I'm not sure whether I agree or not, as without cryptography the only way to have a private discussion with someone, which I think is equally important to transparency, as people usually are "transparent" about personal stuff with close friends/family members only under the condition that other people don't have access to the information, would be to have such conversation in person behind closed doors. Which it isn't always easy, think people living far apart. Consider also that having no cryptography isn't by itself enough to have a transparent government: they can still lock important documents in a physically secure place and have a long jail sentence as a deterrent for people thinking about leaking them.
> Consider also that having no cryptography isn't by itself enough to have a transparent government: they can still lock important documents in a physically secure place and have a long jail sentence as a deterrent for people thinking about leaking them.
But here you say that: Security can depend on social contract and not technology. But the same argument can be applied to your original objection. We can mandate (in the social contract) that people have the right to privacy. (And there are some analogs where we do that, for example, we could have Gattaca-like dystopia where people's access to health care is based on genetics, yet all developed countries have a ban on such discrimination.)
I think it's far more dangerous that the government or adversary is technologically capable of being non-transparent than if ordinary people don't have capability to be non-transparent. It's because I believe power ultimately thrives on information asymetry, and the encryption only amplifies this asymetry.
> It's because I believe power ultimately thrives on information asymetry, and the encryption only amplifies this asymetry.
Quite the opposite, I find. In fact, the government has the infrastructure and political power necessary for surveillance of people. The reverse is definitely not true. Regardless, assume you are in an authoritarian state with a powerful state police: how would you even attempt fighting it if you do not have a way of coordinating with the other people being oppressed? How can you trust communications if the government can interfere?
I simply don't believe that in an actual authoritarian state, private (Internet) communications are a neccessity for fighting back. I was born in Czechoslovakia, and if I look at what actual dissidents did, it seems that once your goal is to fight back, you just have to get used to that you're gonna be surveilled no matter what. Because if you want to convince many others that the system is oppressive, you will have to make yourself known. Vaclav Havel discusses some of the strategies in the Power of the Powerless, and it also goes to Gramsci, who observed that it's mostly ideology that keeps the systems of power.
I think privacy is important in democracy, but if you're taking on an authoritarian state, that some police knows what you had yesterday for dinner, that's the least of your problems.
To clarify: The harsh truth is, in an authoritarian state, the police doesn't really need your communications; they already know what you're up to: no good. That's enough for some of them to justify any action they want against you.
If you really want to be pedantic, you should recognize there is a difference between technology as implemented (the social contract as it's implemented now) and choice of technology (all the different ways how the social contract could be different, reflecting history and geography).
This is an insane take. If encryption is broken I _guarantee_ that the public will still be as in-the-dark as they are now. The government (and telcos) are the only ones who control the infrastructure needed to inspect this kind of traffic.
I am not suggesting that, in an encryption-free world, the advantage for the public is in being able to inspect all government traffic. Rather, it makes it easier for whistleblowers to bypass the government protections and get relevant documents that cover some atrocities.
I really like Assange's essay on the topic, where he describes that every big operation requires a sort of paper or document trail (which is used to coordinate many people), and this fact makes whistleblowing always an option.
However, I believe, encryption (and related things like trusted computing) helps to minimize the exposure of this trail even to internal actors, and in doing so, it makes whistleblowing more difficult.
Russia has something like 4,000 nukes, only 1 or 2 really need to work to cause massive devastation. It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
Enough? Enough for what? This is not mutually assured destruction. If Russia and the US engage, this is a madman shooting a tank with a 9mm. It may cause some damage, but he's going to be obliterated in the process.
Yes but Russian leadership doesn't necessarily believe that the nukes don't work. If they do a massive launch then we'll probably take at least some damage, and if we massively retaliate then we'll conduct a risky experiment to see who's right about nuclear winter.
The debris thrown up into the stratosphere from our weapons detonating in Russia would likely be enough to start a nuclear winter, not to mention the fallout making everything in the northern hemisphere a lot more radioactive.
Any large exchange of thermonuclear weapons is going to break most supply chains and lead to a great simplification of society and the deaths of at least 90% of the population in the process as industrial farming stops being a thing.
The exchange on the Russian side would be minimal, if any. On the US side, it'll only need to target major cities to be effective. Destroying Moscow and Saint Petersburg would be more than enough. They could use neutron bombs, as they are cleaner, if they still have.
Destroying Moscow and St. Petersburg might be worth losing Paris, London, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles; but it certainly wouldn't worth losing Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, and other centers of the worlds history. The others also has a vote, you know.
Still, I'd rather not have to move my ski season to the sides of Mount Golgotha near Jerusalem - that glowing snow might still be radioactive after all.
The GQP‘s ongoing downplaying of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already killed more than 1 million Americans, has proven that a large part of the US electorate disagrees with you.
>It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
Obviously.
Historically, with real tanks seen to be performing in action, then cardboard tanks additionally performed exactly as the deterrent fake ones were intended to do.
Also in tank warfare when the majority of tanks have not been brought into action, the cardboard ones accomplished the same things as the majority of real ones.
Edit: not everyone can be expected to believe it's true, some are just more easily fooled than others
Plus my bad, there were a lot of inflatables historically for even better deception:
Is it the case that they'll launch a whole bunch at once? Wouldn't they send one or two to Ukraine for effect? If it works it should be enough to scare everyone.
The west is very clear that they’re not willing to allow the precedent of small scale nuclear weapons use without consequence. If Russia does this, we will massively ramp up our involvement in the war.
Nuclear weapons will not actually make a huge difference. Neither on the battlefield nor on civilian targets.
I have hemorrhoids and bought a bidet about 2 years ago. I have not had a single flair up since I started using it. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
The unit testing section is interesting because I feel like this may not be the perfect approach to them, but it is not a bad method. Too many times I see unit testing being used as the holy grail of debugging and then half of them get ignored because "Oh that's a known issue."
As my last image in round 5 I got a photo of WWF where Mankind was on top of the hell in a cell. I guessed 1998 because of the meme and got it correct! It was the only image I hit dead on.
Same for me with Musk on stage with the Cybertruck (2019).
It would be more interesting if these popular photos were removed, and guessing would be based only on knowledge about clothing and hair styles, film type, car design, etc.
I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a company I wouldn't work for.