I don’t really think the Russian economy is any real bottleneck here; they have abundant natural resources, a densely-knit industry and even now still many trading partners. Ultimately the only realistic way to stop the war is a peace agreement, which is why people voted for Zelenskyy in the first place.

There’s this post of mine, also this article gives some background on the application of PIR to anonymous messaging. Basically, I’m trying to do a basic version of that, but using a state-of-the-art PIR protocol introduced in this article. It’s still not great performance-wise, but it’s enough to be practical (as stated, many thousands of users given enough resources).

No, sorry, I haven’t uploaded anything yet, I’ve only coded the protocols and some benchmark code. The idea is for each client to send and receive data continuously. Since text messages are pretty small and YPIR+SP doesn’t have a lot of overhead, that could be a reasonable way to conceal all metadata, as long as there are not enough people connected to overwhelm the server.

Human embryos do have immature gills, but they are reused to create ears, jaw, tonsils, thymus, parathyroids and the large arteries in the neck and upper chest. We could add extra pairs and try to turn them into actual gills, although that would require removing the aortic arch and forcing all blood through the gills. Connecting them to the pulmonary system is not possible, as lungs and gills need different pressures (that’s the whole reason we have two circuits). Maybe we could connect them in parallel to the aorta? That would only work as a backup, but with an adequate vasomotor system could do a nice job!

Sorry! I meant Private Information Retrieval, that could allow metadata-hiding messaging.

My bad, the downvotes got me confused.

Many people are targeted around the world for their beliefs. That includes activists, journalists and other people who “haven’t done anything wrong”.

I guess we could make one using newer FHE-RAM techniques and some edge case handling.

Linux (windows at work tho).

Late-Permian extinction. Not very imaginative, but I find it cool that there are so many hypotheses even about the largest mass extinction ever.

Western companies outsource much of their production to countries with cheaper labor, so the really important things here are cheap raw materials and state subsidies. Since the Chinese state owns many of the large companies there, they can reduce profits throughout the supply chain or move them to other companies in the form of these subsidies. As well as use that money to build transport and green energy infrastructure, further lowering manufacturing costs.

Investors always seek short-term profit, so playing the long game is something you need aggressive policies for.

I used to be afraid of looking at mirrors at night. Idk what it’s called, spectrophobia maybe? Well, anyway, one night I took acid and happened to look at a mirror while blasted off my mind. Staring at it felt so disappointingly mundane that I laughed at myself for expecting anything to go wrong. Lost my fear permanently.

Imagine a situation wherein everyone has more or less the same amount of money. They can afford the same number of houses, let’s say, two small, or one larger house. Even if there’s some inequality, it’s not hard to imagine people buying larger or smaller homes and yet everyone being able to afford one. Renting is an afterthought in this scenario.

If inequality grows larger, some people will not be able to afford ownership, and then renting becomes profitable; those who can afford more than one house will buy more than they need, increasing demand and then offering those homes for renting and getting profit. This in turn increases inequality, but as long as the forces pushing it down prevail, this state can last for long.

The crisis breaks out when these mechanisms eventually come out of balance, pushing a large share of people out of the market, and homeownership starts concentrating.

The idea is that investing is only profitable when people don’t have what they need; any solution that gives them that (increasing public housing is a popular proposal here) will reduce profit. In fact, profitability is at a maximum now because of the housing crisis, and even just going back to step 2 would reduce it. A “perfect” solution would give everyone homes at the best price physically possible and with full liquidity, which would sink renting yields to basically zero.

Objectively, yes. But it was polarizing at the time because some of the people present were investing heavily in real estate.

You can imagine ;)

Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis in my country can’t be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.

Tissue, cell and organ donation (including blood, semen and oocytes) can and should be done strictly not-for-profit. This is how it’s done in Spain (well, you do get a snack when donating blood and a small amount of money for oocytes since the process is quite long) and there’s usually no shortage of blood components in hospitals. Local governments do a lot of campaigning, set up mobile units etc., which seems to work; people see all of that, think of it when planning their day, and many even go in small groups to donate.

Haha yeah, absolutely! Might be too messy to consider it “well used” though… But it does motivate me, seeing all the signs I put there and imagining one day I will conquer that mountain. Maybe not even on the second attempt, but definitely one day.

Fake article

Yes, that’s true and a better way to look at it, thanks!

Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.

So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq’s mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.

I did learn a lot though. Since then I’ve been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I’ve collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I’ve begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!

One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.