cypherpunks

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

sources and image transcript:

• the top half of the image is screenshot of this article about a startup claiming to be able to use ultrasound to induce lucid dreams so that “people can work in their sleep”. (spoiler: it’s vaporware)
• the lower half of the image is a screenshot from this (imo worth-watching) 2 minute video from 2016: Hayao Miyazaki’s thoughts on an artificial intelligence with the subtitle “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” There is a more detailed description of that video here. (Guillermo del Toro agrees.)

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

You interpret this meme as being in favor of the US banning TikTok? I don’t.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

Vegeta Over 9000 meme with text “it’s under $9,000”

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

It’s a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised

I think this is precisely what the ActivityPub model of federation promised, actually 😅

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

It sure is convenient for law enforcement and others to have the ability to immediately get the IP addresses of all visitors to a specific URL. (They just need to circumvent the OHTTP by asking fastly and google to collude…)

cypherpunks, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The spiders tell themselves that they’re keeping the tiny frogs around because they’re killing pests and also kind of cute but, really, there is a brain parasite in the frogs’ feces - tiny amounts of which are all over the floor of the spiders’ burrows - which makes the spiders believe this.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

scientificamerican.com/…/tiny-frogs-and-giant-spi…

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

Twitter is now suspending any account that mentions the name “Hans Kristian Graebener” until they delete it.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/stonetoss-doxxing

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

I think it’s pretty great that Zuckerberg went all-in on the thankfully-wrong bet that his Second Life knockoff would somehow be popular and that people would actually want to strap a computer on their face to use it. 🤡

Which is to say, VR isn’t particularly high on the list of things I’m concerned about giant tech companies’ control of.

I recommend reading The Verge’s review of the Apple Vision Pro which concludes:

Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to nowhere. This is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever, and it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain undefeated for years to come.

As someone who doesn’t want to live in a world where head-mounted cameras in public spaces become ubiquitous or even socially acceptable, I found that review to be good news.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

a sign with a red circle and line through a drawing of an eyeball with a google glass in front of it, above the text “Google Glass is banned on these premises”

cypherpunks, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

post-quantum cryptography can be compared with a remedy against the illness that nobody has, without any guarantee that it will work. The closest analogy in the history of medicine is snake oil.

Good on them for saying that.

A “remedy against the illness that nobody has” is a good analogy, but it is important to note that it’s an illness which there is a consensus we are likely to eventually have and a remedy that there is good reason to believe will be effective.

It isn’t a certainty that there will ever be a cryptographically relevant post-quantum computer, and it also isn’t a certainty that any of the post-quantum algorithms (as with most classical cryptography) which exist today won’t turn out to be breakable even by yesterday’s computers. The latter point is why it’s best to deploy post-quantum cryptography in a hybrid construction such that the system remains secure even if one of the primitives turns out to be breakable.

That said, I think it is totally wrong to call PQC snake oil because that term in the context of cryptography specifically means that a system is making dishonest claims: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil_(cryptography)

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

they basically agree with you

yes, I realize :)

I should’ve made clear in my comment that, aside from a bit of imperfect English and incorrect use of the term snake oil, I think this is an excellent blog post.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

It's a great product, but this one comes in more varieties:image of an Armstrong brand cheese package, overlaid with images Vaughn Armstrong playing 12 different Star Trek characters: a Human, a mirror universe Human, a Romulan, a Borg/former Borg, a Vidiian, a Kreetassan, a Hirogen, two Cardassians, and three Klingons

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

gif of Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) nod of approval

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

pro: for a huge number of people, being on github makes it easier to contribute

con: for another (almost certainly smaller) group of people, it makes it more difficult and potentially prevents them from contributing

it seems to me that the best course of action for many projects is to be on github but to also be elsewhere, and to explicitly accept issues and PRs in multiple places. it’s a mess, but it’s better than either being on github or not.

fwiw, I use github in some contexts, but, because it is a giant hassle to make a new account anonymously these days, I haven’t yet made one for this identity… so I sometimes irritate the lemmy devs by sending them bug reports on matrix instead of opening an issue :(