When someone says "an institution needs more diversity" they mean that given two people for any job in the industry the minority should be chosen for diversities sake. They want women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities and religious minorities to be more qualified for available jobs for the sake of being rarer, as opposed to true equality. It's nonsense. And I say this as a weird person - me being weird shouldn't make me more qualified for any job in which my weirdness is orthogonal - nor should any non-job related uniqueness qualify anyone else.
There are too few (good) jobs and too many qualified people, so it's a kind of gatekeeping. College is similar for the most part, but they do you the favor of teaching you something (while fleecing you at the same time, but that's another issue).
Can anyone give a little insight into how some of these discoveries can have engineering applications? There are some abstracts, but has anyone looked at this and seen potential uses in computer science? I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal.
> I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this on Hacker News considering it's the Fields Medal.
Many would argue that looking for engineering applications in mathematics is not why mathematicians do mathematics. That mathematics does sometimes have engineering applications is a mysterious and beautiful side effect. It isn't the motivation behind doing mathematics.
Indeed, a possibly apocryphal tale holds that matrix algebra, while a beautiful mathematical construct, was considered by its inventor to be utterly useless. We know better today.
One of the winners says that there are no concrete applications, but that some of the tools developed ("interpolation formulas") could potentially be useful for solving differential equations and signal processing, but doesn't go into detail.
Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity.
I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether global warming happens or not. The way around this is collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the problem.
consumer's demand is indeed part of the problem, but the corporate/industrial's perpetual quest for growth is also part of it IMHO. if corporations are okay with not growing, planned obsolescence won't be a thing and we will also probably get less ads shoved on our face to trigger our impulse to buy.
Never. I'm not changing any part of my lifestyle to prevent any climate disaster. I'm all for technological solution to climate change. In case that's not enough, I'm happy to face the consequences. But I'm still not changing my lifestyle.
Lots of people have tried to promote biking, urban zoning reform, denser cities, mixed living and working areas, reduction of urban cars and the overall need for cars, increased availability of public transport, remote working, less work to more time off ratio, reduction in use of plastic, companies have switched from oil based plastics to alternative plastics, people have switched to solar or wind generated electricity, triple-glazed their houses to save on heating bills, paid for a more efficient washing machine or lower power TV or fridge.
I see tons of hands and lots of companies lobbying against them because it wouldn't be as profitable if things changed and people bought less.
100% willing to never use a car again if the place I live is designed properly. Happy to dramatically reduce plastic use to only what must be plastic. Electricity use reduction is definitely the hardest sell to me since electricity is by far the most impactful modern convenience and I actually can't think of a use I have for it that doesn't come down to some kind of necessity (food preservation, cooling, and powering the tools I use to literally earn my entire income).
I already have given up my car and transitioned to using a bicycle for my commute to work, longer distances i cover with the train. We (my family and i) are on a vegetarian diet and moving to vegan.
The author uses several analogies which are rather cutesy, but doesn't address the main issue in a salient way.
All consumption comes from some combination of raw resources and the addition of technological input. In real prices, as the cost of raw resources increases over time, this means that technological innovation is not making up for how much of those resources are being consumed as compared to the population as a whole.
At it's most basic we can calculate the rate of change as the amount of time it takes the average worker to buy a gallon of water or food and shelter for a single person. These are resources that aren't substitute-able, and are required for life. Other costs are rather nebulous (how much does a college education cost and what does this say about society now versus how much technological innovation is necessary for the continuation of the species)?
So then the question then becomes, does the real rate of return for any particular company or the stock market as a whole assume that a potential future exists in which that real rate of return is actually possible to exist?
Let's assume, in a model as simplistic as possible, that there is one stock (or market) that represents all of the world's companies that has a real rate of return of 2.5 percent per annum that is compounded once per year. As a sum total of world wide growth this would seem rather modest. The worldwide initial capital we'll assume is $100.
So the growth rate is given by A = P(100 + r/n)^(nt) which would be in our case
(for an investment of 100 dollars) -
100x(1.025^10) = $128.
So for the real capital stock of $100 to increase to a real capital stock of $128 some combination of things must happen - the amount of capital stock in terms of raw resources must increase in real terms and the amount of technology must increase in order to make the use of these inputs more efficiently.
If technology remains constant then there must be an increase of 28% over ten years of capital. If capital remains constant then technology must make the current use of capital 28% more efficient.
Compound return over time is concerning in the long run, and hand waving it away is either ignorant at best or disingenuous at worst.
And capitalism is still the best distribution system we have come up with. Most of the world is working with a single overall social model, because it has been so successful, and we don't have a backup that's been shown to work in practice. My concern isn't in favor of Das Kapital or Marxism - who owns the product of labor and historicism over labor rights isn't as concerning as compound interest over all.
Most economists I've worked with don't seem to think that this is a problem or that technology will magically free market a utopian future of plenty for all. This is an article of faith.
The idea that cellular automaton can form a foundation for physics that mathematics can't seems incredibly unlikely. Mathematica is a useful program, but his claims are a bit over the top compared to the critiques from fellow scientists.
Well all CAs are math so I am not sure what you mean here. CAs are basically state space in time models that may exhibit some general predictable behaviors that can be described by math.
I'm not sure why comments mention CA. His physics theory and the multicomputation stuff does not make use of CA's (at least no more than any other abstract machine).
So, if someone could explain this to me, I don't understand all the particulars.
From the article -
The attacker used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals.
The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized so that it limits an attack vector, similar to this one, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.
Can someone explain what happened here? How were they storing the keys in such a way that they were accessible from the internet? Namely, is this a problem with how crypto is designed itself, did they mishandle their architecture (so presumably if they organized their containers in another way then a hacker wouldn't have access), or did they just put the keys in a file that said KEYS.pem with open access?
Does this have implications for blockchain as a whole or was this company just dumb? Ideally, you shouldn't hold 650 million in one wallet, but if the promise of crypto is supposed to be secure then it shouldn't matter.
PS:
If anyone would loan me 650 million dollars I promise not to lose it and would take only a small percentage of the total to pay rent and continue to exist.
>Does this have implications for blockchain as a whole or was this company just dumb?
They were just dumb. The Ronin bridge where this money was stolen from wasn't decentralized at all and wouldn't even be recognized as a blockchain by even moderately experienced user. It was just a 5 of 9 multi-sig where the security was very poor and susceptible to social engineering. This was akin to a company keeping 100 gold bars in the closet by the bathroom and doesn't say anything about technology or things like DeFi or smart contracts.
> It was just a 5 of 9 multi-sig where the security was very poor and susceptible to social engineering.
Taking this a step further, the article mentioned that 4 of the 5 were under one companies control and compromised together. It wouldn't shock me to learn that all 4 had the same access rules, and as such all were accessible if one was, essentially reducing the 5 of 9 to 2 of 9.
"And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity."
I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection.
Even three lines up we have -
"Data and experts suggest the public struggles to distinguish fact-based journalism from opinion content online."
So I guess a gay black man would be able to somehow report facts better? The entire article is baffling.