Amazing user interface. Seriously inspiring stuff.
Like you, I've built some C++ analytics infrastructure that I would have loved to have in an earlier corporate gig. But unlike you, I have no idea how to build a UI that people will want to use. I do everything at the terminal.
Can you recommend the best way to get going with UI development? Like, what tools should I use, what should I read? Is it even possible to get started with ~1week investment in learning?
Thank you for the kind words. Do you want to build a desktop or a web app? If desktop, despite all the electron hate here in the threads, I still say it’s a quickest way to build something to test out. Good thing, you can use your C++ code in Node. If you do go with Electron, you will need to learn some JavaScript. I think 1 or 2 weeks of learning Javascript should be enough to build a PoC.
> Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.
One caveat.
It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).
It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.
Didn't a ban on space weapons forestall the weaponization of space by a few decades?
Didn't bans on chemical and biological weapons keep research in those fields small enough to prevent the emergence of politically potent factions with a pecuniary interest in their development?
The nuclear test ban treaties have held up well.
There is a big difference between "states openly develop these things and rich people lobby for more budget", and "states have secret programs as a hedge against noncompliance by the other side".
Ban on space weapons is an interesting point, as it was done early enough, the downsides were immediate enough, and the upsides far away enough, that it was politically doable.
Autonomous robots are much further along, relatively, and the upsides are realizable next year whereas the downsides are in the farther future. Does not seem promising.
But it does take a state to load out an MQ-180 with hellfires that will automatically target anyone whose IMSI has been within 100 yards of someone in the "disposition matrix".
You can actually add both—there's a partial GPIO header for the Zymkey 4i on the board.
But yeah, I think the idea is TPM is a bit more standardized across hardware, so some software that uses it would not need any tweaks to run on the Pi with a TPM built-in.
Sort of; the communication protocol is standard (CCID), but the actual HSM interface varies. Yubikeys implement the OpenPGP smartcard interface, for example, as well as PKCS #11.
The TPM specification has its own crypto interface that is standard across all hardware, so you can do things like generate a key and perform crypto operations without requiring the hardware implement a particular interface beyond whatever TPM version you require.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. On Linux, TPMs are implemented in the kernel, and CCID is handled by userspace drivers.
> In the US the way to influence politics is campaign contributions to politicians.
I mean, the US has a ton of industry funded "think tanks" that are effectively unregistered lobbyists. If they spend >50% of their time lobbying, they have to register. Some probably cross that line and don't register.
Spending money on lobbying makes a lot of noise, but donating to a "think tank" can be stealthy.
It could be interesting to scrape / crowd-source the public calendars of house/senate committee members and agency commissioners to identify these orgs and the scale of their lobbying activities. The results might surprise you.
Think tanks don't lobby at all. What they do is design favorable conclusions for their backers, and the studies and press releases to dishonestly back those conclusions up and to generate pithy quotes. The politicians that are then lobbied by those backers now have something to say when interviewed about their political activities in favor of who is being lobbied for.
Politicians need a media strategy in order to do the things that they're paid to do by private interests, and think tanks provide that strategy.
There's a Russian language documentary on YouTube worth watching.
It's unlikely that he's given up mathematics. Publishing, yes. Mathematics, no. If he'd finished his proof a few years later, I suspect Perelman would have followed Satoshi's lead and published as an anon. He just dumped dumped it on the arxiv, on the random.
In the documentary, Gromov seemed a little miffed at Perelman. As Gromov sees it, other mathematicians spent a lot of energy helping Perelman progress and he kind of "owes" it to the community to interact and mentor.
On the flip side, we should probably ask ourselves why someone like Perelman would rather be a recluse than participate in the community. The politics around his proof were particularly nasty, but I have to wonder if he sees deeper problems.
> In the documentary, Gromov seemed a little miffed at Perelman. As Gromov sees it, other mathematicians spent a lot of energy helping Perelman progress and he kind of "owes" it to the community to interact and mentor.
Proving the Poincaré conjecture wasn't enough? Why would he owe more than that? It's significantly more return on the investment of energy than anyone expected.
I think it's important to remember that the Millennium Prize problems were chosen partly because they would drive the development of new mathematics (it’s not as though the Poincare conjecture or Fermat’s last theorem are useful things). Ideally, when someone solved one of these problems, they would train a new generation of mathematicians with their toolbox. Gromov benefitted from this - his work was built using technology that people had spent their entire careers exploring and clarifying. Perelman didn’t really do anything like that, so it’s fair someone like Gromov would feel Perelman didn't pay it forward.
Of course, this whole debacle could have been avoided if Princeton had given Perelman tenure after he proved the Soul Conjecture. To an extent, I agree with Perelman’s opinions of the mathematics community, I just felt Gromov’s opinion was a bit more defensible than you were giving it credit for.
Yes, of course I read your comment. I have read it again now. I still don't see how it is about mathematics being an end unto itself.
What I mean by mathematics being an end unto itself is that mathematical results have intrinsic value. That is, they have value in and of themselves, regardless of how they may or may not be used.
Perhaps you thought I meant that mathematical results could be used to discover more mathematical results? No, that is not what I meant.
So, I think the point you’re missing is that how results are proved is just as important as the existence of a proof (in fact, I’d say it’s often more important). That’s why people are often excited about new proofs of old theorems, and why the Simon’s foundation chose certain problems to be “Millennium Problems” - the techniques developed to solve the problem would, ideally, drive progress in that area of mathematics.
The Poincaré conjecture is interesting because it was a simple statement that ended up being very hard to prove. How someone proved it, and understanding why such an innocuous statement is so difficult to prove, is far more interesting than knowing that the obviously-true-sounding statement is true.
> we should probably ask ourselves why someone like Perelman would rather be a recluse than participate in the community.
That's an interesting choice of language. For you to make that point at all indicates you feel it has some validity. But you didn't choose a compelling form of words to advocate your interest to other people. Why not?
Perhaps you are a mathematician, and perhaps this is some expression of the difference between maths and other endeavours.
The beauty of maths is that it exists independent of all other considerations. This seems to be where Perelman comes from. Perhaps Perelman goes further. It's hard to say without knowing more of his story, which Perelman doesn't give us.
You, on the other hand, find the human dimension of Perelman's story interesting - so much so that you dare to conjecture what he might think. Some emotional force drove you to post about his story, presumably because you desired other people to share your interest and commune with you in a way that might resonate and drive your enjoyment further. But you didn't push it. You only just barely said it at all. But you did suggest it.
I'm curious why you didn't choose a more strident form of advocacy to grab people by the lapel and drag them towards Perelman's story, where they might learn something and be entertained and enlightened.
Perhaps because advocacy isn't maths?
Perhaps because you have too much humility and respect to foist your own interests onto others?
I think many do this, though it’s impossible to tell of course. I do know a couple of mathematicians (one sometimes discussed on HN) who only circulate proofs, or conjectures, among themselves.
> The beauty of maths is that it exists independent of all other considerations. This seems to be where Perelman comes from. Perhaps Perelman goes further. It's hard to say without knowing more of his story, which Perelman doesn't give us.
So, I’d just like to point out that this is a very naive perspective on the philosophy of mathematics. Math is an intrinsically social activity, because you need to lead other mathematicians through your proofs/arguments.
There is a very large number of people who hold similar views. The fact that these two characters each hold that view is very weak evidence for the claim that they are in fact two characters from one person.
> Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?
"Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations".
If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.
Of course the first two things do sometimes happen to people. But people in a psychotic state very frequently think they're happening when they actually aren't happening. A high percentage of them believe it, but out of that sample, the belief is almost never actually based in reality.
That's why I listed a myriad of symptoms. If someone solely believes that, say, some people are following them, that's one thing. But if someone thinks people are following them and that some entity is implanting thoughts into their head via futuristic technology, then they're very likely in a state of psychosis.
If you haven't committed any crimes or done anything noteworthy, it's especially unlikely any government is going to devote resources to following you. If you know you've committed some serious crimes, then it's certainly a much more rational fear and could be real.
Also, if you're really being followed by a government IRL, odds are you're not going to notice it unless they want you to notice it, and that pretty much doesn't happen unless you're an important figure traveling to a foreign country and they want to intimidate you. It's not impossible that you could notice it, but when multiplied by all of the other probabilities, it's very unlikely. Especially if you hold other paranoid beliefs.
>Who decides what's real? Is it not real unless you've got audio?
If you hear someone talking to you but you don't see anyone nearby, or if you hear something/someone while no one else near you hears anything. But, yes, if you try to record it and don't hear anything on the recording, then that would also be an indication.
Like you, I've built some C++ analytics infrastructure that I would have loved to have in an earlier corporate gig. But unlike you, I have no idea how to build a UI that people will want to use. I do everything at the terminal.
Can you recommend the best way to get going with UI development? Like, what tools should I use, what should I read? Is it even possible to get started with ~1week investment in learning?