ccooffee

For a secure communications app, the website is awfully light on details of that security. This could just be a mis-alignment issue (i.e. website aimed at "average users" who may find technical jargon a reason to avoid the app). But my initial question of "why would I use this over Signal or GPG emails?" doesn't seem answerable from the website.

The security page says:

> 3. Verified and Secure -- Widely reviewed Open Source Public Key Cryptography and App itself can be fully audited and accredited.

As a bit of feedback, this description needs some cleanup. The word "can" in here is a scary word. Has the app been audited and accredited? If it has, make that clear. (Perhaps include information about when the app was audited and by whom.) If it has not been audited and accredited, this advertising blurb is a super red flag. "We could do some security stuff in the future but have not yet" wouldn't go onto the website, but you've wrapped the statement in enough jargon that unsophisticated users may be misled.

In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.

In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.

The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.

Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason to avoid that terminology?)

To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.

Dr. Blum is also a great professor for smaller undergraduate classes. I took his "theoretical cryptography" class, which was a semi-random walk through the history of creating and breaking crypto-systems. It was a small class (8-12 people), and his whiteboard lessons were great. That said, it took some getting used to the environment. The first problemset he assigned in that class started with the question "1. Think about the scientific method"; the "no right answer, but many wrong answers" approach was typical of most of his assignments. His extremely open-ended approach to learning was a breath of fresh air compared to other undergrad CS classes which seemed geared for memorization not understanding.

Multiple times throughout that course, the class collaboratively created a cryptosystem. Dr. Blum would inevitably see the cracks in them instantly, and then teach the principles so we could rigorously show weakness. None of our cryptosystems were any good, being a handful of novice undergraduates, but _collaboratively_ tackling hard problems in small pieces definitely helped me in my career afterwards.

I wouldn't call that a final solution to the paradox, though.

(Put on your tinfoil hats.)

Maybe the Earth-Moon system was engineered. The solar system came together from a nebular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. The great impactor hypothesis points to the mega-collision around 4.5 billion years ago. During the early days of the solar system, the system was very chaotic. By applying tiny-but-very-precisely-calculated forces in that system, you could cause an impact. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude above what humans have accomplished, but the gravity slingshots that got the Voyager missions out of the solar system are the same principle.

I'm amazed by this. Platform-independence _with the same binary_ is such a neat solution that would really have helped me at a prior job.

Some corporate IT shops manage user machines with tooling that can't deploy software specific to machine os/version/hardware/etc. This often caused problems with 32-bit vs 64-bit windows machines or differing windows versions (XP/Vista/....). We also couldn't easily make linux or osx executables available for the end-users due to corporate IT policies.

I don't think, based on 20 minutes of internet research, that the job title "therapist" (with no modifiers/descriptors) is legally protected anywhere in the United States. But with the URL spelling using an 's' not a 'z', this might be targeting other countries.

But I really don't like the URL here:

1. US english would typically spell the URL as therapiZe.me . Unfortunately, that domain looks held under a different registrar from the submitted one. I assume that's a domain squatter. In word-of-mouth recommendations, this tool becomes "therapise.me with an s not a z". You lose the snappiness of common sense. (That said, if this tool is aimed at the British public or whatever, it's perfect.)

2. "Therapy" is an emotionally-loaded word for some people. You might be turning away users based on their preconceptions of therapy. (Thinking of the big online mental health players, none of them use the word "therapy" in their name. But they all seem to use the word prominently in their websites, so maybe it isn't so cursed.)

How is Twitter tied into this problem?

The first reporting on the topic was the Al Jazeera English tweet, which used "killed". The second reporting of the topic was the Al Jazeera (Arabic) tweet which included the video and the Arabic word for victim/casualty.

We don't actually know what sources various reports actually used. I would not strongly fault a reporter who found both the AJ English and Arabic tweets and trusted the translation. This story hinges on the difference between "500 killed" and "500 casualties", which is a distinction that many native English speakers aren't good at picking up. I would absolutely believe that a reporter who passed the AJ Arabic tweet through a machine translator would assume the computer made a mistake by choosing "500 victims" when compared to an ostensibly expert-translation from a different media outlet.

> It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.

Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")

I really don't like this assignment idea as anything more than getting used to the assignment submission and grading system.

1. What is it teaching? Comparator<Integer> is trivial to implement, and you're adding no requirements on it (except maybe having a human readable shortname). Code reviewing a Comparator which merely has to compile and match the two simple rules of Comparators is not a useful code review. CI tests to check those rules for common errors is quite easy (undermining the value of code review) but there's not much extra complexity to shove into the Github actions to show their power. Maybe students will be amazed by a live scoreboard, but I don't expect that anymore. We had live scoreboards for (secretly submitted) assignments back in the 00s, and the world has become significantly faster-updating since then.

2. Incentivizing unique comparators adds in a lot of meta-work. Students will need to monitor the repository and the submissions of other students if the incentive is too high. Some students may wait until the last second to submit their solutions to avoid being detected, and yet other students may try to play spoiler and copy other submissions.

3. I don't like the structure where students submit two things (a number and a comparator) where the outcomes of the lottery are almost entirely based on the number. The comparator, which seems to be the intent of the lesson, isn't tied to the success of a particular student. And since you're only re-rolling comparators in the case of a 0 output for an input pair, there's a pretty significant chance that some student submissions won't even appear in the lottery computation tree.

There are definitely people advocating one-way trips to Mars. Buzz Aldrin wrote "Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration" (2013) pushing the idea of one-way trips and colonization by 2040. There are quite a few projects that have invested time and money into the idea. MarsOne (2012-2019) is possibly the most serious of the attempts, but they weren't exactly close to sending a mission.