wisemang

I’m curious about your statement that you “became” aphantasic. Any specific triggering event, or how did you realize this?

AFAIK aphantasia hasn’t been super widely known about until the last decade or two (obv I have no idea how old you are now)

Why do public keys need to be distributed out of band?

I haven’t read Berry, but he just went up on my priority list based on this.

Another link to Quality in the Pirsig sense I haven’t seen discussed much is Christopher Alexander’s work. Specifically A Timeless Way of Building which gives similar frustratingly inexact descriptions. I guess Jane Jacobs fits in with this as well but with a bit more concreteness.

Nothing says “we’re watching you” like the wifi password at the hotel I stayed at in Shanghai being my passport number.

Mr Robot was generally pretty good for this kind of thing

First I’ve heard of aphantasia applied to sound / music. Though I have on a number of occasions thought about the concept.

I have (visual) aphantasia. But am better able to remember / hear notes and timbres in my head than images. Never really tried composing and for the number of years I took piano lessons I’m pretty crap at it (lessons don’t matter if you don’t practice in between).

But sounds stick with me more than visuals. So interesting that it’s all on a spectrum with these various facets.

Sure, but my overall point was meant to refute this:

> But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language […snip…] but they don't understand what's actually going on.

And to support the commenter who expressed surprise about that given Vernor Vinge is a mathematician. Clearly he does know what’s going on. And I think the fact you just posted supports this even more.

Anyways I have no horse in this race, haven’t read the book, just another internet pedant who saw something on HN that could be corrected.

Ah, hence the need for ITS.

Doesn’t mention anything about quantum there though. Symmetric keys are secure enough against a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but OTP provides information theoretic security. As GGP mentioned AES should be fine as far as we know for the foreseeable future regardless, but for all we know some brilliant cryptographer will in fact find a flaw. With OTP one doesn’t have to worry about even the slightest chance that could happen. This excerpt also may be alluding to threshold cryptography (Shamir’s secret sharing) which got.. shared.. here recently as well, and also happens to be information theoretically secure.

Pfft those suckers didn't have Parsec or Car Wars or Ms. Pac Man plus the hours spent typing TI-BASIC from a magazine was less frustrating than trying to get the jumps right on Super Mario Bros level 8-2. And I'm sure Demolition Division and Meteor Multiplication are why I ended up with a math degree.

For real though I spent so much time pining for Mario 3 before my parents finally did give in. But I feel like there was something good about the diversity, like when I could play Lode Runner on my buddy's C64 (actually a 128... GO 64)

I’ve noticed the honestly thing for sure.

But I feel like I’ve noticed an uptick in people using the adverb “genuinely” in what I genuinely believe to not be AI generated comments, articles, etc. Maybe it’s just me, I got similar vibes about the word efficacy a few years ago, before the ascent of GenAI (but after the pandemic — again, maybe just me).