zakk

> The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.

I find this deeply troubling. So the seeds were provided by the NSA and they said "don't worry, they were generated hashing a trivial sentence. Unfortunately we forgot it now, but trust us, it's just Jerry joking about getting a raise, nothing more..."

I can't believe this didn't undergo further scrutiny earlier, and I can't believe the seeds haven't been chosen in a more sensible way, such as combining random seeds provided by different parties with competing interests, also including hardware RNGs, etc...

Protons are non-perturbative, indeed, but this does not mean that there are no virtual particles exchanged inside a proton. It seems like your comment implies that, sorry if I misunderstood.

On the contrary, this means that there are too many virtual particles (gluons) being exchanged inside a proton, so many that perturbation theory is not applicable.

Part of these renewables are the so-called "biomass", which leads to pretty substantial CO2 emissions.

So basically they replaced a CO2-neutral energy source, with another which is pretty CO2-intensive.

Renewable does not mean good for the environment!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Still, cheating at chess is not murdering someone!

Nuclear wastes are incredibly small, the whole energy you would need in your life would fill a soda can of wastes, if only nuclear was used.

Geological repositories are an excellent solution. Those place are geologically stable, and can contain thousand of years of wastes. It’s not very expensive to collect wastes there, as well!

Please, please, please stop with the waste management taking point!

There are super-safe and rather cheap ways of treating and storing nuclear waste!

It’s essentially a scaremongering talking point.

> researchers invented a fundamentally new kind of problem that a quantum computer should be able to solve exponentially faster

Telling of the status of the field.

It’s very cool, but every update of mac OS resets it! After a while I didn’t bother to reactivate it…

Is there a permanent solution, that does not involve cron scripts or other hacks?

Why does every company need to try to take over the world?

They make toy bricks, they actually make the freaking best toy bricks ever… Just stick to that!

I know I might be exceedingly idealistic, and as soon as MBAs and consultants take over a company things need to change, but have strong feelings towards LEGO and I am fine being idealistic here!

You look forward to mozzarella? That’s a very good thing to do, probably best food ever! :)

You’ll have my mozzarella from my dead hands!

Are you joking? You can easily find a very long list of conservative/right wing personalities banned from Twitter.

The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.

And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.

Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.

Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.

This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!

As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!

I sincerely hope you are joking.

People can discuss things that are not law.

One can point out, for instance, that Twitter is not a free speech platform, and this is bad for many reasons.

One can comment on laws, proposing to extend legal protections to different sectors.

I hope your conversations are not solely based on current law, that must be pretty boring.

(You interpretation of Section 230 is shaky at least)