I don’t really think the Russian economy is any real bottleneck here; they have abundant natural resources, a densely-knit industry and even now still many trading partners. Ultimately the only realistic way to stop the war is a peace agreement, which is why people voted for Zelenskyy in the first place.

There’s this post of mine, also this article gives some background on the application of PIR to anonymous messaging. Basically, I’m trying to do a basic version of that, but using a state-of-the-art PIR protocol introduced in this article. It’s still not great performance-wise, but it’s enough to be practical (as stated, many thousands of users given enough resources).

No, sorry, I haven’t uploaded anything yet, I’ve only coded the protocols and some benchmark code. The idea is for each client to send and receive data continuously. Since text messages are pretty small and YPIR+SP doesn’t have a lot of overhead, that could be a reasonable way to conceal all metadata, as long as there are not enough people connected to overwhelm the server.

Sorry! I meant Private Information Retrieval, that could allow metadata-hiding messaging.

My bad, the downvotes got me confused.

Many people are targeted around the world for their beliefs. That includes activists, journalists and other people who “haven’t done anything wrong”.

I guess we could make one using newer FHE-RAM techniques and some edge case handling.

Western companies outsource much of their production to countries with cheaper labor, so the really important things here are cheap raw materials and state subsidies. Since the Chinese state owns many of the large companies there, they can reduce profits throughout the supply chain or move them to other companies in the form of these subsidies. As well as use that money to build transport and green energy infrastructure, further lowering manufacturing costs.

Investors always seek short-term profit, so playing the long game is something you need aggressive policies for.

When returning from kernel code, one should issue Drop Execution Ring Privileges, of course.

Haha yeah, absolutely! Might be too messy to consider it “well used” though… But it does motivate me, seeing all the signs I put there and imagining one day I will conquer that mountain. Maybe not even on the second attempt, but definitely one day.

Fake article

Yes, that’s true and a better way to look at it, thanks!

Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.

So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq’s mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.

I did learn a lot though. Since then I’ve been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I’ve collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I’ve begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!

One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.

The private sector is ceasing to be China’s primary driver of growth, with that role year after year being further taken up by the state. Diminishing private funding is obviously not good, but it does align with their goal of reaching socialism by 2050. We’ll see how their economy does from now on…

Just applied it. Super cool!

Relevant context

They count it as Linux, yes!

I wanted to delete all the subfolders in the current directory:

 rm -rf ./*

After a few seconds, I realize in horror that I had mistyped the path. Whole system nuked. Had backups though.

If you can’t find a tool, this has worked to some degree for me. Open on e.g. GIMP, scale the images to the desired size in different layers, use perspective transform to align them very precisely, then set layer opacity so that you can merge them down with equal weight on each photo. It’s not a really good method, but might do the job. Good luck!

The article gives me bad vibes… On the one hand, it (and linked articles) seems to present the implicit assumption that Israel = Zionism = Judaism, which is very clearly false but could be easily used to used to “prove” other statements, like this: “Israel = Judaism -> Criticism of Israel = Criticism of Judaism = antisemitism”. Same logic can be used for “anti-Zionism = antisemitism”.

Additionally, the article does not mention any criticism of Israel that would not be considered disinformation, leaving that question open. This, of course, is dangerous, as it leaves open the possibility that people who “only care about truth” (but do not unconditionally support Israel) support restrictive measures on X as suggested by the article while those measures are then effectively meant to silence criticism of Israel.

Finally, one linked article seems to support the idea that all footage from the warzone should be fact-checked before being published. While this would curb some (minority) false footage, it would dramatically reduce the exposure that the conflict can get, as well as potentially exposing its spread to censorship from many sources.

So, overall, I think this article is using a reasonable-sounding rhetoric to push forward centralized control of social media narratives. It’s not a problem that some information on the platform is false, but if the overall narrative is biased, that would really become a problem, and X already implemented community notes (which use a really innovative de-biasing algorithm) to fight that. I can only conclude that we should resist the call to introduce potential sources of systematic bias to counter ultimately “inoffensive” random bias, which would be a step towards true authoritarianism.