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This reminds me of the Chilean miners that were trapped in a collapsed mineshaft for two months back in 2010. At first they had to ration two days of food for 17 days. Their leader, Luis Urzua, made sure they all ate their meager teaspoon of tuna together so that they all knew they were in the same boat, dealing with the same level of hardship.
He kept them focused enough to survive and was very keen on their individual wellbeing throughout the ordeal. But he also was famously the last one of the the mineshaft when they were finally rescued 69 days later. What a class act! A true leader all around.
A bit of self deprecation. Endothermic in biology means warm-blooded. Warm blooded or "has a pulse" is what you would say about a person without other qualifications.
Neither. The sheepskin is increasingly unnecessary, but the experience can be invaluable.
I wouldn't trade my time at engineering school for anything, whether the outcome is a career or not. It made me take charge of my own education, forced me to introspect on where my interests and talents overlap. Just being surrounded by like-minded individuals who want to learn and build was fantastic. Coming out of it with improved time management, leadership, a patent and research experience were bonuses.
I can see the argument that you can get all of the above outside of an academic setting, and honestly, there are so many fantastic resources available now. But at the same time, it takes the right individual and personality to accomplish that on their own and there's something to be said for having skin in the game (committing to a program and paying for it.) I'm a little torn, but I'm still going to be recommending it, not for the sake of the diploma though, and definitely not if it incurs substantial debt.
If the individual is strongly self motivated or highly entrepreneurial, it might be the wrong call (depending on their interests.) But for me it was definitely worth the time and expense.
I thought this was fun, but only because there was no pressure of an exam. I could see how it would be quite stressful if timed and there's a grade behind it. Took me a minute or two to realize how to simplify the problem, but at that point it simplifies enough to do mental math for the solution.
Great article! The PRISM signature scheme sounds quite promising while being only ~5x the size of existing PK + schnorr signature.
I'm not a mathematician/cryptographer and I didn't quite follow it all, but I appreciate how you applied the signature schemes to existing bitcoin features like HD wallet derivation and key tweaks. (Mostly it made me appreciate all of the cool features we have now in Schnorr sigs and taproot.) This isn't perfect, but it's impressive how much can be replicated with isogeny cryptography.
I feel like we have a moving target, where we need to upgrade to quantum resistant signatures with an unknown deadline, but meanwhile, the cryptographic state of the art is advancing too. The verification times for PRISM are a little concerning, but maybe that won't be the case 10 years from now. I see this as an argument for allowing quantum resistant signature scheme research to cook a while longer before we push an upgrade path. It's all a little fraught when it's urgent but not imminent.
This is one of the Brandon Sanderson religions - I forget of it was from the Mistborn or Way of Kings series. Practitioners of this religion believe everyone is collecting different experiences, but they're all ultimately the same being. I thought it was rather fun.
I'm not sure there's a satisfactory solution, but it's interesting that a lightning channel is basically what you're describing: You're signing a transaction that's held offline, now how do you avoid a double spend scenario? In LN, you also sign a revocation transaction that would punish the sender if they tried to double spend. This gives both parties some degree of settlement finality, but the caveat is you have to be online at some minimum periodic rate to be able to broadcast the justice (revocation) transaction if the other party were to try to cheat.
The closest thing currently (still under development) is asynchronous payments. Async payments are an attempt to hold a payment (for up to two weeks maximum) in the event that the receiving node is currently offline. It works by messaging the next-to-last node with a request to notify the original sender (or their LSP) to release the htlc when the recipient node finally comes online. So long as the htlc is locked up on the first hop, the sender can also go offline after creating the htlc and their channel peer (probably an LSP) can wait to release it. This avoids long lived htlcs along the whole route. The sender needs to be able to reach their LSP/peer though - I'm not sure there's any way around that.
I'm sure there's lots of things you could do with sufficient trust, but we're talking IOUs now. For instance, I could create a one time use rune (bearer token) for my Core Lightning node that would allow the holder to connect to my node and tell it to pay an invoice of a specific amount. Just by handing over this rune (which could be written/appended offline), the recipient would have an IOU they could redeem when online, but there would be no guarantee that the liquidity would be there. That's a lot of trust for the recipient.
She's done the work to onboard a number of people personally, and shared their stories of how they're using bitcoin to solve their problems. And that's not to mention all of the local Bitcoin meetups she's gotten off the ground and provided with educational resources (translated into the local languages before chatGPT no less.) She's on the front line and putting in the work for those that need bitcoin the most! I'm a fan too.
I've been curious about Goose after all the hype it's gotten from the presidio bitcoin podcast. I haven't tried it yet, but my experience with llama 3.3 and Qwen3 hasn't been great. There's still a fair rate of hallucination in both, which can become tedious to correct. I find llama3.3 can also be easily distracted by details unrelated to the task at hand. I guess that's fair as it can happen to me too.
The fact that agentic coding works at all and that you can run open source models to do it is kind of amazing though.
Yes, I bought a crosscut shredder from staples over a decade ago (model SPL-TMC-10A) and surprisingly it's still running great. I get plenty of mail I'm not really comfortable just tossing in the bin without shredding. Businesses seem to care less and less about your personal information these days.
I thought pretty hard about trying to do this some years back. My concept was more of a suspended gondola (which itself could triangulate to any point on the side of a building by having two winches + cables) with several tethered drones attached which would scrub windows and cling to them with suction. The gondola would provide power, cleaning solution and a waste return.
It's interesting that they went with climbing, but I'm sure it doesn't work on all facade types.
I was wondering the same. It must have been quite the effort to recreate from historical documents and accounts.
Wow, that's incredibly detailed. It's interesting how some nations had vast territories, and other regions were densely packed. Interesting too about Comanche, Seminole, etc., not having formed yet in the 16th century.
LLMs are pretty good about understanding the semantics of Linux utilities. If you get stuck with how to accmplish a task in particular, asking chatgpt isn't a bad place to start - I think of it as an improved rubber duck. (It's probably relying on training from the useful stack overflow articles so we should continue using that resource as well.)
Have some patience and it will be a rewarding experience. Starting with Arch is certainly a choice!
Trying to rotate from PHYS (gold ETF) to bitcoin. I've held it for just a few months for some slight diversification, but it's done well and bitcoin is back on sale now - might as well take advantage.
Yes, CLTV delta is the number of blocks, so for example, you could add 12 to the default to give your node about 2 more hours to resolve any issues with an active htlc.
RTL should allow you to edit your node's config file, but it doesn't give access to all of the setchannel parameters (even though I think it uses it under the hood to set channel fees.)
This is why we can't have nice things. On another note, the repair cafe sounds pretty cool. I get a lot of pleasure out of fixing stuff. One of my favorite repairs recently is with an electric mower that ran great until the battery gave out after a couple years. Rather than paying almost the price of a new mower for a replacement battery, I made my own out of LiFePO4 cells that now give it full power for the whole yard and last ~4x as long as the originals. That was at a fraction of the replacement battery price too.
The fun thing about fixing it, is now you've replaced the weakest link and you understand more about how the thing works. It makes it even harder to dispose of the item in the future.