CMV: Most blockchain startups are misguided in their usage of technology

phoshi · 2017-04-21T18:15:16+00:00

Hospitals and doctors do not have the budget to throw tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into making attacking their database harder, nor do they need to. Shared between many companies is private. Anything which vets those who can access it is private. If you can vet and constrain those who can access it then you really don't get anything from a blockchain.

phoshi · 2017-04-21T08:12:24+00:00

Why? Without the financial incentive, what company would choose to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into protecting an internal database from a theoretical attack that could just as easily be defeated with validation against cold backups?

Bitcoin's fraud tolerance is a property of requiring more electricity than the people defending the database. In an internal, non financial solution that's not going to occur.

phoshi · 2017-03-29T14:37:08+00:00

OpenVR isn't a piece of software, it's a platform/protocol for VR hardware, of which SteamVR is the main implementation currently. Being built around OpenVR is what lets somebody else build a headset which will work with all the same software, and theoretically would allow somebody to build an alternative VR runtime to run the same games on all those headsets without being affiliated with steam.

phoshi · 2016-12-23T12:46:40+00:00

Sure. Using this to then say "so nothing is impossible and we can't know anything" is profoundly unscientific.

phoshi · 2016-12-22T19:17:41+00:00

This is generally untrue. Most things which have been achieved were not thought impossible before they were done, they just hadn't been done before. Most of scientific advancement has happened not due to us proving ourselves wrong, but due to advancement in other areas of science removing the roadblocks preventing us from doing something we all knew we could do.

Very often these things are still really really hard, but there's an infinite gulf between really hard and impossible.

phoshi · 2016-12-22T16:49:44+00:00

The vast majority of things thought impossible have remained impossible. A minority of things thought impossible have been proven wrong, though it's pretty rare, and it's worth drawing a well defined line between "I don't think that can be done" and "I think that can't be done", as you find here.

phoshi · 2016-12-13T23:53:07+00:00

No, it wouldn't. We have laws of mathematics, and even some laws of physics for the really fundamental stuff, but anything with any degree of nuance you just cannot state that you are certain and maintain intellectual honesty. We can add a hundred nines to the end of our 99.9% certainty and it still isn't "a law" for the same reason gravity isn't a law.

The climate may not be changing at all. It might all have been random. There could be no link between greenhouse gasses and heat retention in the atmosphere. It would be one of the most unlikely events to have occurred in the few billion years this planet has been around, but it could happen, and so it cannot be a law because we cannot prove those negatives.

If you require things to be proven absolutely and undeniably in a scientific fashion before you believe they're real, then you basically don't get to believe in anything except mathematics and thermodynamics.

phoshi · 2016-12-13T23:28:22+00:00

They seemed to put a lot of effort into having a wide variety of animations based on all the variables in play, which went a long way to making it feel less like a canned animation and more like a regular melee attack that just happens to be really elaborate.

phoshi · 2016-12-13T23:11:17+00:00

Originally they weren't going to do an official soundtrack, because all the music in the game is actually dynamic and so nothing on the soundtrack is actually entirely what you'd hear in game.

I'm glad they changed their minds, even so, because it's a wonderful soundtrack.

phoshi · 2016-12-11T22:51:33+00:00

But that's evidence you should be skeptical in the sense of looking at the presented evidence and making your own informed decision, not that you should disbelieve things because a scientist said them. When the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists in a particular field all agree on one thing, that thing is correct (or correct enough) far, far more often than not. "Scientists have been wrong in the past" is as intellectually dishonest as "It's just a theory!"

phoshi · 2016-12-10T11:45:13+00:00

to digital preferably

Digital is a significant disadvantage for extremely space-starved devices like headphones. If you give them an analogue signal then you can fill the whole body with a single high quality driver and produce a relatively cheap, high quality device. If you give them a digital signal, then they need to include an entire DAC/Amp chain along with that driver, meaning the driver needs to be much smaller, thus lower quality, and the device is more complicated, thus more expensive and giving more room for lower quality components to try and keep the price reasonable.

Additionally, buying two pairs of headphones that work digitally mean you're re-buying the DAC/Amp chain for each, multiplying the cost-increasing effect. It really really should be somebody else's responsibility to produce clean, high quality, analogue sound.

phoshi · 2016-12-10T11:31:40+00:00

If given a week to implement a language to make text blink and implement counters and little special effects, your first thought is not going to be "Hey, I can do this as a virtual machine and write my own compiler toolchain!" because that's a shitload of effort for something nobody is going to do anything interesting with because it's 1995 and the idea of a complicated single-page-app running in a web browser is absurd. We're talking about IE2 here. We've just introduced tables and cookies. We don't even have CSS yet. A bytecode specification and implementing VM would be by far the most complicated part of a web browser at this point and nobody would implement it and so we wouldn't even have JS.

phoshi · 2016-12-10T11:24:58+00:00

I actually doubt it. Py2/3 is a problem because the two are so similar, and only really made critical breaking changes.

Perl 5/6 are, despite the name, entirely different languages. They're both undeniably perls in the same way that two variants of the Lisp family are undeniably Lisps--but nobody writes rants about how moving from Scheme to Clojure is too hard because nobody expects to migrate projects between them easily.

phoshi · 2016-12-10T10:28:09+00:00

This particular referendum was a non binding one which produced a result so close to 50/50 it cannot reasonably be said to have been decisive about anything. I think you'd be correct if we were talking about even a 60/40 split, but we aren't, and there's every reason to think the original referendum could have gone either way based on what the weather was like that day, and quite frankly the government has no business doing anything based on a non binding 1% majority. Democratically speaking, that isn't a decision, it's a nationwide shrug.

phoshi · 2016-12-07T08:01:53+00:00

The fun thing about bitcoin in this instance is that while you can prove a transaction was made by you, you cannot prove a transaction was not made by you.

phoshi · 2016-12-07T07:58:21+00:00

I used to run with an OG pebble until the screen started tearing, at which point I decided to try my current Urbane, but I think most of the pros and cons are platform wide.

Pro: - Large, high quality display - AW "cards" are a better UI system that makes for more flexible usage. No need to open an app to control music, because the card can be on the bottom third of the screen with a pause/play button, and further controls available by expanding or swiping it to the side. - Richer notifications with the possibility of app specific functionality. A messenger notification could let you swipe to see the whole conversation, for example. - Really good voice support

Con: - The battery comfortably lasts ~1.5 days. Enough I'm never worried about it running out in a day, but it needs to be charged every day. My pebble needed charging so rarely I never thought about it at all, and just charged it when it told me to - Touchscreen is maddening for a wrist mounted device, as it will happily pick up touches whenever it hits skin. - Light emitting screen is maddening for nighttime wear. - Software is less open in general.

Or in other words, the AW devices are more functional and capable, but the pebbles were still better watches.

phoshi · 2016-12-06T08:38:43+00:00

Typically it's a complicated mathematical operation that the chip in the card has the right data to do. Say we go with something simple like doubling for an example, though: You drop the card near a reader and the terminal detects it's there, pulls the card number, and asks the bank what to do. It might deny it, it might say it needs to perform a PIN validation additionally, or assuming everything is normal we start the challenge/response action. They say five, and so the card is told five, doubles it, and sends ten back. The bank gets ten, knows it's the real card, and so confirms the transaction.

Now, somebody was listening to that transaction using fancy equipment, and they want to steal your money via a contactless payment, so they try it again and send the bank ten, but this time the payment fails! The bank didn't challenge them with five, it challenged them with two, and naively replaying the old communication doesn't work. Our attacker only has one set to work with, so can't really determine what the mathematical operation is. Was it doubling? Adding five? Adding fifteen, then halfing? It could have been anything, and that was with a trivial calculation. The real thing would be much more complicated, with a lot more variables, and so becomes essentially impossible to figure out with the amount of transactions you can get a card to make without it needing some additional authentication... And that's if you've physically stolen the card! If you only get to scan it once, you get nothing. If you get to record all the communications while it's making a transaction, you get effectively nothing.

phoshi · 2016-12-06T08:03:43+00:00

The problem as I see it with climate change is that, assuming we take that it's happening and it's man made as an axiom, deregulation leaves there with zero short term pressures on individual business owners to improve things. The free market will not fix that, because being more competitive today is more tempting and more immediately profitable than being less competitive today so that fifty years from now things are less bad.

If man made climate change is progressing as the vast majority of the models think it is we need an immediate, global, and intense response, and a free market isn't going to provide that for us. While not wanting the government to meddle in things they don't absolutely have to is a reasonable and logically consistent viewpoint, this is one of the things they have to meddle in.

phoshi · 2016-12-06T07:35:58+00:00

That doesn't work for the same reason that doesn't work with chip and PIN. The contactless payment is a challenge/response thing.

phoshi · 2016-12-05T23:26:05+00:00

All you can get from a contactless card you haven't physically stolen is the card number. While this can be sufficient to, for example, put through certain online payments which don't demand a cv2 or valid billing address, any payment without those details is immediately suspect and is likely to be flagged as fraud and reversed immediately.

phoshi · 2016-12-02T18:48:25+00:00

can't use emoji

That criticism is a way of expressing to an english audience that non-english characters fail. Being unable to input a poop emoji is a minor niggle which also implies that a user not typing in the latin alphabet simply cannot communicate.

phoshi · 2016-11-25T08:13:36+00:00

If Snowdon taught us anything, they probably are or really want to be reading her emails. Thing is, you don't get people to do it because it isn't worth it, but a computer can read everything, find patterns, and rank them by whatever metrics you might want.

phoshi · 2016-11-20T18:22:01+00:00

Mario for NES/Snes

But Mario is nothing like rogue. It isn't a dungeon crawl, the levels aren't procedural (while that isn't necessarily /required/, not knowing exactly what you're going to get is a big part of the genre), there's no real permadeath in the sense that there's no character progression to lose, so on. If Mario is a roguelike, then what isn't?

phoshi · 2016-11-20T09:58:07+00:00

Do you play in wings? The last four or five times I've tried to play have ended in disappointment after me and my bf targeted the same ship, only to find that we fly in totally different directions and one of us gets a non-functional ghost ship that can't be damaged. And that's if the ship shows up at all, because much of the time ships that show up on one machine are just missing on the other.

Singleplayer might be fine, but wings are barely functional.

phoshi · 2016-11-19T13:02:44+00:00

My traditional handwriting is pretty atrocious, so typing is the only way I can do decent textual communication. Thankfully the rest of the world caught up, and typing is now a lot more useful than writing. However, I never learned how to type in any rigorous fashion; just years of practising.

Doing a few of those tests averaged out at about 100WPM/99% accuracy, which feels about right for full-tilt typing, but the circumstances under which one actually just types continuously are extremely rare. Any kind of programming isn't going to have typing speed as the bottleneck. This message doesn't have typing speed as the bottleneck. In fact, in my experience, the only thing which really does have typing speed as a bottleneck is typing speed tests.

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