Viewing profile — brian_cloutier

You might consider reading Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. It gives an argument for studying math for the sake of math. Personally, reading a beautiful proof can be as compellin…

how so? modern post-training uses RL and immense amounts of synthetic data to iteratively bootstrap better performance. if you squint this is extremely similar to the AlphaZero app…

Bluesky does allow you to hold your own keypairs. Your identity must be registered at plc.directory, the central service they control, which allows them to stop clients from being …

I have absolutely no context beyond reading this document but it appears they only did SSL decryption on their Facebook Research App where users were explicitly paid for running th…

URLs resolve not to ip addresses but to some form of static identifier such as the hash of the content. Static sites are retrieved via static identifier and are therefore incredibl…

If anyone wants to read this in book form, Linear Algebra Done Right includes it as an exercise at the end of a very short and readable chapter 5.C on eigenspaces and diagonal matr…

Oh, I think I see the confusion. "proof of personhood" is something of a term of art which worldcoin did not invent. They are not literally claiming they can prove, in a mathematic…

It is of course possible to understand it and still be opposed. That's what makes it so frustrating that seemingly all of the negative coverage is ill-informed; I would love to rea…

It is literally impossible for a simple deadbolt to keep intruders from entering your house. Are locks scams? Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated p…

That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq. You're _never_ sure that your counter-party to some communicat…

I don't believe they have ever promised that. One person = one account is not at all how the system is designed. It is definitely never mentioned or promised here: https://whitepap…

I disagree that it's so easy to game but maybe you know more than me? I'm not sure what you mean by buying biometrics early, stealing them seems very uneconomical, and faking them …

What is the thing they are claiming which is different from the actual results and which they know is different from the actual results?

I said and I meant "more fair". We both agree this will not be a perfectly fair airdrop. Anything not perfect is feudalism? > What prevents a factory owner from having all of his e…

Try to imagine using a computer without any internet access to book an airline ticket. It doesn't really matter how many or which operations your computer can perform, it is not ab…

It looks like the airdrop gives you something like 25 WLD, or $50. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems to be around this order of magnitude. Your hypothetical spo…

Most criticisms of worldcoin completely misunderstand/misrepresent how it works but this one does not. The GP is correctly pointing out that the iris hash is only necessary for rec…

Why does that make it a scam? "Scam" implies some kind of fraud or lie, I don't believe worldcoin has ever claimed biometrics were required for later usage. The value of the biomet…

What do you mean when you say scam? Are you claiming this is fraudulent in some way?

Why would they have left no traces? Dinosaurs lived ~200 M years ago and left enough traces for us to discover them. Wouldn't an industrial civilization 50 mya have left some kind …

This feature is not unique to cryptocurrency. Governments are our mechanism for deciding what is and is not allowed.

There's a great fanfic which attempts to explore these more and polish them up into a cohesive philosophy. In Star Trek the Ferengi are a foil, a caricature of capitalist excess. T…

Hilariously, those are the four parties. This sentence claims the voters will predominantly give their votes to one of the other parties.

This sent me down a rabbit hole; I would love to see your source I can't find any. The idea that someone might carefully pace their recital in order to keep accurate track of time …

This is clever but seems to work through brute force and my guess is that results should be accompanied by some kind of confidence measure. You're forcing the model to choose a pat…