petertodd

13 ms·

61.
by petertodd 2y ago
USB-C PD has made laptop battery life less of an issue than it used to be, because carrying around extra battery life with external batteries is so easy. I typically carry one or two of these in my backpack: https://iniushop.com&
62.
by petertodd 2y ago
That's correct: "Jump teams are made up of Waffle House contractors, construction workers, gas line experts, restaurant operators, food providers and other associates who are assembled and ready to go wherever needed at a moment&#
63.
by petertodd 2y ago
Excellent point!
64.
by petertodd 2y ago
Exactly. The world is a big place. It's likely that in 2008 thousands of people had the right skillset to create Bitcoin, any one of which might have done it. As long as Satoshi wants to stay hidden, we're not going to find them.
65.
by petertodd 2y ago
> Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don&#x2
66.
by petertodd 2y ago
That quote actually comes from an early technical conversation I was having about proof-of-sacrifice. Specifically, a conversation lamenting the fact that we kept on inventing neat tricks faster than we could actually use them - by "wo
67.
by petertodd 2y ago
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is p
68.
by petertodd 2y ago
Zcash was using it for a purpose where waiting a week or two to validate the random beacon was fine - it was a one-time calculation required by the mathematics of their trusted setup. But yes, you are absolutely correct that for many applic
69.
by petertodd 2y ago
It's interesting that using a PoW blockchain such as Bitcoin as a random beacon is another way of implementing a pre-commitment. Since blocks are created upon another, and have to meet PoW difficulty requirements, miners are effectivel
70.
by petertodd 2y ago
FYI I have a project that has been running for a few years now that injects that NIST Randomness Beacons into the Bitcoin chain, along with a few other random beacons: https://github.com/opentimestamps/nist-inject Bitc
71.
by petertodd 2y ago
It's not uncommon for perfectly legitimate military operations in urban areas to kill more civilians than enemy soldiers. Managing to only injure a few civilians while seriously wounding hundreds of enemy soldiers in an urban area is a
72.
by petertodd 2y ago
There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.
73.
by petertodd 2y ago
> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significa
74.
by petertodd 2y ago
Dunno if we ate at the same place. But at the end of my tour they also served us dinner, and it was excellent. One of the first times I had borsch.
75.
by petertodd 2y ago
There are some tours still happening. But its now (supposed to be) only state/military approved delegations in some kind of official capacity: https://www.chernobyl-tour.com/english/161-visiting-chornoby... It&#x2
76.
by petertodd 2y ago
You used to be able to easily visit the Duga Radar, legally, via one of the many tour companies that offered Chernobyl tours. Back in 2018 I visited myself, I believe with this company, as part of a conference: https://chernobyl-
77.
by petertodd 2y ago
No offense, but your understanding of how Bitcoin works is quite incorrect. There aren't publicly accessible "mining nodes". Rather, there is a P2P flood-fill network of tens of thousands of nodes, of which a tiny % belong to
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by petertodd 2y ago
The problem is legitimacy in this case is not keeping logs. That is impossible to prove. The best you can do is human scale things like "how likely is it that Joe is a fed?", which can't be automated.
79.
by petertodd 2y ago
> The basic concept is that when you put current through an inductor for a while, then disconnect it, you get a big voltage spike. That's actually usually not true, as the vast majority of DC to DC converters are step-down convert
80.
by petertodd 2y ago
At the time that's exactly what the Royal Mail was. Requiring identification to send packages is a much more recent development. Society just accepted that bad actors could do this and solved the root problem instead.
81.
by petertodd 2y ago
To be clear, in this case if you don't want to think about it, and just want to use dynamic dispatch, you absolutely can! Just return a boxed iterator for the normal case, and a boxed empty iterator for the special case. Rust's dy
82.
by petertodd 2y ago
The Albanian Alps are beautiful, and rapidly developing with brand new roads and other infrastructure.
83.
by petertodd 2y ago
> and the modern street lamps turning into gas lamps. Really? Gas lamps are usually the luxurious option, only maintained at great expense out of nostalgia; Moldova has almost no domestic gas production.
84.
by petertodd 2y ago
I am suggesting public defenders. I'm suggesting we expand that to everyone who is charged. Because in the current system, legal bills tend to ruin people who get declared innocent and provide enormous incentives to plea to crimes peop
85.
by petertodd 2y ago
These are criminal cases we are talking about. Cases that destroy lives when the prosecutors get it wrong. They damn well should be certain and they shouldn't be overcharging just to drain resources, as is clearly happening in this cas
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by petertodd 2y ago
We have all that stuff because if we didn't, it's likely that prosecutors would start abusing their power a lot more, and then the average person charged would not be guilty.
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by petertodd 2y ago
That isn't what money laundering is. Money laundering is taking illegally gotten funds and turning it into apparently legal funds. What you're describing is fraud: you took money for one purpose, and used it for something the dona
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by petertodd 2y ago
> We have a very high bar for guilt in criminal trials. If we do, then my suggestion should be easy to implement and will only impact a tiny minority of cases. Of course, in this case it's pretty clear that the prosecution made up a
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by petertodd 2y ago
It certainly changes the calculus: it's much easier to get a lawyer willing to work on contingency if there is a financial reward for winning. In civil cases it's quite common for lawyers to work on contingency because so many civ
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by petertodd 2y ago
> It would incentivize prosecution to avoid court at all costs. Their job is to prosecute. Their only option is to pick cases that can be won. Which isn't hard, as the average person who is charged with some criminal act is not only

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