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 compelling as reading a beautiful poem and needs no further justification.
However, there is another reason to read this essay. Hardy gives a few examples of fields of math which are entirely useless. Number theory, he claims, has absolutely no applications. The study of non-euclidean geometry, he claims, has absolutely no applications. History has proven him dramatically wrong, “pure” math has a way of becoming indispensable
I have no problem studying Math just to study Math. I read the title and jumped to some conclusions, I'm afraid. Was talking to a friend about String Theory and their 11+ dimensions the other day and that is immediately where my brain went to with this one. The article is interesting even though I have zero desire to personally study math just for math's sake.
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 approach of iteratively training using RL over data generated through self-play
Your identity must be registered at plc.directory, the central service they control, which allows them to stop clients from being able to verify your identity. I think they intend on decentralizing this, eventually.
However, you are allowed to create an identity which only uses keys you control. You are also allowed to update an existing identity and transition it to only use keys you control: https://web.plc.directory/spec/v0.1/did-plc
I've read this document before. Is there an example of someone who is doing this? Or a tutorial on how to do this? Most of my experience is my exposure to the Bluesky app which does not appear to support anything more than adding a dns handle.
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 the app and giving facebook access to their network traffic. I... would probably not accept that deal but it doesn't seem accurate to call this "spyware" or "wiretapping", both of which imply non-consensuality.
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 incredibly easy to cache and even extremely popular sites are cheap to serve because most requests never make it to the origin server.
There is no need to visit archive.org, the internet archive can directly seed the content it deems worthy of archival. Abstrusegoose.com eventually expires and the new owner points it to new content but the old site sticks around indefinitely, it is accessible via hash for as long as someone seeds it.
In your proposed scheme of URL->hash, everyone is expected to pay a big service to host their data, so that their page is accessible to that service's users? Or what? It sounds like you're saying "use IPFS for web hosting" but that's famously slow and unreliable for anything not incredibly popular.
How do you propose a person publishes their data? They get a domain, they create their page, they hash their page, they point that domain at that hash, and then what exactly? They update their content, compute the new hash, and then wait for DNS to propagate the new change?
I'm serious here, I'm trying to work out how what you're suggesting would work for the standard use cases of websites, and I'm trying to work out how if it does work for the standard use cases it solves any of the problems that archive.org has to manage, or any of the features people use archive.org for?
People don't use archive.org to ask "where did this content get published?" (e.g I have a hash of the page content) they say "what was the content at this location+time?". Definitionally they do not have the content, so they do not have the hash. They have the location, but you've just said the location is just the hash of the content. If you're saying the location of the document is the full url, not just the domain (the only part that involves machine addresses), then what is the hash for?
Finally, if the location is based on hash, you don't only break any content that is not 100% static, you break encrypted content, because definitionally encrypted content is not static.
You're still thinking in terms of paying for hosting, ie a commercial web, you cannot solve this problem by everything remaining a commercial entity, since payment for services rendered must cease at some point; you're just trying to bandaid over the problem.
Systems like you're describing, exist, and the fundamental problem is that they are not even semi-permanent archives.
For something to exist, someone has to host it, and the way you get something hosted is to pay for it (either paying someone to be a host, or paying for hardware and connectivity). Once you stop paying those costs you're reliant on other people choosing to keep your data around, just as archive.org does. If no one chooses to, the fact that you had a pile of random hashes scattered into the resource naming/identification scheme does not matter. Sure nodes would cache commonly accessed data, but the moment it stops being frequently used it starts getting pushed out of those caches to hold the new popular stuff. If you are hosting it yourself, or paying someone else to host it, once it drops off the "being popular" wagon its persistence is limited to whenever the next cache flush occurs.
So in exchange for content being harder to update, the routing performance being lower, making cryptography impossible, not working for dynamic content, and making censorship much easier, you have not solved the problem that archive.org already attempts to solve. Nothing in your scheme would obviate the need for scraping and separately archiving, nothing ensures content remains once no one is paying to ensure hosting.
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 matricies.
The treatment in thirty-three miniatures describes the steps you take but doesn't mention what you are actually doing (finding eigenvalues) or leave you with any intuition for why this was a natural thing to have tried
Yes, that book (thirty three miniatures) has great content, but a hard read. Basically someone like me needs to go back, read other sources, and spend time on paper to get it.
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 able to book an airline ticket unless there is another computer which can accept that booking and which your computer can talk to. The internet is next to useless for booking ryan air flights until ryan air puts one of their computers onto the internet and gives it authority to issue bookings.
Blockchains are like virtual computers. It is absolutely possible to imagine ryan air deploying a smart contract to ethereum and giving it sufficient authority to issue bookings but until that happens ethereum is next to useless for booking ryan air flights. This is the oracle problem.
Here I've focused on the write-path but "the oracle problem" usually refers to the read-path. Say you have some prediction market where participants can place bets on who the next US president will be. How do you resolve that market? When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will. But for now blockchains have to make do with various hacks which allow them to imperfectly track what is happening in the outside world.
> When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will.
The Oracle problem isn't the fact that this doesn't happen today, it's that it can never happen in a way that is trustable. When Congress (or anyone else) does decide to publish the election results to a blockchain, every dollar bet on the outcome will be a prize to be won by anyone who can subvert the publication process.
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 communication is who you think they are. The definition of the oracle problem you propose applies to almost the entirety of the modern world and would come up in conversation all the time.
TLS and other measures make me _very_ sure google.com is resolving to a server controlled by Google. A congress who wanted to do so could vote using hardware wallets and publish signatures and we could be just as sure that the blockchain reflected reality. A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality; ryan air could decide that the ethereum smart contract which manages bookings _is_ reality, then there would be no oracle problem even by your definition.
[1] or maybe it would require a constitutional change
All the existing systems we have to solve this area are trust based systems. You trust your browser and OS to choose the correct CAs to trust, and they are the ones that validate to you that google.com is Google. Whole schtick of crypto folks is about reating trustless systems. It is trivial to add real world information to a blockchain if you have an authority that you trust, the oracle problem is how to do that when you don't.
Even the Congress example for who is president, we literally had a bunch of people certify fake election results last election and try to overthrow the US goverment. No matter how much you scream that one day the blockchain will be the reality, that goes agaisnt every single judicial and political system we have in the world, and if you disagree with it, I hope someday somebody doesn't hack your house away from you, cause then you will learn why all proper property systems have judicial systems with actual human beings running on human logic with power to do fixes.
the implication here is that those powers of the judicial system will always be used to do fixes in your favour. but if that optimism was shared by everyone, blockchains would have never been invented in the first place.
> That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq.
I don't follow, one of us is confused about what the other is saying and I'm not sure who. If the Oracle problem were solved tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is publishing stock prices to ledgers so that derivatives could be implemented in smart contracts, yes?
Anyway, what I'm saying is, whatever real world data you'd like to have on a blockchain ledger, election results or stock prices or sports scores or whatever, the Oracle problem is specifically the fact that you wouldn't be able to trust it if it were there, not the fact that it isn't there yet.
> A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality
This is a workaround - if the value on the ledger is the source of truth, there is no Oracle problem.
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 spoon-wielding lunatic would be risking serious consequences in order to earn $50; that doesn't seem like a particularly strong incentive.
cripple beggars in calcutta, for example, earn approx 30 cents per day and organized criminals maim and manage them in order to extract this amount.
you're confident they wouldn't use a spoon to take 160 days worth of income? and comparing to non-cripple beggars, it's about a full year of income. that sounds like substantial incentive to me.
Even more ghastly, it seems like the criminals could use the spoons to convert non-cripple beggars into cripple beggars. That way they both get a one-time payment and a source of recurring revenue.
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 receiving some of the initial airdrop. It is completely true that once a wallet is generated (and you don't even need to visit an orb to create a wallet) anyone who possesses the private key, human or robot, can send transactions using that wallet. Receiving some of the initial airdrop really does require trusting worldcoin that they are telling the truth and not saving images of your iris.
Is it possible for people to understand how it works and to still oppose it being broadly adopted in your opinion? Can you please clarify what exactly others are not understanding or misrepresenting?
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 read some informed criticism!
Just some simple examples:
> Imagine that your digital identity has been lost in some way — shut down by authorities for non-compliance, or otherwise blocked. With traditional cash — and other cryptocurrencies — you can always make a new wallet and stash some fresh coins in it. But this isn’t Minority Report, and you can’t get a new iris from your neighborhood surgeon.
You don't need to walk up to an Orb to create a wallet. You can own and transact worldcoin without ever showing your iris to an orb.
> When your immutable digital identity is locked — imagine merchants who won’t take your coins from you without a digital signature announcing your World ID — it’s over for you. No old account. No new account. No soup for you. You just lost your digital personhood.
This is also possible... with every other form of payment? Imagine merchants who refuse to accept cash. Once the government locks your credit card you're out of luck. Imagine a world where you have to sign in with google before you can pay for anything (why is the worldid dystoia apparently so easy to imagine, while the google one seems silly?). Once the government locks your google account you're out of luck. A dystopia has _many_ levers to pull and refusing to deploy worldcoin is not have any impact on the success of that dystopia.
There is really so much that it's not possible to clarify "exactly" what others aren't getting in a single comment, there are a dozen different misconceptions, if you have specific concerns I'm curious to hear them and attempt to reply to them.
The company behind Worldcoin are making fairly bold claims about the capabilities of their cryptocurrency and “proof of humanity” project. I think it is important to fully evaluate these claims and not take them on face value.
From worldcoin.org
> could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.
This breaks down into 3 claims:
1. Be able to identify humans from AI online in a privacy preserving manner
2. Provide a platform for global democratic processes
3. Provide a universal basic income.
If we cannot agree that these claims are Worldcoin’s main goals then I am afraid Worldcoin is going to need to update their website as I do not see how it could be interpreted any other way in the language they use.
So now that we have their claims we can begin to look at some concerns. Starting with the ones you provided:
> You don't need to walk up to an Orb to create a wallet. You can own and transact worldcoin without ever showing your iris to an orb.
If this is possible, they why is the orb necessary and how can Worldcoin provide the guarantee that everyone using their wallet and blockchain is in fact a person? If UBI and voting are to happen using this as the platform, not needing verification via their iris scanning mechanism calls into question how they can claim to prove that each world id maps to one and only one unique human. If anyone can create an account without verification and transact using Worldcoin then voting and fair distribution of UBI cannot happen the way they describe.
The second concern is something that can happen in the non-crypto space. But if this is a valid concern of the current system, replacing it with something like Worldcoin doesn’t resolve that concern. We would have that same problem. So if we are to replace the current system with a new one, why would we willingly carry over these kind of issues if it were possible to not do so?
Now on to my concerns. I am not an expert in cryptographic mathematics and the nature of zero-knowledge proofs. So I will accept the following:
1. Iris Hash generation is cryptographically unique, privacy preserving, and the database of Iris hashes will be deleted.
2. Iris Hash to World Id is generated in a sufficiently zero-knowledge proof way that makes it so an Iris Hash cannot be used to identify any one specific World Id.
3. World Id to Wallet Private Key is also generated in a sufficiently zero-knowledge proof way that makes it so an Wallet’s private key cannot be used to identify any one specific World Id.
With those assumptions, I have the following concerns:
1. Has the company behind Worldcoin allowed for 3rd party audits? Code reviews, attestation of the zero-knowledge proofs, and other standard security audits we would expect of a global biometrics hardware company?
If they haven’t, and we cannot independently verify any of their claims, they really cannot be trusted. The Worldcoin company has a financial incentive in becoming the global identity solution. Saying they are safe from any vulnerabilities, privacy issues, or flaws in implementation is not good enough for me.
2. Sybil attacks. What has Worldcoin done to prevent sybil attacks? If I can modify the appearance of my iris with the use of a contact lense, and any other biometric data they would collect, can they identify me as the same person? Are chimpanzees inhuman enough to not be allowed to verify? Can attacking the orb operator by completing a sybil attack be enough to perform a denial of service attack against Worldcoin? If my goal is to prevent people from accessing the UBI or voting process then if this attack is possible, as an attacker, I win if my fake personas go undetected and I can collect the UBI and vote fraudulently or if my attack is detected but this compromises the identities of anybody scanned using that orb thus invalidating their accounts or preventing people from accessing accounts by being scanned for the first time as a replacement orb for that area is needed.
3. Which leads to the orbs. If you or I am unable to build our own orbs and join them to the network, then any claims of decentralization is invalid. Of only official orbs are allowed, if they cannot be examined to verify behavior then we cannot trust them either (ties into the audit issues).
I could go on with more but at least based on my surface level understanding of Worldcoin and their operations, I can see several attacks that if this is widely implemented as the global ubi and voting system would be untenable.
If there is no account recovery system, the average person could easily be denied access to participating in society by a simple mistake on their part, let alone any targeted denial of service style attack. And if there is an account recovery process then that is a vector that can be attacked today.
Putting all the world’s eggs in one basket makes this system a nonstarter. Claiming that they don’t want to do that means the language on their website and rhetoric they use in interviews are lies or misinformation of some kind so why should we trust them?
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 biometric is in ensuring a ~ more fair ~ airdrop. With bitcoin the people who discovered it first and who were able to run miners received an outsized reward, and consequently the distribution of bitcoin is extremely unequal. The usage of biometrics doesn't _completely_ solve this problem, there is still a pool of insiders who have an outsized amount of wld, but a very large number of people will be able to walk up to an orb to claim some wld and they will all receive roughly equal amounts. The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.
> The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.
And how is this not a lie when it's so easy to game? It's only shifting the distribution from people who were running a computer early to people who buy biometrics early, steal biometrics or find ways to fake biometrics. And even worse, if you were once robbed of your biometrics in that system, you have lost it forever as I understand it? Is there even any way to get back what was robbed from you?
And just out of curiosity, does this system handle collisions of biometrics? Or is it just assuming and hopes for none to happen?
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 is an engineering challenge which seems quite difficult.
> And even worse, if you were once robbed of your biometrics in that system, you have lost it forever as I understand it? Is there even any way to get back what was robbed from you?
The biometric is only used for the airdrop. It is possible to create a wallet and send and receive transactions without ever visiting an orb. The only thing the biometric does is send an initial amount of WLD to your wallet and ensure that you can only receive that initial amount once.
If someone steals your wallet there is no getting it back, it is not linked to your identity it is just a private key. I'm not really sure what it means in this context to steal your biometrics?
> And just out of curiosity, does this system handle collisions of biometrics? Or is it just assuming and hopes for none to happen?
This is territory I don't know very well. I believe irises were chosen specifically because they were not invasive and they contain enough entropy that the chance of collisions is quite small. I don't know if it has enough entropy that they can be sure there are no collisions or if it has enough entropy that the expected number of collisions was tolerably low.
It seems you didn't read the article, it specifically talks about people are already buying accounts for $30 or less to be able to make accounts in areas where you're not allowed to register.
Describing it like this makes it sound very much like a ponzi scheme. When you buy into WLD, you're effectively giving money to current WLD holders, with the hope that more suckers will buy in and do the same for you.
You don't know what a ponzi scheme is. You're describing speculative markets, which have always existed, and must exist for any sort of economic stability to occur.
Does it? What prevents a factory owner from having all of his employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim their coin, and then hand over their wallets to him as a condition of employment?
Assuming this thing actually works and won't accept irises grown in a vat or someone scanning a chimpanzee, it at least rate-limits you to creating new wallets with new coin at the rate at which you can find and coerce other humans, but it doesn't actually guarantee the 1:1 mapping of wallet:human or an equal initial distribution of coin.
All it's doing is shifting the balance of power from people who command many machines to people who command many other people. It's like reverting industrialism back to feudalism, a digital replay of the same mistake made by every communist revolution of the 20th century.
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 employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim their coin, and then hand over their wallets to him as a condition of employment?
The airdrop is gated in multiple places. Everybody needs to visit an orb to claim worldcoin but the set of active orbs is managed by worldcoin and when one of them acts suspiciously the orb can be deactivated, among other counter-measures. A set of wallets all owned by distinct people will act differently than a set of wallets controlled by one person.
This is obviously not perfect, some fraud will occur. It is still a more fair initial distribution than any other currency I know of.
However, there is another reason to read this essay. Hardy gives a few examples of fields of math which are entirely useless. Number theory, he claims, has absolutely no applications. The study of non-euclidean geometry, he claims, has absolutely no applications. History has proven him dramatically wrong, “pure” math has a way of becoming indispensable