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150 sats \ 2 replies \ @petertodd 22h \ on: FBI and DHS agents search home of Indiana University cryptography professor news
Good chance this is an espionage case.
Of course it's a flop. Cease-fires have been negotiated with Russia something two dozen times before. They just break them.
This is as idiotic as trying to negotiate with a thief. Russia has no legitimate grievance against Ukraine, or any of the other nations they've invaded recently. They're invading because they're evil people who want to steal land and resources. The only answer is to defeat them. Which is most effectively done by crushing the Russian economy.
Fortunately Ukraine keeps on blowing up Russian oil infrastructure. They'll win this if allowed to.
The lanterns in my second photo are also cast and mass-produced.
Yes. Which is why their intricate decoration comes across as fake! They're a simulacrum of 1800's to 1900's era lighting (which itself was cast and mass produced, but at the time that was something special). The context is different now, which comes across as cheap and inauthentic.
Please show me "very common" examples of furniture, buildings, or other wood structures where screws go in one side, out the other, and are secured with external metal fasteners.
Have you looked at telephone poles before? The most common way to attach things to them is a bolt right through to the other side. The that's the typical way crossbeams at attached at the top, for example.
There's probably billions of examples of this in the US alone.
Seriously, if you want an example, go outside and find one yourself.
I think the left lamp is a better example of that philosophy than the right. But yes, great article.
Is it still honest and elegant to drill holes all over the pole and then apply a patchwork of metal bands to the same pole?
The holes in concrete poles are cast in place; concrete poles are a mass produced item.They usually aren't drilled after the fact.
If the wood pole were “being true to what the materials are”, why pass the screw through the entire thing and fasten it externally on the opposite side?
...because that's a quick and easy thing to do in wood. Takes just a minute or two. And guarantees a solid connection for many years to come. That's also a very common way to fasten things into wooden poles.
Have you done any construction?
This feels like one of those things where your sense of aesthetics is influenced by your lack of experience actually building stuff. And vice-versa in my case.
Do you still think they’re honest and elegant?
Yes! The steel bands are used on the concrete pole because drilling into concrete is more difficult than using a steel band. For the wooden pole, you can easily use screws, which that light almost certainly does.
That's actually a great example of the design being true to what the materials are.
i also agree here, the sign is ugly and wouldn’t fit in.
But these days signs are required, and they have standardized designs. You can't avoid them. What you can do is have a design where they fit in. And faux-antique doesn't work that well for that.
Same thing with the steel bands on the faux-antique pole. They got added for a reason...
There's also two steel bands on the imitation antique in the background. None of which appear to be actually doing anything.
I think those steel bands look ridiculous on that imitation antique. While on the concrete pole, they look appropriate.
Also, imagine how silly that antique would look if you attached the modern "WATCH FOR CHILDREN" sign to it.
Do you believe the world would be a more beautiful place if all wires for all electronics were dangling outside all of our devices?
Yes. There's an appropriate amount of infrastructure to show off in the right circumstances, and overall I think we show off too little.
That metal band is a stainless steel compression band. They're extremely strong and last forever; I've never seen one break. Also, structurally it makes for an elegant way to support the light: think through how the loads are resolved.
I like the exposed wires. It's an honest detail to what it actually is and how it works.
IMO the lights on the left look much nicer than the ones on the right.
The ones on the left are true to themselves. They're an elegant design made out of high quality materials, chrome metal and glass. The ones on the right scream fake. They're just cheap, soulless, imitations of antique lighting.
So? Bitfinex is a Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin coming from them is consistent with El Salvador buying BTC from them.
They're just switching protocols from the whois protocol to the RDAP protocol. The information made public by whois will still be made public.
Ah yes, the Nazi county with... checks notes... a highly popular Jewish president.
Meanwhile I've been to Odesa, Ukraine, a few times. 30% Jewish population and it's one of the big cities that Russia is trying to eliminate. Last time I was there they had rotating blackouts because Russia had been heavily hitting the power grid. And a dinner I was having got interrupted by a Russian air strike nearby.
The Nazi's here are the Russians. Which is really a repeat of history, considering how the USSR allied with Hitler...
😂😂😂
I've been to Serbia... and it's neighbors. The neighbors have plenty to say about the not so peaceful character of Serbia. It anything, NATO was overly restrained in their efforts to stop Serbian violence.
Serbia still is a fucking nuts country. When I visited most recently it was full of Russian supporting Z symbols. Absurd.
The hardest part about being a contrarian is knowing when not to be.
This isn't some subtle, complex, situation. Russia is invading Ukraine for their own stupid reasons, mainly to simply steal Ukrainian land and resources. Same thing Russia has done for centuries. That's the reason why Russia is as large as it is in the first place.
Obviously, peaceful countries have a vested interest in not allowing blatant, genocidal, theft to be a successful strategy. Because the sort of countries who do that are likely to repeat it all over again. This time with more wealth to fund their next invasion.
Hell, most of the reason NATO even exists is because countries in NATO knew damn well that Russia might invade them next; being in NATO is (so far) very effective at ensuring you don't get invaded by Russia. And sure enough, the Russian invasion of Ukraine meant that Finland and Sweden finally joined - both of which have borders with Russia.
One example of a seized, privately owned, asset is a large Russian cargo plane at Toronto Pearson airport: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/01/12/antonov-airplane-toronto-pearson-international-airport/
I've seen it myself fairly recently flying through Toronto. The ridiculous thing is it has ended up with about a million dollars in storage fees owed to Toronto Pearson Airport because it's just been sitting there since 2022. It should have been sold off years ago to both pay the airport fairly and stop using up ramp space, and to use the remaining proceeds to compensate Ukraine (it's probably still worth ~$50 million).
Obviously, this would be a different matter if we were talking about a private individual who left Russia. But we're talking about an active Russian cargo company who is actively contributing to the invasion by continuing to operate and pay taxes in Russia.
Russia owes Ukraine trillions of dollars worth of damages. It's about time that Russian assets get returned to Ukraine, or at least, spent on defense of Ukraine.
...and that damn well should include private assets too. With war at this scale – a double digit percentage of Russian GDP is going to the invasion – the entire Russian economy and everyone working in it is responsible.
If you're Russian in most cases you had an ethical obligation to leave Russia years ago. If you didn't, and you could have, you're not much different from the soldiers doing the actual fighting.
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 11 Mar \ parent \ on: Payments below dust limit not trustless lightning
I specifically wrote about the future where this amount may not be trivial.
But that's the thing, the game theory isn't about the HTLC amount being small. It's that closing a channel costs fees greater than the amount. So you can't make a profit from this attack.
We probably will have to tweak certain aspects of LN implementations to make sure this logic actually holds up in all cases. But the basic idea is sound.
Without HTLC they are unenforsable and may lead to the sender losing money.
Nope. I covered this in my big article on L2 protocols: https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review
A L2 payment should have one of the following two properties:
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Unilateral enforcement on-chain. Lightning generally has this as you can close a channel, and in the case of a non-dust HTLC, actually represent it on-chain. But, obviously this costs fees... which brings us to:
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Economic enforcement: alternatively, ensure that the attacker can't profit from theft.
Dust HTLCs meet the second criteria because to steal the value of them you have to close a channel, which results in more transaction fees being ultimately spent than the HTLC is worth (FYI, while the dust HTLC is in flight, the value of it is just added to the transaction fee for the current commitment transaction --- the transaction that would be used to force-close the channel if necessary)
Sure, on occasion someone might lose a few sats from a counterparty closing a channel at the right moment to steal a dust HTLC. But this basically never happens because it's not an economically viable attack. Transaction fees eat up all the profits.
In fact, the dust limit isn't even the right criteria here! The way to choose between a "real" HTLC and a "dust" HTLC is to base it on current fee rates. Right now Lightning implementations arguably create too many real HTLC outputs that can't actually be profitably collected if the channel is in fact force-closed.