fcortes

There are Street View photos that look like they were taken from someone driving down one of the side streets so you can pretty much walk on it. You can see apartment buildings, local shops, people going about their day... It’s heart-wrenching to contrast that life with the current aerial view, with nothing but rubble and destruction.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...

This is kind of why P vs NP is such an interesting problem. It seems that a big family of NP-hard problems in fact _can_ be solved efficiently if we allow relaxing some constraints, like optimality (eg TSP), or generality of our algorithm (eg type checking).

I feel that is similar to how adding randomness to cryptography [1] opened a bunch of new systems like zero knowledge proofs[2]. By allowing us to be wrong in a very small number of instances (arbitrarily small by adjusting things like key size), we can build practical systems with really impressive properties.

[1]: Goldwasser and Micali - Probabilistic Encryption, 1983 https://web.archive.org/web/20090319000035/http://groups.csa... [2]: Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff - The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems, 1985 https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2008/handouts/1989-siamj...

A couple of months ago I wrote a small post [1] (in Spanish) about subsampled MRI image reconstruction using compressed sensing and how it relates to government funding issues. At the time Tao had written some posts [2] about how the IPAM, where Terrence Tao was working, was losing some funding because UCLA wouldn't follow some new federal government policies.

[1] https://fintualist.com/chile/ciencia/los-efectos-de-las-pole... [2] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114956840959338146

Fun fact: S2 and EC2 sound exactly the same in Spanish - both are "ese dos". Add that to EC2 and S3 already being confusing to tell apart by ear