mikegreenberg

Given electric cars are responsible for much bigger responsibilities than combustion cars (avoid driving into that bicyclist), there are new concerns here which beg extra consideration.

I am currently a mentor and previously a judge and volunteer for many years at regional events. In all my years I have never seen anything remotely like sexual objectification. I obviously can't know your experience but I would be very very surprised to find this occurring... especially at competitions.

I believe this implication goes against core values of the org and certainly it's local volunteers. I have no skin here except to defend a program that is doing amazing work. My kids are participants and I have contributed to the org for more than 10y.

Just offering some more anecdata for passers-by.

  Location: South Florida, USA

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  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgreenberg/

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Hi. I'm Mike. I'm a polyglot backend computer/software engineer w 20+ years experience delivering software in high-stakes, high-paced roles. I have spent the majority of my career in remote roles around the finance, cryptocurrency, and IoT industries.

I pickup new ideas quickly, self-start, and self-direct. I don't know how to idle. I enjoy making sense of chaos and and turning ambiguity into understood risk with insight toward mitigation. I have prototyped my share of MVPs and understand how to glean value from tight feedback loops. I offer technical leadership that understands how to drive consensus toward pragmatic solutions in teams of all sizes. I deliver at a level which most companies consider a Staff/Senior Engineer.

I'm looking for opportunities where I can leverage my deep Golang experience into opportunities to learn new languages/technology. New interesting technology includes (but not limited to) Zig, AI/ML, applied cryptography, and creating unique experiences through art/music. I want to deliver meaningful work which helps humanity keep their freedoms and creating technology that makes the world more equitable. I like avacadoes.

Once upon a time, I was using postgres for OLTP and OLAP purposes combined with in-database transforms using TimescaleDB. I had a schema for optimized ingestion and then several aggregate views which produced a bunch of purpose-specific "materialized" tables for efficient analysis based on the ingestion tables.

Timescale had a nice way of abstracting away the cost of updating these views without putting too much load on ingestion (processing multiple TBs of data a time in a single instance with about 500Gb of data churn daily).

FIRST and most of its teams are very open to collaborating and supporting rookies new to the org. I recommend reaching out to as many nearby teams as possible and see what support they can provide. Any serious teams are motivated to help as this directly contributes to their team's success during the competitive season. Competitions require a teams to have a pro-social aspect to their operations. Helping other teams is a strong signal in this area.

Additionally, find a nearby FRC competition and volunteer for at least one event (do more, if you can). Wander the robot pit and interact with the teams. There will be a lot of good intel for you there just wandering around and asking questions.

Source: Am volunteer judge for FRC.

I couldn't agree more. FIRST is an excellent organization to get involved with. Even if you don't have specialities which directly align with the needs of a team, most will not turn you away (especially if you demonstrate passion).

Just a few thoughts about starting a team and/or volunteering:

Starting a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team is not for the feint-of-heart and requires significant time and money investment. This is the sort of endeavor you try when you're either retired or have a group of other dedicated volunteers willing to help you build the team over multiple seasons. If you spend a year or two mentoring/volunteering for a well-established team, you'll get a good sense of what you're getting into. FRC is a bit hardcore.

If no FRC teams exist nearby, FIRST Lego League (FLL) is a good entrypoint, but may not be technical enough for an adult interested in using FIRST to gain exposure to robotics. (It is plenty satisfying to mentor these teams, but Mindstorms can be somewhat limiting.) These are geared toward using Lego Mindstorms for learning robot concepts.

A good middle ground (for exposure to more practical robotics) would be volunteering with a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team. It's the middle ground between FLL and FRC and is _doable_ for a single, dedicated, passionate adult to start (though I'd strongly recommend finding another volunteer to pursue this with).

If getting involved with a team is not an option, seek out nearby FIRST events that you can volunteer at. Many competition events need volunteers and you'll get a chance to interact with local teams and find plenty of opportunities to play with robots.

Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol.

https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)

This is a matter of semantics... anyone who actually cares about E2EE probably understands the nature of email being cleartext over the wire and that Proton can't control what is outside of their control. Maybe inaccurate but I doubt they are misleading (in the sense that they are hoping to fool people into thinking their email is encrypted over the wire).

Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.

Further, this is explain quite clearly on their FAQ: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

</pearlclutching>

I've felt this to the point that I attempt to preempt the fake concern with my own rhetorical "Hope everything is going well for you." I'd like to think this alleviates the other party from feeling like they have to share anything they aren't comfortable with but allows them room to respond if they choose.

You've missed my point or didn't read it. This is not about the market fitness of the idea/product. This is about the parent commenter throwing shade on the inventor's curiosity and aspiring entrepreneurial effort. Regardless about how right you or the parent is about the products fitness, making assumptions about the inventor's motive removes the opportunity for the inventor to learn/grow from their attempt at going to market.

Instead, it would be better to support the inventor with constructive criticism... how they might better measure PMF, how they might prove whether there's a need for their idea in the market earlier, or how they might get more efficiency out of their approach.

And if you don't have the criticism to offer, you can probably find a better way to share your knowledge without saying the idea is terrible or they are acting in bad faith. (Or just don't comment at all!)

What is silly and obvious to you is exploratory for others. When you cast shade on curiosity, you snuff out the potential before it ever comes to light.

Some counterexamples:

- TCP is a spec delivered by a software implementation program. Maybe you disagree that TCP is being "deployed" as opposed to "used"?

- What about peer-to-peer hosted webpages? Certainly this is deployed software served over the internet connection?

The devil is in the details... details which are not specified in the order. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a lawyer arguing the finer details of "deployed" and "software" and falling on a definition which results in a less "open" Internet.

Also, I think of the meaning of "that is not predefined" is not at all clear. Predefined at what point in time?

IANAL.

It seems the definition of IaaS Products could very well extend to ISPs: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-46

> This proposed definition adopts the E.O. 13984 definition for “Infrastructure as a Service product”, which is any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications.

How would an ISP not be misconstrued as a "managed network"? Deploy/run software could just as easily be running some protocol over the network connection?

Sure, there are very few international ISPs which would be affected by this as physical infrastructure must be local to the user, but I wonder if this would be true always (e.g.: Starlink)

Or, if you don't want to trust the source, https://drand.love/

There are a few projects doing this. This one piqued my interest as having a potentially nice UX after some maturity. https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/01

I have one first-hand story:

I did tech support via phone for a popular consumer computer brand. One particular call, a woman reported that her computer was restarting every time someone in the house flushed the toilet.

Long story short, her home was in the back-back woods with the home powered by a generator. In addition to powering the computer, the generator was also the source of power for a water pump which would kick on to refill the toilet bowl whenever it emptied. And wouldn't you know that that water pump had a beefy coil around its motor and would brownout the entire house every time it started?

Caveat: The other comments mention the file's contents being the only dependency on the hash, but the algo used to hash would also need to be the same. If the hash algo changes in two cases, the same content would have a different hash in those two cases.

I don't think the blockchain walk has to be done locally. Much like someone looking up DNS records don't need to participate in the DB management to get their records, there can be intermediaries which provide the response and still rely on the blockchain as a source of truth?

The value of the blockchain (in the context of name resolution) would (should) be limited to enabling trustless-ness of the response. I can cryptographically authenticate the origin of the response. If you don't trust that source, zk proofs would enable the user to validate the response is part of the latest version of the blockchain's state without looking at all of the history.

I think the cost of carrying the whole history is a red herring.

> Either way you need to have a kind of central authority, or at least trusted third parties.

You lost me here. Couldn't the local user ('s process) reference the same block chain instead of another trusted party?

Also, I assume it wasn't intentional, but consider against arguing from the position of "I can't think of anything". You are betraying yourself by implying that you know all there is to know...which no one does.

Based on your wording, it sounds like you're conflating the two things together... running an exit node and using tor are orthogonal to one another both in value provided to the user as well as effort involved.

Plausible reasons for:

(a) you greatly value privacy and the privacy of others such that you are willing to altruistically provide an exit node as a service; your country is a police state and you are sympathetic to those affected while also willing to accept the risk

(b) you greatly value your privacy and do not trust your ISP; you cannot access content sanctioned in your country; you are an internet engineer and need to test services which depend on privacy as a core feature

Bitcoin transactions can be written to support escrow use cases.

*Edit: Transactions can be sent to a script which requires multiple keys to forward the funds from that script address to a wallet address. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multi-signature

This is the primary mechanism for escrow services to function. If the need for a CC-like refund feature is important to the user, one could potentially use a service over Bitcoin which is party to a 2-of-3 multisig transaction. The payment may be settled immediately by the buyer and seller. Or either party may dispute with the service provider to settle according to some agreement.

There are a ton of interesting distributed systems problems in cryptocurrency. More generally, open source projects will often share issues for beginners which might be good to start with. Find a project you like and see if there's any way you can help.

Most projects label their low-hanging-fruit issues with "good first issue". Start there and filter down as required. https://github.com/search?q=label%3A%22good+first+issue%22&t...

I'm not even sure why you replied if you're not going to add anything to the conversation here. You talked about trusting your "bank" with cryptocurrency and I replied that you don't have to....your argument comparing cash to cryptocurrency is like comparing cash to property/stocks.... it was a strawman and doesn't make much sense.

The market (and you) decide to use cryptocurrency however you want, in a bank, in a wallet, or not at all. And that includes whether you think the "bank" holding your funds has enough guarantee that your funds are safe.

Good luck to you.

FWIW, I was speaking about the "collective" you. And of course one does not automatically get the value out of anything without using it properly. If you use something other than how it was intended, you will get something other than advertised.

And I also agree that cryptocurrency is still not easy to use, but I'm not sure why it needs to "inherently" solve something (even though it has intrinsic value in certain dimensions). HTTP was inherently made to transfer structured text. No one was hoping it was going to replace the postal service, and yet the majority of the worlds information is transmitted using the protocol.

And just because you couldn't use "HTTP" when it was being first developed by researchers, it still served a purpose for them at the time and gradually became the invisible technology that it is today. Now replace "HTTP" with "cryptocurrency" and "at the time" with "now".

This is exactly what I meant when I said that maybe cryptocurrency wasn't ready for (collective) you.

That's not true. How to use credit cards very much have an "interface".

- It is open and requires that you protect the numbers on the outside or access to the data on-chip. Many of these security problems have hurt consumers over and over again despite how "easy" cards are to use specifically because those users don't understand the complexity of the card's system. - It requires you to insert, tap, or swipe it to borrow funds. This interaction is not obvious for a child who has never done this before. It is a learned behavior. And that learned behavior for interfacing with the credit card network with your CC token is complex enough that the US has had significant friction introducing chipped and contactless credit cards over the past years. Because the interface and the UX are there for cards too.

I'm not sure the reason for your distinction between understanding the UX vs the complexity of the system. You can't consider UX without considering complexity... one follows the other necessarily.

I'm not really sure how that changes anything I said. You're naïve if you think the service isn't going to pass those costs onto their users.

And if you need to resort to a custodial service, what are you even using BTC for? Using a custodian to give you permission to enter and exit a market is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for and exactly what it was created to fix.

> However, I didn’t see any talking points in your list that could not be addressed by building solutions to improve UX.

These things are problem with the protocol specification. I'm curious to know how you can solve things like without reducing the value proposition of Bitcoin being trustless and permissionless and Lightning being a fast settlement layer for daily transactions.

- Removing the pain of settling twice on-chain with an unpredictable cost. The best I can think of is to create some fund which amortizes the channel handling cost across all users. Which means you're sacrificing permissionlessness to whatever is doing the amortization of fees.)

- Fixing routing and the convergence of the network toward a hub-and-spoke shape. (This is bad because Bitcoin is suppose to be trustless/permissionless...if you need to trust a hub node, then you're getting all of the negatives and none of the positives.)

- Fixing the dust attack that HTLCs enables. (Context for others: HTLCs are a critical piece of the Lightning network protocol and is what enables channels to be created/destroyed at all.)

I understand the point you're trying to make but I disagree with your analogy. Linux is not being advertised to the masses as safe and easy to use like LN is.

> It won't. The only "goalpost" I have is: congrats, you've invented banks...

Actually you moved it from "holding your cryptocurrency" to being a bank with safety nets.

If you want someone to hold your funds with guarantees to make sure you don't mishandle them then you use dollars in a bank. But if you want to put anything other than, it will not have those guarantees or protections. Only dollars have been given these privileges. You have none of these privileges on other things like stocks, bonds, property, etc. But you can (and do) still hold them in banks and institutions without the guarantees you're asking for. Cryptocurrency is currently treated as an investment and a property (in the US) and will have the same guarantees available to it as stocks, bonds and other property from traditional institutions because that is the risk profile they have established and understand best.

So, if you want the guarantees associated w US dollars, then you need to use US dollars. But having those guarantees from an institution holding your assets was never a goal of Bitcoin... that is, it intended to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It is to distribute the power we currently give to those who manage monetary policy instead to a network of trust-less actors. It is to enable individuals with the means to accumulate and protect wealth. It provides permission-less commerce between private parties who would otherwise be prevented from using their assets as they choose.

It is up to society how it uses and enables Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If society chooses to treat it in a way that it doesn't deserve the guarantees you seek, then you should seek elsewhere in the market to get the guarantees you desire. And those which are looking for the above value propositions will be able to consider cryptocurrency among their options. Just because cryptocurrency does not do what you're asking, that doesn't make it any less useful to the rest of the market with different needs from yours.