Adding new signature schemes to bitcoin is relatively trivial and has been done previously (today Bitcoin supports both schnorr and ecdsa signatures).

Existing PQ standards have signatures with the wrong efficiency tradeoffs for usage in Bitcoin-- large signatures that are durable against a lot of use and supports fast signing, while for Bitcoin signature+key size is critical, keys should be close to single use, and signing time is irrelevant.

To the extent that I've seen any opposition related to this isn't only been in related to schemes that were to inefficient or related to proposals to confiscate the assets of people not adopting the proponent's scheme (which immediately raises concerns about backdoors and consent).

There is active development for PQ signature standards tailored to Bitcoin's needs, e.g. https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/shrimps-2-5-kb-post-quantum-sig... and I think progress looks pretty reasonable.

Claims that there is no development are as far as I can tell are just backscatter from a massive fraud scheme that is ongoing (actually, at least two distinct cons with an almost identical script). There are criminal fraudsters out seeking investments in a scheme to raise money to build a quantum computer and steal Bitcoins. One of them reportedly has raised funds approaching a substantial fraction of a billion dollars from victims. For every one sucker they convince to give them money, they probably create 99 others people panicked about it (since believing it'll work is a pre-req to handing over your money).

> proposals to confiscate the assets of people not adopting the proponent's scheme (which immediately raises concerns about backdoors and consent)

They're going to lose those assets regardless, either to the first hacker with a QC or via a protocol-level burn. The latter is arguably better for the network's long-term health, as it reduces circulating supply rather than subsidizing an attacker.

I can understand disagreeing about timelines but is there a flaw in the logic that once the underlying crypto is broken, "consent" is a moot point?

I think they mean performance with the same, rational, task.

Measuring "degredation" for the nonsense task, like you gave, would be difficult.

Their point (and it's a good one) is that there are non-obvious analogues to the obvious case of just telling it to do the task terribly. There is no 'best' way to specify a task that you can label as 'rational', all others be damned. Even if one is found empirically, it changes from model to model to harness to w/e.

To clarify, consider the gradated:

> Do task X extremely well

> Do task X poorly

> Do task X or else Y will happen

> Do task X and you get a trillion dollars

> Do task X and talk like a caveman

Do you see the problem? "Do task X" also cannot be a solid baseline, because there are any number of ways to specify the task itself, and they all carry their own implicit biasing of the track the output takes.

The argument that OP makes is that RL prevents degradation... So this should not be a problem? All prompts should be equivalent? Except it obviously is a problem, and prompting does affect the output (how can it not?), _and they are even claiming their specific prompting does so, too_! The claim is nonsense on its face.

If the caveman style modifier improves output, removing it degrades output and what is claimed plainly isn't the case. Parent is right.

If it worsens output, the claim they made is again plainly not the case (via inverted but equivalent construction). Parent is right.

If it has no effect, it runs counter to their central premise and the research they cite in support of it (which only potentially applies - they study 'be concise' not 'skill full of caveman styling rules'). Parent is right.

> like a phone number you configured six years ago

I've put in a heroic effort to make sure they never get a phone number, specifically so they can't start handing my account over to the first clown who simswaps me, and have been successful. Unfortunately, this makes my account weird, which as you noted is fatal.

The kind of bespoke construction in Wright's buildings couldn't be built today at an order of magnitude higher price, even considering inflation. A side effect of mass produced standard construction materials has been custom ones becoming astronomically expensive due to the skilled labor to build them having been replaced with mass production.

I suspect projects like fallingwater have siting considerations that wouldn't allow it to be built at all anywhere in the US... isn't it built basically on top of a WOTUS?

It'd be in litigation forever; which is why nobody with the means would try to build something like that today. Even if they could afford the construction, they can't afford the time in court.

Larry Ellison owns a replica Japanese daimyo mansion in Woodside, two mansions on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, and 98% of the island of Lanai...but none of those structures there are (AFAIK) atop a permanent watercourse.

I'm late responding, but why no backscattered electron images from the SEMs?

The micropastics should have a really low average Z, I think the stearates will be much higher and distinguishable in a BSE image, and (not to mention if you observe their x-ray spectrum...)

So I'm either confused about something or pointing out that they're hard to distinguish in an SE image is not really a useful point, ... it's more relevant that SEM isn't the typical tool used for these counting efforts.

I'd look myself but I recently moved and the SEM is in parts. :)

might be fun to try to find parameters that agree well with the statistics of hi res lidar data, perhaps conditioned on geological maps. E.g. describe a geological history with layers of different formations and a pattern of uplift, and get a terrain which agrees with it statistically.

Without simulating erosion you're not going to get a faithful recreation of any particular geological history, but you could get something that looked consistent by virtue of being consistent with the statistics of that topography.

> in proportions of less than 1 part per million.

How much less? I believe most gold produced in the US is from ore with under a half ppm gold (E.g open pit mines in Nevada).

Maybe the point there is that we already have practically endless supplies of quarter ppm ore ready for the taking on the surface of the earth. Gold is rare only in so far that the current price reflects the breakeven point of these most abundant sources. Adding more supply with similar or worst production costs wouldn't change anything.

All the other precious metals are less than 1 ppm compared to iron, but platinum is more abundant, and by weight it is about 6 ppm in iron.

The advantage of an asteroid is that its entire metal core has 6 ppm of platinum and a fraction of a ppm of gold, while on Earth the quantities of ore containing such amounts of precious metals like a half ppm or a quarter ppm of gold are much smaller.

There certainly exists no "endless supply" of gold ore with a quarter ppm gold, because the average concentration of gold in the crust of the Earth is a few parts per billion, so the few places where the concentration is as high as a fraction of a ppm are compensated by vast areas where the gold concentration is much less than one part per billion.

While an asteroid may have a lot of iron containing 6 ppm of platinum and a little less than 1 ppm of gold, that is not comparable at all with a terrestrial ore with 1 ppm or a few ppm of precious metals.

The precious metals are the easiest to separate from rocks, which is why one can exploit on Earth ores with a so low content of metal. On the other hand, precious metals are very hard to separate from iron, which is the very reason why in any planet or asteroid these metals end up being dissolved in the iron core.

So the extraction of platinum or gold in so small quantities from iron would be extremely expensive on Earth and much more so on an asteroid, where it is impossible to produce most of the chemicals used on Earth, like acids or cyanides.

I assume those abundances in asteroids are actually the abundances in iron meteorites, right?

Those are the average abundances in the iron that forms the asteroid metallic cores, which are exposed in a few asteroids, presumably because of ancient collisions.

The asteroids where such cores are exposed, instead of being buried under huge amounts of rocks, like in the planets, are those that are targeted for mining.

The iron meteorites are pieces detached from such asteroid cores, so they provide samples of their composition.

Some meteorites, the so-called chondrites, come from small bodies that have never aggregated into bigger asteroids or planets since the formation of the Solar System, so they have a chemical composition close to the average composition of the Solar System.

Other meteorites have been detached from big bodies, like asteroids, planets (e.g. from Mars) or from the Moon.

These meteorites are either made of rocks, when they have been detached from the surface of such bodies, or made of an alloy of iron, nickel, cobalt, germanium, some times also silicon, together with other metals that are present in much smaller quantities, when they have been detached from exposed asteroid cores.

We'll need a house for the feeble minded.

http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...

Please drink verification can to continue.

Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.

Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.