I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what Zelensky is saying in an interview but can pretty much never understand native Ukrainian speakers. I think there's also a gradient of dialects and accents West to East, so I'm sure you can find some Ukrainian villager I would understand better but in general they're not mutually intelligible (to me).

Wow. Did you attend Russian language-only schools when growing up? Is this common in your generation?

Moved to the US as a kid (by way of Estonia and then Italy), went to a year of Russian language "transitional" school here. So don't have any insight on the Ukrainian school experience.

I expected the core of the algorithm to be a parallel prefix scan though (isn't that the point of Mamba?):

    for i in range(l):
            x = deltaA[:, :, i] \* x + deltaB_u[:, :, i]
            y = einsum(x, C[:, i, :], 'b d_in n , b n -> b d_in')
            ys.append(y)

Keras started out great but grew clumsily, making custom use-cases cumbersome and error prone and also became inextricably linked with TensorFlow (which was a big headache compared with PyTorch).

It seems like this rewrite cleans up the meandering mess of Keras's middle period, or at least I'd be willing to give it a try.

It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013) Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes, (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the DeFi/NFT bubble also left nothing but rubble. This stuff is zero sum, shuffling money without creating new things of enduring value.

At the moment, you can buy drugs with it online. Don't know if that will last, though.

Can you still!?

It's so incredibly traceable these days and every iteration of Silk Road gets busted, no?

Dark web markets absolutely still exist. The traceability problem is at least partially solved using mixers. I don't know everything there is to know here, like how easy it is to get back fiat.

The markets get busted (or become scams), the dealers not so much. If you’re on these markets regularly for years you’re probably communicating directly with sellers at this point.

Bitcoin did factually fail at its stated goal, as laid out in the original whitepaper. Bitcoin has not succeeded at being a peer-to-peer currency, because the "peer-to-peer" part went out the window when users stopped hosting their own nodes, and the currency part was abandoned when people realized that transaction throughput is fatally low.

Well, more like it’s no longer p2p after the 2017 hard fork and people are being pushed to use Lightning which centralizes over time through hub and spoke model, and many people prefer to use custodial wallets.

I think you'll see people picking those techniques and using them in a hidden-from-the-user way (like how git and BlueSky use Merkle trees)

Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.

I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.

I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense

I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.

Like, huge tangible improvements.

You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing

It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...

Recent advances in SNARKs/STARKs/VDFs were funded by crypto. SNARKs have gone from unusably slow to reasonably efficient.

> I think you'll see people picking those techniques

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand though.

I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it will replace all other forms of transportation, and a worrying number of them are still out there crediting the (failing) product for inventing the wheel.

Merkle trees, yes! That was just an example of a technique that can be well hidden vs in the user's face.

Newer techniques like Verkle trees, SNARKs, STARKs, &c are.... well, new.

The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less technologies and more business-plans to make money--perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from available tools.

It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps, and while their investment might have spurred some new tools/libraries/algorithms they use, the broader usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to mean they have a good/sustainable business.

There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is actually just a regular old distributed database of yesteryear.

> They didn't invent cars

Can we really call the car an "invention"? After all, both the wheel and the steam engine already existed.

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand.

I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge podcast.

My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.

Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.

It's a very cool but failed idea.

Scott's political ontology seems intrinsically limited to white middle class. It doesn't really make sense in poorer parts of America and really falls apart once you start trying to correlate belief systems in non-white communities.

My wager is little to no SETI investment as we settle into the assumption we are either the first, the only, or are structurally isolated from intelligent life in the universe. A collective shoulder shrug and a refocus on survival in our dirty terrarium.

It's pretty readable at their large font size

Agreed. I feel like I'm always the first in my company to complain when someone proposes a too-thin or too-light font style or color, but this read fine for me. I'd move away from monospace if anything, but I take that as a stylistic choice they made even if it hurts readability a little (not like thin gray that's used without even noticing: the dev already knows what's written there, or doesn't care if it's lorem ipsum, and checks the font only for form instead of also for function).

Is that a condemnation by faint praise? :)

Could be because I'm reading on desktop and it works better on mobile.

I'm on a laptop and it looks totally fine to me.

>This is how it already works - this is what a clinical trial is.

That's not at all how clinical trials work. If and when someone decides to advance a drug to the next stage of development, it's done because they think there's a sufficiently profitable market at the end of the road. So lots of extremely promising drugs stall out if the numbers don't make sense. Furthermore, the trial enrollment process itself is cumbersome and often your only entrypoint is email "[email protected]" and hope you can a response and can navigate their arbitrary screening process. Speaking of screening: trials are full of exclusion criteria. They can get copy-pasted between trial protocols and often have no real reason excluding you. What's the washout period for your last line of chemo? Ever had any kind of immunotherapy? &c &c From the point of view of whoever is trying to get a drug approved it's better to be safe than sorry wrt any kind of uncertainty in a patient's medical status or treatment history. But that means that there might be a drug that looks extremely promising from previous trials but the only current trial excludes you for a small reason.

I assume they meant that clinical trials are already free for the patient, as suggested by the comment they were responding to.

They're free but not accessible, it's a universe away from compassionate use access wrt practical availability.