Taler does use crypto, aka cryptography, to make sending payments securely anonymous. That is the main point of it.

Target audience: People who want to pay for stuff anonymously through the Internet. It’s a large and underserved market.

It’s a big part of why people got so excited about bitcoin, and why it was so disappointing when it spectacularly failed to be any good at that application.

Well, I got around to reading it although I didn’t look too closely at the actual mathematics of quantum annealing. The sensationalist tone of the headline dominates much of the text as well, unfortunately. But they did factor a 2048 bit number, taken as representative of a class of such numbers which have two factors that differ from each other in only two of their bits. So a space of roughly 2^1000 numbers I guess.

California State University previously factored a 1061 bit number. It’s reference 27, which says “https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/44” where it should be “https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/444.pdf”.

This marks the first successful factorization of RSA-2048 by D-Wave quantum computer, regardless of employing mathematical or quantum techniques, despite dealing with special integers, exceeding 2^1061−1 of California State University.

That’s a lot of California State University. If I’m guessing correctly as to what they’re trying to say it’s an impressive result, but it is not a successful attack on RSA-2048 and it’s made somewhat less plausible by the misleading title.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

Imagine spending four years plotting and scheming about how you’ll do everything better next time, and this is what you come up with.

It’s perfectly simple really. They’ll add a small AI module designed to detect Chinese language being spoken, levels of air pollution, and the scent of Chinese food, which will detonate an appropriately-sized self-destruct charge when a certain threshold is reached.

Nvidia products are just the start. Cars, sneakers, Coca-Cola — eventually every consumer product made in the USA will come with one. They’re just working out how to stop them accidentally detonating in certain parts of San Francisco and New York.

In the 2000s, an ideological battle played out across the fictional cosmos of EVE Online.

I was playing EVE around that time and it’s a little strange to see Goonswarm valorized like that. It’s the only MMO I ever tried where I really got into the social scene within the game. For a time I was loosely affiliated with a small independent corp which was loosely affiliated with a sort of informal federation of others. We all had the ability to make a living independently but we all usually had more fun when we cooperated and so we often did. I never really stopped to think about the politics of it but I guess it was pretty close to proper anarchism, in a way. The giant alliances that battled each other for total dominance were a but distant menace that we would occasionally snipe at or steal from.

Anyway, good book review. More interesting than I would’ve guessed when I clicked on the link.

Only that it wasn’t as good as they expected. I’m going to go ahead and assume it was the 1969 Hall Bartlett movie because that looks intriguing.

I think that most people would indeed “automatically pass out and sleep” long before 11 days went past, unless they used some strong drugs or stimuli designed to keep them awake. Source: I tried to see how long I could go without sleeping, no tricks just sheer force of will, when I was young and healthy. Slightly more than 90 hours.

Oh no, the video game industry is dead. Good thing we still have about thirty million video games to choose from.

I know these things take time but it seems overdue by about ten years.

Computers? Fun!? Whatever, nerds.

(Or perhaps if things need to connect to some kind of grid management services, a firewall with appropriate rules — i.e. ones that do not allow connections to or from random addresses in China. Or some combination of both. Depends on the requirements but it’s not that complicated. Consult your local IT security expert.)

This can be solved by not connecting your solar panels to the Internet, or putting them behind a secure VPN if you really need remote access for some reason.

If we’re at the point where it takes “economy of scale” to remain in the game then the average miner must have invested in a whole lot of hardware and such. What happens when the cost of financing the premises and equipment outweighs the meagre returns over electricity cost from keeping things running? There could be periods where nobody’s making money. Not that I have any idea if we’re in one.

Bitcoin mining hasn’t had anything to do with GPUs since 2014. Ether, since 2022. It’s the AI people you’re looking for.

Also because of, you know, tobacco.

If only somebody would design an open and federated protocol to replace giant social media platforms in a way that destroys the ability of billionaire monopolists or anyone else to use the network effect to lock people into their psychomanipulation machines.

Nah, we’ll just make them tweak the dials towards less disinformation and more safe-for-advertisers messaging.

When the power was out for over a week a couple years ago, after getting over the initial difficulties the next thing I missed was laundry.