> Should I treat this as some datapoint on monero’s security having held up well so far?
No. The reason attackers mine Monero and not some other cryptocurrency isn't the anonymity. Most cryptocurrencies aren't (meaningfully) mineable with CPUs, Monero (apparently) is. There may be others, but I suspect that they either deliver less $ per CPU-second (due to not being valuable), or are sufficiently unknown and/or painful to set up that the attackers just go with the known default.
Trying to mine Bitcoin directly would be pointless, you'd get no money because you're competing with ASIC miners. Some coins were designed to be ASIC resistant, these are mostly mined on GPUs. Monero (and some other coins) were designed to also be GPU resistant (I think). You could see it as a sign that that property has held up (well enough), but nothing else.
The main reason to use Monero for stuff like this is their mining algo. They made big efforts and changed algorithms several times to make and keep it GPU and ASIC resistant.
If you used the server to mine Bitcoin, you would make approximately zero (0) profit, even if somebody else pays for the server.
But also yes, Monero has technically held up very well.
I haven't studied math beyond what was needed for my engineering courses.
However, I also am starting to believe that infinity doesn't exist.
Or more specifically, I want to argue that infinity is not a number, it is a process. When you say {1, 2, 3, ... } the "..." represents a process of extending the set without a halting condition.
There is no infinity at the end of a number line. There is a process that says how to extend that number line ever further.
There is no infinity'th prime number. There is a process by which you can show that a bigger primer number must always exist.
The statement and proof of the theorem are quite accessible and eye-opening. I think the number line with ordinals is way cooler than the one without them.
I went down the rabbithole, and as far as I can tell, you have to axiomatically assume infinities are real in order to prove Goodstein’s theorem.
I challenge the existence of ordinal numbers in the first place. I’m calling into question the axioms that conjure up these ordinal numbers out of (what I consider sketchy) logic.
But it was a really fun rabbithole to get into, and I do appreciate the elegance of the Goodstein’s theorem proof. It was a little mind bending.
yes, if you want ordinal numbers in ZFC you need to take the axiom of infinity. Other than that it's a pretty straightforward construction. If you reject the axiom of infinity you also essentially reject all of standard analysis (using limits to study reals often implicitly invokes the axiom of infinity).
Whether you think infinity exists or not is up to you, but transfinite mathematics is very useful, it's used to prove theorems like Goodstein's sequence in a surprisingly elegant way. This sequence doesn't really have anything to do with infinity as first glance.
Actually, all numbers are functions in Peano arithmetic. :)
For example, S(0) is 1, S(S(0)) is 2, S(S(S(0))) is 3, and so on.
There is no end of a number line. There are lines, and line segments. Only line segments are finite.
> There is no infinity'th prime number. There is a process by which you can show that a bigger primer number must always exist.
You misunderstand the concept of infinity. Cantor's diagonal argument proves that such a bigger number must always exist. "Infinity'th" is not a place in a number line; Infinity is a set that may be countable or uncountable, depending on what kind of infinity you're working with.
There are infinities with higher cardinality than others. Infinity relates to set theory, and if you try to simply imagine it as a "position" in a line of real numbers, you'll understandably have an inconsistent mental model.
I highly recommend checking out Cantor's diagonal argument. Mathematicians didn't invent infinity as a curiosity; it solves real problems and implies real constraints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument
>You misunderstand the concept of infinity. Cantor's diagonal argument proves that such a bigger number must always exist. "Infinity'th" is not a place in a number line; Infinity is a set that may be countable or uncountable, depending on what kind of infinity you're working with.
Diagonal argument doesn’t work in a constructive ground. It’s not a matter of whether the conclusion is valid, but if we have blind faith in the premises and are fine about speaking of something we can’t build.
They are things that humans will never be able to construct, no matter how far their control over the universe surrounding them might go. To start with, humans can create the universe, — whether it’s infinite or not.
We can construct a function G, which, given a function
f : N -> N -> {0,1}
returns a function
G(f) = h : N -> {0,1}
defined by h(i):=not(f(i)(i))
This h=G(f) has the property that, for all i, there exists a j such that f(i)(j)≠h(j) . In particular, j=i will work for this.
It seems to me that this is all constructive.
The only out that I see is to not consider the class of “functions from N to {0,1}” to be something that exists (as a set, or type, or whatever).
Like, you can fairly reasonably hold the position that there is no powerset of the natural numbers, but you can’t reasonably hold the position that it exists and that there is a surjection from the natural numbers to it. (Likewise with any other set N. This isn’t specific to the natural numbers.)
We have a constructive refutation of that claim, in the sense that we have a construction of a function which, given such a surjection (as in, a function along with a promise that the provided function is such a surjection), produces a contradiction.
You're right, I was way too imprecise in my language. Thanks for the correction. I'd rather say that all numbers can be interpreted as being constructed via a process, just as the parent comment described their interpretation of Infinity.
Let’s keep it simple. What physics or engineering is easier? Let us ignore mathematics for its own sake . If you can’t show use there … id argue it’s our math aesthetics that are wrong
Why have you picked that comment of mine to reply with that reply? I was just correcting an error. Your reply seems irrelevant to my comment.
I was just saying that “one more than 0” isn’t a function just because in Peano arithmetic, the successor function, along with the constant 0, is used to denote natural numbers.
Long time OpenBSD fan. Used it as my daily driver for years before standardizing all computers at home to macOS. I still think about going back to openBSD one day, but it's no longer very practical as a daily driver.
I want to use OpenBSD for the next project I'm building. However, I can't wrap my head around the old way of doing deployments (before containers). People who've built production grade systems with OpenBSD:
1. How do you deploy software?
2. How do you manage fleets of servers?
3. How do you spin up/turn down servers from cloud providers? (I only know of Vultr who provided an OpenBSD option out of the box).
> Long time OpenBSD fan. Used it as my daily driver for years before standardizing all computers at home to macOS. I still think about going back to openBSD one day, but it's no longer very practical as a daily driver.
It's only practical for hobbyists. I used OpenBSD as a daily driver between 2001-2005. I fought, I suffered, I conquered, and I got tired of not being able to watch video on the web reliably and MacOS in those days was so clean and refreshing. I learned so much, though.
> I want to use OpenBSD for the next project I'm building.
I admire your open-mindedness. But ask yourself:
1. Do you want to have to upgrade fleets of servers every year with no exceptions for extended security support instead of 5 (or more if you're willing to pay) for LTS versions of Linux?
2. Who else will need to support it?
3. You will likely have worse performance if that matters.
> 1. How do you deploy software?
Honestly, not many people create their own services that run on OpenBSD. Those that do use old-school packaging and scripting. Tooling like ansible works.
> 2. How do you manage fleets of servers?
Ansible would be my go-to for classic fleets of servers.
> How do you spin up/turn down servers from cloud providers?
There are ports of cloud-init for OpenBSD. Creating images for third party OSes can be different levels of painful, depending on the cloud provider.
OpenBSD has virtualization out of the box now. Most of the benefit of containers you can get with chroot. I don't know if any of the developers are working on a true container/jail capability.
I'd like to see a more modern performant filesystem with OpenBSD but ffs has never really let me down. Capability for logical volumes and/or live resizing of partitions would be welcome as well.
I ended up having a work laptop that looks exactly like my personal laptop. After making an embarrassing mistake once, I picked up some stickers and stuck them on my office laptop.
Now, my work laptop looks clearly distinct, not just from my own personal laptop, but also from all the identical laptops other people at work bring to meeting rooms.
Yay! A tiny minuscule bit of my code is riding on these. While I no longer work there, I am absolutely thrilled at this milestone
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
So pornhub needs to see how many terabytes of content they host and use AI to generate 2x more terabytes of cat pictures and add them to a compliance tab on their home page now?
Seems annoying but not impossible to do.
Edit: I am happy to build a cat pic to porn ratio audit company if anyone is interested. I want to participate in the funniest regulatory process this will create
doubly so because you can create the cat pictures and make them technically accessible just by hosting them but you don't have to provide equal means of access between the cat pictures and the "cat" pictures. Users are guided to the content that they're actually there for and anyone who actually wants to see feline photos can navigate to their URLs manually. Every pic uploaded triggers generating another cat pic (or subtly altering one that exists) and now no minors are protected but your operating costs have gone up by a little bit and the government has established that it gets to decide what is appropriate for minors and can use violence to force the entire internet to meet that definition.
> I must say their 3-way merge tool is the best free software on Windows the only competing one, but less good, is p4merge, and it's closed source.
A long time ago, I used Araxis Merge[1] and I can strongly recommend it[2]. It was specifically better than both tortoise git and p4merge, after having used both of those options personally.
Indeed it seems to be a very good diff tool, plus the fact the license is for life.
But this is not the killer feature that will make me replace tortoise (in fact you can even configure tortoise to use an external diff tool different from theirs).
The killer feature for me is the revision graph [0], and even if tortoise is open source, I can't find something good enough on Linux/MacOS to approach the features of that said revision graph. But once again, please prove me wrong.
But I want to talk about how much free headspace Graham Hancock has managed to acquire. I thought about him the moment I saw this title. I'm sure some of you came to the comments looking for his name too.
But I am interested in the monero aspect here.
Should I treat this as some datapoint on monero’s security having held up well so far?