Readit Newshyper_reality commented on Traffic collisions including cyclists in London 2022 github.com/Lisa-Ho/30-day... · Posted by u/willm
This map looks cool but it doesn't tell us a lot about the safe and unsafe places to cycle in London. Because it's based on collision data by location, but we don't know how many people cycle on each road per year, so can't normalise for that.
To compare two examples, you can pick out Richmond Park in south-west London due to the low number of collisions in it. But this is actually a highly popular location to cycle. The relatively low amount of vehicles, 20mph speed limit, ban on large vehicles, high visibility, and few junctions, makes it a great place to cycle.
There are also a low number of collisions in the boroughs of Bromley and Bexley in south-east London. But this is not because they're safe, but because very few people cycle there. There are loads of fast roads in these boroughs and little cycle infrastructure, and more of an hostile attitude from drivers compared to many other places in London.
hyper_reality commented on Why we don’t generate elliptic curves every day words.filippo.io/dispatch... · Posted by u/mfrw
Are there cryptographers with dissenting opinions to this article, or is what the author writes about generally recognised best practice?
I ask because I remember an article a while back where this same author had very confidently got some details wrong about CloudFlare and I think the CEO or CTO or someone like that had to step in and correct him.
Are you sure you're thinking of the right author? Filippo used to work at Cloudflare so I can't imagine he got the technical details about it too wrong.
hyper_reality commented on The Matasano crypto challenges (2014) cryptopals.com/... · Posted by u/simonpure
are there any websites like this but in context of cybersecurity?
HackTheBox (https://www.hackthebox.com/) is the largest and most active hacker challenge website. Focussed mainly around black box pentesting of vulnerable Windows and Linux machines, but they have lots of other types of content these days too such as CTF challenges and paid lab environments.
hyper_reality commented on The Matasano crypto challenges (2014) cryptopals.com/... · Posted by u/simonpure
Another similar website for people who like this: https://cryptohack.org/
It is like cryptopals, but in a Catch The Flag format. Many challenges on cryptopals do exist on CryptoHack too, but CryptoHack also have some even harder challenges to solve.
Thanks for mentioning CryptoHack!
Yes while some challenges overlap, we also explore more deeply the mathematics of cryptography, as well as its practical use in protocols like TLS. We recently added challenges on lattice-based post-quantum cryptography. In this way it makes a great complement to CryptoPals.
But it's not all harder, our introductory section gradually introduces concepts like base64 encoding and the modulo operator one challenge at a time.
I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws:
- whenever possible, do no harm
- do not let harm occur due to inaction
- when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate
- higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)
- deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)
It kind of really brings to bear how much of a thematic device the 3 laws are. There's no way to make them congruent with actual, messy, real-world situations. Also why the whole "self-driving car trolly problem" is a non-issue - there will never be a situation where the "AI" has nice neat consequences and a binary choice laid out in front of it. It's always going to be some collection of "preserve life as best as possible" heuristics.
> - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)
Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making lobsters extinct would be very bad (unless they really hate lobsters).
The difficulty is when we can no longer rely on intuition and have to come up with a precise exchange rate of when one being's life is more valuable than another's, which, like you say, is impossible to do in the complicated world we live in and our limited understanding of consciousness and neuroscience. In absence of that, deferring to the first law "whenever possible, do no harm" seems sensible.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't think I can be held morally responsible for inaction in any circumstance. We didn't start the fire etc.
I answered "no pull" to every one except the one where the express goal was pranking the trolley driver (and no implied harm from pulling). This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but the only one I can reconcile with my own concept of responsibility.
To pick an extreme but well-known thought experiment. You are walking past a pond, and see a child drowning in it. You glance around and there is nobody else nearby. You could easily jump in and save the child. It will certainly die if you do not.
If you choose to do nothing and ignore the drowning child, are you really not morally responsible in any way for the child's death?
While I think it's possible you're right that the cyclists are usually the victims, that's not a foregone conclusion for at least two reasons:
- cyclists can hit pedestrians who are even more vulnerable. Pedestrians are also included in this analysis.
- as much as cyclists hate to hear it, they're the most reckless users of the road on average (even worse than scooter drivers). Every time I walk around in London I see them cutting red lights to conserve momentum, changing from using car rules to pedestrian rules when it helps them, driving quickly across pedestrian crossings (too fast for cars to see them coming), and other "convenient" actions that are hard for cars/pedestrians to safely deal with.
According to the Department for Transport's report, there were 41 pedestrians and 7 cyclists killed in traffic collisions in Greater London in 2022. Pedal cyclists were listed as the "other vehicle" involved in fatal collisions 0 times, while cars were listed 39 times, and goods vehicles 23 times. As stated "other vehicles" does not directly describe who is to blame for a collision, but it's a proxy measure for it. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/casualties-in-greater-london-2022...