ifwinterco (u/ifwinterco)

ifwinterco commented on Should you take creatine? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84

gruez · 8 days ago

>No mention of potential hair loss. That alone makes it not with the risk.

source?

ifwinterco · 8 days ago

It's controversial/almost a meme at this point.

There is one study of rugby players done 20 years ago that claims creatine supplementation raises DHT levels, but it's never been replicated. I think the reason is everyone knows it probably won't replicate and rightly or wrongly nobody in academia cares about failed replication studies

ifwinterco commented on I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer drobinin.com/posts/how-i-... · Posted by u/valzevul

mft_ · 9 days ago

I enjoyed the humour. (We’re heading towards a sad world if any attempt at levity in an article is interpreted as evidence of LLM usage by critical killjoys.)

Edit: total random thought: something in your prose shouted ‘Brit’ to me very quickly. Is it possible that part of this is simply cultural differences in humour and writing, and over-interpretation of subtle differences as evidence of LLM use?

Or do LLMs just write in a subtlety more British style because, well, Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Milton? Or does ChatGPT just secretly channel PG Wodehouse?

ifwinterco · 9 days ago

Does sound like some people just don't get the humour which is fine, personally I liked it (but then I am british).

British people do tend to have a fairly humorous indirect way of communicating that can take some getting used to for people from other cultures, but that doesn't mean we're all secretly LLMs

ifwinterco commented on NIST Finalizes 'Lightweight Cryptography' Standard to Protect Small Devices nist.gov/news-events/news... · Posted by u/gnabgib

adgjlsfhk1 · 11 days ago

If these were faster than AES and as strong as AES, they would be replacing AES, not only being used for "lightweight devices unable to use AES"

ifwinterco · 11 days ago

Most modern processors have hardware support for AES, that's why it's fast. ChaCha is significantly faster when run on the CPU

ifwinterco commented on NIST Finalizes 'Lightweight Cryptography' Standard to Protect Small Devices nist.gov/news-events/news... · Posted by u/gnabgib

AyyEye · 11 days ago

> Meta reported they spend ~0.05% (1 out of every 2000 CPU cycles) on X25519 key exchange within the last year, which is quite significant.

That is not even remotely significant. Facebook spends 25% (1 out of every 4) of my CPU cycles on tracking. Pretty much anything else they optimize (are they still using python and php?) Will have a bigger impact.

ifwinterco · 11 days ago

Or just reduce the quality of served photos and videos by 0.05%, probably nobody would notice

ifwinterco commented on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack twitter.com/p3b7_/status/... · Posted by u/treyd

eurleif · 12 days ago

>so overall inflation is around zero

Pedantic point: monetary inflation is around zero, not necessarily price inflation (which is what people typically mean when they just say "inflation").

ifwinterco · 11 days ago

Yes sorry, important clarification.

In theory if the entire world was on an ethereum standard with a steady state population, price inflation would also average out to zero

ifwinterco commented on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack twitter.com/p3b7_/status/... · Posted by u/treyd

ChadNauseam · 12 days ago

why would staking rewards be any more necessary than mining rewards?

ifwinterco · 12 days ago

In the end state (after ~2140), mining rewards just come from TX fees. But true, it is possible you could just redistribute TX fees to stakers.

Post-merge ethereum is designed so that the gas fees and the staking rewards roughly cancel out on balance (so overall inflation is around zero), but they are decoupled so even if nobody is using the network you still get a staking yield

ifwinterco commented on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack twitter.com/p3b7_/status/... · Posted by u/treyd

api · 12 days ago

Sure, and this is well within the capabilities of any competent large intelligence agency.

It's only a secure system if adversaries are either small or economically rational.

ifwinterco · 12 days ago

For monero and other smaller chains maybe, but for BTC this is already at the point of being quite difficult (the intelligence agency really would have to be quite large).

The money is one thing, you also have to somehow acquire a huge % of the ASIC supply over years, and the not insignificant amount of energy to run them

ifwinterco commented on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack twitter.com/p3b7_/status/... · Posted by u/treyd

idiotsecant · 12 days ago

That's not at all relevant to parent post's point. BTC mining is famously centralized, and continues to get more so. It is inevitable that a manufacturer of BTC asics with access to cheap power will become large enough to control 51% of the hash. It's inevitable. It's bad system design - it makes being able to manufacture your own custom silicon table stakes to run a financial system for some reason.

BTC will have to move to a proof of stake design to survive. It's unavoidable.

ifwinterco · 12 days ago

That is debatable, but also besides anything else, changing to PoS means changing the tokenomics (some tail emission for staking rewards, no 21m hard cap), which means it's incredibly unlikely to happen

ifwinterco commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

bigfudge · 13 days ago

But this essentially has to collapse down to 2 or 3 parties unless these preferences are for graphically concentrated. Which they don’t seem to be. Reform might wipe out the tories with Lib Dem’s cleaning up the scraps, but that doesn’t really move us forward. In fact it’s likely to entrench the moderate left into holding their nose and voting labour?

ifwinterco · 13 days ago

Yes, with first past the post it will probably get pretty messy. Right now Reform are polling so well they would get a majority, but I'm not sure they'll sustain that until 2029, and whether they'll actually fix anything is questionable.

My gut sense is labour have pissed off people (including or perhaps especially the left) so badly that they are toast at this point. Those left wing votes are up for grabs by anyone who makes a decent case for them

ifwinterco commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

Roark66 · 13 days ago

And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not impossible. It happened before.

However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.

This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.

ifwinterco · 13 days ago

That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months it's all cracked wide open.

Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.

A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for