I think this 6 set Venn Diagram is nice because I made it. :)
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irchans commented on Using information theory to solve Mastermind goranssongaspar.com/maste... · Posted by u/SchwKatze
The Kodak Research Labs (like Bell Labs) let their researchers play. In the 1960's my father (who later devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) coded this algorithm for "Jotto" the 5 letter word version of Mastermind.
Computers were so slow that one couldn't consider every word in the dictionary as a potential guess. He decided empirically on a sample size that played well enough.
I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.
> I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.
Very cool.
irchans commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224
On the other hand: Are you willing to pay hundreds of millions for developing the biggest data leak in human history, killing websites like Wikipedia in the process, while stopping only 10% of underage children from seeing porn?
The current systems being put in place in the UK are privacy-invading and ineffective. In my opinion they are worse than not having anything at all. I might be willing to change my viewpoint if something better comes along, but if a proper solution was so easy, why haven't we seen a peer-reviewed reference design yet? What's stopping the nerds from nerding harder?
So, I think that I can avoid a lot of the data leak problems.
There might be a simple way to do this with a crypto-currency. If possession of a credit card is considered proof of age, then possession of cryptocurrency should also be considered proof of age. Maybe the user could play $0.01 to the porn site using crypto currency to prove that he is over 18. If done properly, no one, not even the government, would know who the user was.
Here is another idea.
You have independent stores where the clerks can sell proof-of-age certificates to people. These certificates are essentially just 20 random Base64 characters. By law, the independent stores are not allowed to identify the customer (who pays with cash). The store clerk is only permitted to issue certificates to people who appear to be over the age of 18, no id required. The store keeps a list of every certificate that they have sold along with the month in which the certificate was sold so that the certificates can expire after several months.
Now I claim that it is possible to create open source zero knowledge proof software that runs on a server for each store, a few government certifying authorities, the porn websites, and on the users computer so that as long as the stores don't identify the users, no one will be able to identify the user. The government will not be able to tell which certificate was used to access the porn. The government will not have access to the certificates. It will not be able to tell which store issued the certificate. The porn site will not learn the certificate of the user nor will it know his identity.
Also, the number of lines of code needed for each program of the five needed open source programs will be less than 1000 lines, maybe less than 100 lines.
I think that all of this could be done at a cost of about $50,000 to develop the software plus the cost of running the servers. I feel like I could write all the code for less than that.
The system is not perfect. You have to trust the stores to not identify the customers and to do a decent job of identifying who is over the age of 18. Some kids will get certificates by copying their parent's code or copying the code of an older friend. Some 16 year olds will look like they are 18 and they will be able to buy proof of age certificates. But, over 80% of kids under 17 will not be able to view porn.
Despite the low cost and effectiveness of the idea above, I am not sure that it is a good idea. I don't like the government censoring content.
irchans commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224
Even after reading the article, I think there are reasonable ways to set up a low cost system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to "prove" your age without disclosing your identity. I do think that you will need trusted entities and the system will only stop most, maybe 80 or 90 percent of children under 18 from seeing porn. But, if you do this, then maybe 99% of kids under the age of 14 will have a lot of difficulty viewing porn which is a good thing. There may be valid a slippery slope argument for not setting up the age validation system even if everything I said above is true.
He also famously engineered a bomb hoax in highschool, down to building a ticking device that was heroically disabled by, iirc, the school principal. Today, such behavior would easily end in terrorism charges.
It is all laughing a fun, until you meet people whose futures were destroyed for doing far less in regards to fake weapons in schools.
My son accidentally brought a knife to school at age 12 -- maybe a 4 inch blade. When he realized that he had a knife in his backpack, he told his teacher. He was suspended from school for about 3 days and we had a fairly pleasant conversation with the principal after the suspension.
irchans commented on To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head the-nerve-blog.ghost.io/t... · Posted by u/mprast
I think I stumbled across a similar concept in the more difficult post-grad classes I ended up in a long time ago. I began at some point late in my undergrad doing math tests entirely in pen. I didn't understand why, but it resulted in higher scores almost always, and much neater scratchwork, which I had attributed to the reason, but I think what was helping was something along the lines of what this post is getting at.
What was helping me was that before I wrote a single expression, I thought about it carefully in my head and where it would lead before putting pen to paper, because I didn't want to make a bunch of messy scratch out marks on it. Or, sometimes, I'd use a healthy amount of throwaway scratch paper if allowed. Once my path was fully formed in my head I'd begin writing, and it resulted in far fewer mistakes.
I don't always take this approach to writing code but often I do formulate a pretty clear picture in my head of how it is going to look and how I know it will work before I start.
When I was in eighth grade my advanced algebra teacher said "I wonder if you always did your homework in pen, would you make fewer mistakes." That was 45 years ago. Now I am a mathematician and I have done 95% of my math in pen since then. I'm not sure how much it helped, but as you said maybe I think a bit more before I write because I don't like scratching out mistakes.
irchans commented on To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head the-nerve-blog.ghost.io/t... · Posted by u/mprast
This might be the best article that I have read this year. It might change the way that I program. I really want to write up examples for each of the ideas presented: Monotonicity, Pre- and post-conditions, Invariants, Isolation, Induction, and Proof-affinity as a quality metric. I think it's easy to find these ideas in my code, but I want to try to practice writing proofs "in my head" as I code to make my code better. It is not apparent to me now how this will work, but if I write up some examples, I imagine it will become clearer.
irchans commented on Rules of good writing (2007) dilbertblog.typepad.com/t... · Posted by u/santiviquez
> "the boy hit the ball"
In this sentence, boy=subject, hit=verb, ball=object.
> All brains work that way.
If language sentence structure reflects how brains think, then that's not entirely true. While most languages are SVO (subject-verb-object), not all are. Japanese is SOV (subject-object-verb), while biblical Hebrew is/was VSO (verb-subject-object). I'm sure there are other variations.
EDIT: it just occurred to me that Japanese SVO is syntactically similar to Forth/RPN.
Forth :) It's been like 30 years since I the last time I wrote a Forth program that was more than 10 lines long---fond memories.
irchans commented on Rules of good writing (2007) dilbertblog.typepad.com/t... · Posted by u/santiviquez
I believer there is an error in
"Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)".
It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)
https://chatgpt.com/share/690f675d-c340-8013-b598-41fe487b4e...
It has the nice properties that you can do any number of sets (in theory) and all the boundary intersections are either osculating or perpendicular.