Last year Ethan Heilman wrote about a simple game he calls Terminal Maneuvers . This game simulates a missile attacking an interstellar ship. The ship has a laser defence system. One player controls the missile, and the other player controls the laser. If the missile hits the ship, Missile wins. If the laser hits the missile, the missile is destroyed and Laser wins. The complicating factor is…
Four years ago I bought a pair of YubiKey 5s: One YubiKey 5 Nano, which fits in my laptop’s USB slot, and another YubiKey 5 NFC as backup, which sat in my home office. However, I kept worrying about what happens if my house burns down or something, taking both my laptop and office YubiKeys together at the same time. On the otherhand, if I stored my YubiKey 5 NFC offsite, then whenever I…
Last week, Taproot activation locked-in within the “Speedy Trial” activation parameters. Speedy Trial is often described as a kind of “try-and-see” or “fail-fast” approach to activation. While this is a fair description, it is not how Speedy Trial was designed. I would like to write about how Speedy Trial was designed and why it is the way it is. This article…
I am so excited to read today that the Liberal government is planning to raise the tax on carbon up to $170 per tonne by 2030. The biggest problem with the previous carbon pricing program was that $50 per tonne was way too low. The price needs to be large enough such that capturing carbon is preferable to paying the tax. This announcement would finally put us into that ballpark. Last fall I was…
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo and behold, I found GCC bug #95189: memcmp being wrongly stripped like strcmp .…
It is time to announce the results from Stochastic Elections Canada for the 43 rd General Election. Every vote counts with the stochastic election process , so we had to wait until all election results were validated before we could announce our results. However, stochastic election results are not very sensitive to small changes to the number of votes counted. The distributions for each candidate…
The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, isonomia, and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public. — Herodotus In Athenian democracy, sortition was used to select their magistrates in order to avoid the oligarchs buying their way into the office. What would happen if we used a form of…
Many articles have been written on the EPR paradox and Bell’s inequality. I want to write down, for my own reference, what the crux of the paradox is, how it relates to a counterfactual definiteness, what the various philosophical resolutions are, and why I feel that Everett’s many worlds interpretation is the least objectionable. By and large, I will be following Guy Blaylock’s…
On Hacker news , imh asks, I never understood the step about how a system that can do basic arithmetic can express the "I am not provable in F" sentence. Does anyone have an ELI30 version of that? I think this is a great question and I would like to try to answer it. First of all, it is important to understand that we have quite a bit more than just basic arithmetic. Let us define basic arithmetic…
Does this sound familiar? You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson process, which is memoryless. Even though it has been 7…