The thought began, as many good things begin, in #trilema. Users of the WOT, of V, and other systems where your cryptographic identity is wholly in your own hands1 live with a certain risk of “cryptographic death” – i.e. the compromise of one’s signing key. A conscientious user of public key crypto might keep the […]

Phuctor is back! Now using Bernstein’s Algorithm (D. J. Bernstein. How to find smooth parts of integers.) The entire set is pairwise-GCD’d hourly.

“There are three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” (Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.) It is widely understood that early adopters of Bitcoin, who showed up on the scene in the days when mining difficulty was low, are sitting pretty, and will continue […]

The modern high-level-language programmer thinks (if he is of the thinking kind) of low-level system architecture as a stubborn enemy, or, at best, a harsh and indifferent force of nature. Anyone who suggests that everyday desktop apps ought to be written directly in a CPU’s native instruction set is viewed as much the same kind […]

Anyone who has read CS papers from ~1960-1980 and compared the original-idea-density to those of today might think forbidden thoughts. While meandering through stories of unorthodox computational architectures, I was overcome with a sharp feeling of “where are they now?” Who stole the original thinkers of that era, and planted type-theoretical bureaucrats in their place? […]