On the one hand writing logs can be tedious. Essentially logs are breadcrumbs signifying when significant state changes have logically taken place. From what I've seen, logs are added after every few lines and I always fantasized about creating a language where logging is "automatic".
On the other hand, writing logs is a skill worth mastering. Wrote too many and when a service crashes you have to shift through lots of noise and potentially miss the signal. I once went down a rabbit hole trying to root cause an issue in a Gunicorn application that had custom health check logic in it. An admin worker would read health check state from a file that worker threads wrote to. Sometimes a race condition would occur, in which an error log would be emitted. The thing was, this error wasn't fatal and was a red herring for why the service actually crashed. Of instead it would have been logged at the debug level a lot of time would have been saved.
Fine let LLMs write code but take logging seriously!!!
I've skimmed some literature on Quantum Crypto and from my understanding the outstanding issues currently are 1. How to make these work over long distances and 2. How to implement features found in PKI authentication (though QKD schemes are theoretically secure against MITM attacks, there still isn't a quantum cryptography scheme yet to ensure that you are talking to a non-adversary). There have been advances with the 1st problem, but the 2nd is trickier. Tbf, you don't strictly need PKE to have secure communication between 2 parties (look at Section 6 in https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/).
A lot of real world implementations of quantum crypto have been with respect to satellite communications, which makes sense. The satellite is usually built by the same actors who set up the communication links from the ground the satellite and quantum particles can be transmitted by laser. But as the article points out, it probably won't see widespread use for a while. There was a paper that came out recently called "How (not) to Build Quantum PKE in Minicrypt" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20295) and from my limited understanding of it, a quantum PKE system will likely have very little components from classical crypto incorporated into it. Not to mention that specially built devices have to be installed at ISPs, data centers, etc. for this to work.
Work in this space is valuable as a hedge against a world where all conventional crypto is broken. It also helps advance work in quantum mechanics more generally and other fields in physics and it's generally very interesting :)
My boyfriend woke up one day to find out they couldn't pee. After a few ER visits and an MRI, they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer. However, because they had the audacity to seek immediate medical treatment for a life threatening health issue, they have now been saddled with thousands of dollars in medical debt. I had to personally dip into my earnings from my Big Tech internship to help pay some of it off. Luckily through their job they have some of the best medical insurance in the state and have been getting treatment at UT Southwestern. They pay little, but there was an instance where one of their physicians had to appeal to insurance to get a scan done (thankfully the insurance acquiesced). It doesn't make sense and all this debate around single payer healthcare is just obfuscation and distraction from investigating actual solutions. The vast majority of doctors genuinely want to help people and are more I interested in practicing the skills they've honed for decades rather than deal with faceless automata at health insurance companies who deny claims upon a mere glance. As long as people like Rick Scott can not only get away with introducing inefficiencies in the system, but defraud people and get away with it with no consequences other than personal enrichment, we are doomed.
I probably am massively understating it yes, but I see no reason why an ecosystem around Monero can't flourish that enables sort-of smart contract capabilities. But like you said, it would take a huge amount of effort to enable smart contracts on Monero while not compromising privacy guarantees.
It does seem to be a tradeoff. Solana has smart contract support with low fees, but its network is very centralized compared to other ones and even went down twice. Despite being relatively young, they have flashy PR events in Lisbon and high profile VS backers to hype it up, but again so far most applications built on Solana go back to some form of tokenomics/financial engineering and NFTs.
Writing smart contracts is getting easier and easier with the barrier of entry being how much you're willing to spend on gas really. Hopefully they start expanding into more interesting apps.
That's true, but then again usually the miners using ASICs do so in large warehouses that draw lots of power and are part of large mining pools (some of which are publicly traded I believe) i.e it's easy to target a large portion of mining capacity with certain POW coins.
On the flip side, RandomX optimizing for general CPUs does mean that it can be easier for certain actors to launch a 51% attack on the network. However, it also means the network is more robust in a way. IMO it's a marginally better situation.
Anything I talk about below is not financial advice.
Full disclosure: My crypto holdings consist of around 1 ETH and $5 worth of BTC on Coinbase.
Anyone remember Monero? A POW crypto using state of the art cryptography such as ring signatures and Bulletproofs to guarantee private, secure transactions? It's secure enough that almost half of all dark web transactions are done using it despite its market cap being a fraction that of BTC. So secure that the IRS put out a $675,000 bounty for anyone who could find critical vulns. There's RandomX which is Monero's POW algo which is designed to run best on general CPUs and actually run terribly on ASICs? And to top it off, it has transaction fees in the fraction of cents.
With all of the talk by many crypto hustlers about banking the unbanked, "digital freedom", etc., that Monero would be perfect! So, why aren't VCs pouring money into developing it like they are into new web3 stacks?
It's because it's old news. It doesn't get enough eyeballs like a listing on Coinbase. You can't build digital fiefdoms using Monero, no ICOs, no pump and dumps. You can't have middlemen like OpenSea skim off the top and gatekeep. There's no artificial scarcity of coins. Monero isn't "useful" for the vision of web3 that investors have.
Most people don't have the time to read through every single whitepaper put out. It's easier to join a Discord server waiting for an airdrop, to read a bunch of Tweets, and check what's on Coinbase. It's just more convenient.
True, Monero doesn't have smart contract support and there are things like Tornado Cash which can emulate what Monero offers. Monero is still a sizeable player in the space and a lot of developers behind it. On top of that are all the controversies around Monero such as certain bad actors abuse CI integration services to mine it. But as the article points implies, for the majority of crypto investors/whales it's mainly about making a quick buck before moving on to the next pump.
I'm optimistic for a crypto future. Smart contracts are a great idea (though there's polishing needed) and there are other decentralized technologies out there I'm excited for. The Ethereum Foundation, Starkware, and others have helped push new and exciting cryptography research. Hopefully when the next correction comes, all the noise dissipates from the space.
This is mainly based off of the 2 "founders" at the end talking about the project. When they go scout for locations and one of the founders starts caressing the top of a thatch hut and the immediate next shot is a piece of paper taped to a tree with the title "Mercle Tree", that's when it clicked that this was a parody.
I am a 3rd year undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas majoring in computer science (and dabbling in quantum physics).
I'm looking for Summer 2022 internships/part-time work related to cutting edge cryptography research and security (doesn't have to be related to cryptocurrencies). Work related to Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Zero Knowledge Proofs is ideal.
I'm currently taking a graduate course in cryptography, am working through the Cryptopals Crypto Challenges (https://github.com/TheEnthralled/cryptopals), and am currently one of less than 100 students nationwide to complete task 1-7 of the 2021 NSA Codebreaker Challenge (https://nsa-codebreaker.org/home).
If you would like me to do some "pre-emptive onboarding" by reading up on material, sharpening skills, etc., before Summer 2022, I'm sure I'm able to do so.
During my junior year in high school my mom was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer.
It took an emotional toll on my family. I went to a competitive public high school so after feeling tired from school I would come back home and see my mom with a wig on or hooked up to a pneumatic pump which she still uses daily even after remission. It just made me feel even more depressed on top of the feeling I had of not being good enough to my peers. I even shamelessly tried to use this event in my college apps which was a terrible idea in hindsight.
But I realized that this mindset that I had wasn't productive. At least for me, I try to think about how there are people out there who have it way worse than me: abusive families, poverty, etc.. When I saw on Facebook that a classmate I knew had their mother pass from cancer and they still kept a positive attitude, I realized that my family had gotten lucky and that, for me, the problem I was dealing with wasn't so much my mom's cancer but my mindset.
So I would say just try to find something, anything, to be grateful for everyday. These things are emotionally devastating and I wish the best for your family.
People mention how building new fabs in the U.S would be a worthwhile yet extremely costly and risky investment that require a monumental undertaking that could only be done through massive tech firms and the U.S government.
What I don't see mentioned too often is promoting chip design. Compared to building a fab, making a startup that simply designs chips should be straightforward but through my initial research into it, that's not the case. Tech cos like Google and Amazon have already begun endeavors into in-house fabless chip design through ex.: TPU and Graviton, but hardware startups seem to be few and far between (there are a few like SciFive and Cerebras, but it's not like they are exactly ubiquitous).
In part it has to due with the huge complexity of modern day chips and the fact that if any new startup wants to be competitive it requires hiring talent with deep and niche industry experience.
I think what's more of an issue is accessibility for newcomers into the space. From what I've read, the top 3 EDA companies control the vast majority of their market and license their tools for hundreds of thousands of dollars. These tools aren't accessible to the majority of students and most likely fledgling startups. I know these tools are extremely complex, but it always stuck me as odd how IDEs like VS Code and the ones made by JetBrains are free or are priced so that the vast majority of developers (whether as individuals or as companies)can afford it, while the top of the line EDA tools are only accessible by established players. I know there is an open source effort to change this, but there's a long way to catch up.
Maybe things will change. AMD started out reverse engineering Intel chips and now are beating Intel in most metrics. Hopefully hardware becomes more hyped over time just as machine learning and software startups have.
I'm a student attending UT Dallas.
Not only am I in the honors programs there, but I also have an AES scholarship which grants me a stipend of $3,000 per semester.
I know several people who've gotten into prestigious institutions such as John Hopkins who are going to UTD instead.
It's not like options don't exist. Yeah UTD isn't some brand name, but it's a good starting point.
I blame universities to some degree for this problem, but I also blame consumers. I was once a starry-eyed high school student who applied to the likes of CMU and got rejected from all save UTD and A&M, with A&M basically giving me nothing. People realize that these schools open doors through elite social connections, more so than say UTD, but you can still network outside these elite institutions, it'll just be a little harder.