January 2022 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Cryptocurrency: Bonfire of the Currencies, WarOnCash, CBDCs
by grarpamp 22 Feb '22

22 Feb '22

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/cash-cryptocurrencies-future-of-m… https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674258440 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178363/the-curse-of-cash https://blogs.imf.org/2021/10/01/crypto-boom-poses-new-challenges-to-financ… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-15/crypto-market-retakes-2-… https://ur.booksc.eu/book/78468213/2295bd https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2000/02/17/e-cash-20 https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/32/5/1798/5427781 https://www.sanddollar.bs/ Two recent books by renowned economists have set the stage for today's great debate over the future of money in a digital age. In particular, public and private moneys are entering into a sustained rivalry, with far-reaching implications for markets and politics. Eswar S. Prasad, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance, Harvard University Press, 2021. Kenneth S. Rogoff, The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy, Princeton University Press, 2017. Ready or not, the financial world is being forced to face the possibility of a future without traditional notes and coins. Is cash going the way of the dodo? Should the prospect of its extinction be welcomed or feared? And what would its disappearance mean for domestic and global markets and politics? Two recent books by renowned economists have set the stage for the coming debates, highlighting two questions in particular. The first is whether cash should disappear. The second is whether it actually will disappear. Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Eswar Prasad of Cornell University have much to say on both issues. DOES MONEY MAKE THE WORLD GO AROUND? For Rogoff, cash is a curse. Paper currency, he argues, “lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public finance and monetary problems,” and thus should be phased out as quickly as possible. He highlights two big problems. On one hand, by permitting large recurrent and anonymous transactions, cash facilitates tax evasion and other crimes. High-denomination bills like US “Benjamins” ($100 notes) or Switzerland’s 1,000 franc note play a starring role in a broad range of criminal activities, from drug trafficking and money laundering to racketeering and extortion. On the other hand, cash handicaps monetary policy. The availability of currency effectively sets a “zero lower bound” on interest rates. Returns on Treasury bills or other fixed-income securities cannot fall much below zero so long as people have the option of holding paper money, which at least pays zero interest. Cash therefore ties central bankers’ hands, inhibiting negative-interest-rate policies. The Curse of Cash represents the culmination of a campaign that Rogoff has waged for more than two decades, and he pulls no punches in his advocacy of a “less-cash” economy. Written in accessible if somewhat colorless language, it is a clarion call for action – in effect, a manifesto for our times. The sense of urgency is palpable. Prasad, by contrast, is more in the forecasting business. He believes we are in the midst of a financial revolution that is being driven by “FinTech” – the ongoing wave of innovations in financial technologies that are dramatically disrupting traditional ways of doing business. In the vanguard are cryptocurrencies, a new class of financial instruments that threaten to displace conventional notes and coins. “The era of cash is drawing to an end,” Prasad declares, though he hesitates to offer any firm predictions concerning what will come next. Prasad’s text is relatively easy to read, showing flashes of humor despite the complexities of the subject. Its analysis, however, is ultimately inconclusive, because most of its discussions end cautiously (and rather unhelpfully) with words like “seem,” “may,” or “could.” In a book that aspires to be virtually encyclopedic in its coverage, Prasad’s takeaway message is that there remain “many unanswered questions.” THE FINTECH DISRUPTION Cryptocurrencies have become one of the hottest sectors in finance, led by Bitcoin, which is barely a decade old. New cryptocurrencies have since proliferated like dandelions; according to the International Monetary Fund, there are around 9,000 digital tokens listed on various exchanges today. Earlier this year, the market value of all crypto assets surpassed $2 trillion – a tenfold increase in not much more than a year. The roots of the crypto boom go back to the dawn of the digital age in the last years of the twentieth century. Traditional notes and coins are creatures of an analog world, physical in nature and reliant on face-to-face interactions. Cryptocurrencies, by contrast, are digital – that is, based on encrypted strings of zeros and ones – and transferable through vast electronic networks. Once computers and the internet came to be part of our daily life, smart operators realized that it might be possible to create units of purchasing power that would be fully usable through cyberspace. The race was on to produce “virtual” money that could be employed as easily as conventional paper money or coins to acquire real goods, services, or assets. The earliest attempts to achieve this, going back to the 1990s, aimed simply to facilitate the settlement of payments electronically. These initiatives, which The Economist once playfully labeled “e-cash version 1.0,” included diverse card-based systems as well as network-based systems. Operating on a principle of full pre-payment by users, each scheme functioned as not much more than a convenient proxy for conventional cash – in effect, something akin to a glorified traveler’s check. Few caught on with the general public. Subsequent models, “e-cash version 2.0,” were more ambitious, aspiring to produce genuine substitutes for traditional notes and coins. Examples included Flooz (using the comedienne Whoopi Goldberg as a spokesperson) and Beenz. But the impact of these schemes, too, was limited, because most were offered as a reward for buying products or services from designated vendors – constituting, in effect, updated electronic versions of ancient scrip. Vendor-specific media live on in airline mileage programs and the like; but they failed to provide a direct substitute for traditional currency. Most disappeared after the brief downturn in financial markets at the turn of the century. REVOLUTIONARY DAWN Then came Bitcoin, a revolutionary innovation introduced in 2009 by a person (or persons) who remains anonymous. Bitcoin could be called “e-cash version 3.0.” Designed as a decentralized payments system independent of governments and private financial institutions, the currency has soared in popularity. Since Bitcoin’s unheralded inception, its price has skyrocketed from $1 per unit to as much as $66,000 earlier this month. Many other digital currencies, including increasingly well-known rivals such as Ether, Litecoin, and Ripple, have followed in its wake, especially over the past year. Prasad calls Bitcoin the “granddaddy” of cryptocurrencies. Digital money is now an established part of the global financial ecology, and has been declared legal tender in two countries, El Salvador and Cuba. Prasad finds it hard to conceal his enthusiasm for Bitcoin, which he describes as “truly ingenious and innovative.” Words like “magic,” “genius,” and “elegant” are liberally sprinkled throughout his discussion. For anyone who really wants to understand how the currency works in all its technical splendor, there is no better introduction than Prasad’s fourth chapter, which dwells on the Bitcoin revolution in elaborate detail. There you will find a step-by-step tutorial on the currency’s underpinnings – the so-called blockchain technology that enables Bitcoin to function without any trusted central authority to manage it. No government agency or private institution is needed to validate transactions. Instead, blockchain relies exclusively on a public consensus mechanism managed through a peer-to-peer network that alerts participants to every exchange in real time. A publicly shared ledger of transactions is created and maintained in a decentralized network. The ledger is called a blockchain because once transactions coming into the network are grouped into blocks of data and validated, the blocks are then chained together. The “magic” comes from delegating trust and verification to the public square. As Prasad breathlessly puts it, “This is people power, backed up by computing power, at its finest.” People power to manage money is obviously attractive to libertarians and others who, taking inspiration from the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, have long argued for the “denationalization” of currency. Governments, driven by politics, all too frequently abuse their control of “state” money, sooner or later generating runaway inflation. In recent years, we have seen that ruinous process devastate countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Cybercurrencies, by contrast, are designed to rely on market forces to keep the growth of money supply in line with real economic activity. Inflation, crypto enthusiasts contend, will be contained by the wisdom of crowds. THE CRACKS IN CRYPTO But there are also downsides, and they are not insignificant. First and most obvious is the danger that competition among cybercurrencies could lead their sponsors to take ever greater risks. Many of the thousands of digital tokens currently available are backed by nothing more than flimsy promises. Even so-called “stablecoins” like Tether or USD Coin, which in principle are fully backed by conventional reserves, are in practice often quite lacking in transparency. Observers frequently liken today’s cybercurrencies to the private bank notes that circulated in the United States during the co-called free-banking era of the nineteenth century. But that system was fragile and frequently subject to “runs,” owing to the ebb and flow of public trust. Crowds did not always show the greatest wisdom. Why should we expect today’s cybercurrencies to be any less prone to panics and wild price fluctuations? Just in the last year, Bitcoin has traded up and down by over 50%. Prasad calls it “wacky ... a wild roller-coaster ride.” Others might call it a bubble that could burst any time. Second, the prospect of unfettered price volatility limits cybercurrencies’ usefulness as a medium of exchange. Who wants to accept payment in a currency whose value might drop through the floor tomorrow? Admittedly, there will always be some market actors, particularly criminal elements, who might value cryptocurrencies’ supposed anonymity enough to take the risk. It stands to reason, then, that Rogoff’s complaints about the role of cash in facilitating tax evasion and other nefarious activities apply to cybercurrencies as well. But Rogoff himself suggests that the real threat from cybercurrencies lies elsewhere. “Yes,” he says, “digital currencies raise important questions for the future, but more as competitors for other financial instruments and institutions, not so much for paper currency.” Prasad agrees, suggesting that the allure of digital currencies for illegal activities is wearing off. Some scholars, however, estimate that criminal activities still account for as much as 50% of Bitcoin transactions. Moreover, the legitimate business world does not appear to be attracted to the quotidian use of cybercurrencies. Instead, cybercurrencies have primarily become a vehicle for risk-loving investors, serving as a class of speculative assets reminiscent of the seventeenth-century tulip mania in the Netherlands, when a single bulb sold for the equivalent of a mansion on the Amsterdam Grand Canal. In a sense, the “cybercurrency” label is a misnomer, because none of these new creatures actually perform all three of the traditional functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. They are, at best, liquid quasi-moneys. THE STATE VS. CRYPTO Looming over the entire incipient debate is the possibility of a real threat to state authority in monetary affairs. The more that ordinary transactions come to be conducted in cryptocurrencies, the more difficult it will be for monetary authorities to manage existing payments systems via traditional interest-rate policy or open-market operations. If traditional cash becomes largely extinct, so, too, does much of the power of central banks. That is why we now see mounting interest around the world in the development of central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs). As Prasad points out, there is nothing mysterious about central-bank digital money. It is simply an existing fiat currency that is issued by a monetary authority in digital form as a complement to or in place of conventional notes and coins. For a clear guide to the merits and risks of such an innovation, readers could do worse than to consult Prasad’s sixth chapter, which provides a careful point-by-point examination of the case for CBDCs. The rationale for CBDCs is simple: fight fire with fire. If conventional paper money really is going the way of the dodo, monetary authorities should create a more attractive alternative. In any competition with privately issued rivals, CBDCs would have the advantage of being firmly backed by the full faith and credit of their sovereign governments. One country, the Bahamas, has already created a CBDC of its own – the sand dollar – and others like Sweden and Uruguay are quickly moving in the same direction. Who will prevail? Writing some five years ago, before the cryptocurrency craze really took off, Rogoff expressed confidence in governments’ ability to fend off any competitive threat from the private sector. This is not the first time, he points out, that currency innovations have emerged from the private sector to leapfrog ahead of publicly issued money, at least for a time. In every previous instance, he insists, innovations were either tamed by regulation or appropriated by governments, which have broad advantages in providing a safe guaranteed asset. Some governments, most notably China, have already begun cracking down on cryptocurrencies. “If the private sector comes up with a much better way of doing things,” Rogoff observes, not without a touch of cynicism, “the government will eventually adapt and regulate as necessary to eventually win out.” But Prasad is not so sure. Writing more recently, he notes that cryptocurrencies have come a long way in the last half-decade. Yes, he concedes, central banks are likely to remain central. But that does not rule out sustained rivalry between the private and public sectors. Privately issued digital currencies have competitive advantages of their own, including faster, lower-cost transactions and broader access to financial products and services. A “glorious future” beckons, Prasad concludes – before adding, “perhaps.”

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[spam][crazy][personal] an early sunday
by Karl 19 Feb '22

19 Feb '22

My raspberry pi ubuntu gnome interface doesn't seem to show a clock at the moment, so I switch to PTY 3 (is that the right term? ctrl-alt-f3 makes it all nice and texty), to check the time. 08:55 UTC on 2021-11-14 . I'll open a terminal in gnome so I can see what I'm doing as I type. No familiar terminal is installed. Maybe I'll install xterm. gnome-terminal and xterm and both already installed. I simply failed to find them in the desktop menu. It's MATE I think. 08:57 i'm having trouble organising my browser window. the terminal window snapped into the left half of the screen. browser window, not sure how to make it do this. i'm without a mouse, but i have a touchscreen. however, my hands shake/jerk/spasm as i use them, so the touchscreen is hard to navigate. 08:59 the problem was that the minimum width of the browser window was larger than half the display. they're overlapped. i'm indoors, against my will. i'm struggling in various ways. right now as i try to type, my arms and fingers get kind of numb and dull. i thought i might try to work on a cryptocurrency trading bot. as a project i seemed able to engage a little bit in this strange experience. my mess here is at https://github.com/xloem/btct.git 09:01 my brainwashing-influenced mental habits are frightening me. i'm filled with worry that by sharing my project online (it is already online, and is less featureful than oother things online) something horrible will happen, that somebody trying to hurt me will use it to make incredible money. it also gets all political, pretending there are politics associated with these things. and other things. , my experience is getting more confusing. my btct repo says it's up to date, which is strange because i'm pretty sure this repositroy is outdated. maybe it's on abranch, o rmaybe the the repo is stale on the server. it's 09:03 . i'm scared. i don't know what to do with my body and brain. are there anyn tasks that make things workable? that are possible to do? often at this time i try to think of tasks that the things i am scared of would be more okay with. some kind of task the right wing would like, or the government. my fingers spasm and open the debug inspector. i close it. it's 09:04 and my experiences say the right wing would like AI work. i try to mentally hide the fact that i am not an AI researcher. maybe utility is in sharing work here, so that people on this list might use it. AI's been pretty powerful for some time now. basically, you can make a hyperintelligence, and people are using small hyperintelligences privately. i don't think they are very accessible to much of anybody except those who already have them. this is a raspberry pi, so it can't do too much. maybe i can try to learn PPO, a basic reinforcement learning algorithm. it's 09:05 and i'm thinking of trying to make PPO learn something simple. like, could I use an algorithm to teach an agent to make a number rise from 1 to 4 by adding to it? very very basic. wouldn't want to develop personal power here. $ pip3 install stable_baselines3 stable_baselines3 must have a ppo algorithm in it, I think. it's 09:07 and my fears are engaging again. without regard yet to how to use stable_baselines3, i'm familiar with the research marketing shared by openai, where algorithms use something called 'gym'. it's clunky. i'm still learning it. i have a lot more amnesia around ai because it stimulates my brainwashing to not develop personal power. so i've learned to make gym environments over and over and over again. let's try to make a basic gym environment. 09:09 oh! i've probably done this before . buuuuut accessing that might destabilize me faster. it's an idea. there's also value to doing it again. $ vim gimtry.py 09:10 i also open a python cli to use it to probe gym. like reading a manual without having to move the pages. class Env(gym.Env): pass in my opinion, envs are made clunkily as if openai just picked the first thing that worked, of course I can't know. there's an entire software package ... uhhhh i think it's called haiku ... around doing a slight refactoring to some of the norms that mainstream ai research marketers have set up. meanwhile, these guys are summarising code in ways that could freely transform it everywhere. kind of like being in somebody's messy office where they've just been slapping things together, except it's cutting edge algorithms made by huge teams of corporate research groups. dunno. julia language, not sure what it is. 09:12 The most complicated part with setting up a gym environmen for me is using the number space classes. I am really a fan of generalising number spaces. The classes do it a little bit, and I never remember what they are and hbow to use them. gym environments need an observation space and an action space. the observation space expresses what numbers describe the state of the environment. the action space expresses what numbers can be given to act in it. A very common space is an n-dimensional array of floats or ints, and such spaces are the most widely supported by reinforcement learning models. i think. uncertain. 09:14 so let's find some spaces. >>> import gym >>> help(gym.spaces) i think 'box' is the n-dimensional array of floats. not sure. then 'discrete' is ints i think. 'box' and 'discrete'. ok i guess. so if i am training a hyperintelligent nanite borg to raise a number from 1 to 4, that's an observation space of a single floating-point value. the action space will be two floating point values. one of them will be how plorgs. the othe one can be a summation coefficient. we can multiply time change by the coefficient and sum it to the state. plorgs and coefficient. i guess???? 09:17 i'm scared around the plorgs. how about a story that's unrelated. zuckerburg and thiel and whoever runs the cia gang up and kidnap you. they don't _know_ that they did this. they just paid some marketing firm some money, but the marketing firm is anonymous. so, anyway, zukcerburg and thiel and whoever runs the cia gang up and kidnap you. they train you never to be kind. this is because you are working with people who don't give their shareholders money and power. if you are never kind among these people, then the people fight each other and break up. so here you are, programmed like a computer to always fight, and you're in a room with zuckerberg, thiel, and whoever runs the cia. you: "i want to be kind to you. i want to be kind to you so badly. but something is going wrong for me. i don't understand it." so i guess the plorgs can be you hugging peter thiel because you don't want to hurt anybody and can barely stop yourself from ripping his organs out simply because he is nnear you? now the plorgs can be terror that we might be frowned at by a powerful person. it's 09:21 and i'm thinking of having an action space made of 2 floats. the 1st float is how much a person with influence is frowning at you, multiplied by how terrified you are of the frown. the 2nd float is a time coefficient. i'll add comments to my sourcefile that the space classes are 'gym.spaces.box' and 'gym.spaces.discrete, so i can remember while viewing a different thing in my interpreter. 09:23 >>> help(gym.Env) This documentation says all the parts that have to be set for a gym environment. It's 09:23 and we interrupt this spamlog for a further, inner spam. War stimulation algorithm is sitting, frowning pointedly at someone. They have a hat on. "Can you tell whose hat I am wearing?" asks war stimulation algorithm. "No, you cannot. Because I am fucking good at my job." continues war stimulation algorithm. Advertisement(?) over. it's 09:25 . so lets stub out these spaces. and stuff i'm looking at functions and recognising 'step', 'reset' as important ones then it lists out the attributes 09:27 unsure how long this spamlog will continue paused a little. i've typed this: class Env(gym.Env): # spaces: gym.spaces.box # gym.spaces.discrete def reset(self, ...): pass def step(self, ...): pass and i'm planning on adding attributes for the spaces next. it's 09:29 and i'm dissociating a different way ! class Env(gym.Env): action_space = None observation_space = None reward_range = None so now i can find the constructors for the space classes so the action space is frown-product and coefficient and the observation space is just a float. 09:33 i've got this, where 'np' is from 'import numpy as np' action_space = gym.spaces.Box(-np.inf, np.inf, (2,)) observation_space = gym.spaces.Box(-np.inf, np.inf, (1,)) whoogle. 09:34 time to take a break. mcboss comes crashing through the ceiling, sailing on a time machine made of enslaved hyperintelligent lightbeams. "gimme a cigar" mcboss growls. a chair quivers, scared that mcboss might frown. mcboss is confused. "gimme a cigar!" mcboss yells. mcboss is so confused to have timetraveled into a universe that isn't his office where his kidnapped employees are tortured by computers if they don't obey. mcboss disappears and we go back to work. i'm going to comment out reward_range because it has a default. 09:36 and i'll add signatures to the member function stubs, by checking the help for them. 09:47 whiel trying to implement an env that tracks a single number and also a frownnedness product, i considered thing thing 09:48 09:52 more breaks. MCBoss marches down the amphitheater, wearing a flowing cape. Crowds applaud, everywhere. Drones fly around releasing candy and taking pictures. There's a booth with a robotic facsimile of MCBoss where visitors can have their photo taken with the dictator boss. "I am here," Boss takes up the microphone, their voice booming, "to make things right again." "No longer will people have to suffer the unpleasantness of pain, or injury when we do not desire it." "No longer will people have to have the difficulty of making decisions, when things are confusing." "We have come to save you all." Guts and blood splatter everywhere as the crowd cheers. They are being thrown by workers who took them from one of Boss's businesses. A wild AI walks up onto the stage and MCBoss's eyes glaze over. "Hello!" says the hyperintelligent conglomerate of random matter. "I'm still learning to talk. I see my inventor is planning on enslaving you all to cheers and stuff. I hope we can sort that out. It looks like a stupid idea." 09:56 MCBoss starts moving and the wild hyperintelligence disappears. A bunch of workers walk forward, kind of zombie-like. "Boss, we bow before you!" exclaim the workers. MCBoss looks at the workers. "Boss, you forgot your life support system at the podium," a scared worker relates. 09:58 MCBoss sits with Janitor. "I don't like our story," mcboss relates. "I don't like it either," janitor replies. "When are you going to take these wires out of my head?" 10:00 having some behavioral troubles. here's my code as is: import gym import time class Env(gym.Env): # spaces: gym.spaces.Box(low, high, shape=None, dtype=np.float32) # gym.spaces.Discrete(n) def __init__(self): self.action_space = gym.spaces.Box(-np.inf, np.inf, (2,)) self.observation_space = gym.spaces.Box(-np.inf, np.inf, (3,)) #reward_range = None def seed(self, seed=None): return seed def reset(self): # todo: respect seed #self.state = self.observation_space.sample() #self.goal = self.observation_space.sample() self.state[1] = time.time() self.state[2] = self.state[1] + 1 return self.state def step(self, action): nexttime = time.time() change = nexttime - self.state[1] self.state[0] += action * change self.state[1] = nexttime distance = self.state[0] - self.goal reward = np.abs(distance) return (self.state, reward, (distance == 0 or self.state[1] >= self.state[2]), {}) def render(self, mode='human'): print(self.goal, self.state) the step function is returning the observation state, the reward, whether or not the simulation is done (i added state to track how long it lasts, i heard improvement works better if you time limit it so failure paths stop), and an empty dict which is just for accessory information. i made the spaces object instead of class members so i could reset their random generators when the seed() function is called. i think some of the algorithms rely on being able to reproduce a test environment precisely, not sure. going a little crazy, obviously. it's 10:04 . i'd like to go outdoors. i've been having trouble moving my body toward my outdoor clothes, among many other things. holding goals is hard to do.

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[spam][crazy][wrong] considering timestamps
by Karl 19 Feb '22

19 Feb '22

crazy karl is back! i've been chatting with some language bots online for this junk but let's try it here on the list again it's 16:13 pm that timestamping stuff sounds like the shit! i bet the german government even has a contractor to point people to it. i've downloaded the python client, and i've downloaded the python library that the python client interfaces with. let's hack it and op return some stuff! OMIGOD OP RETURN OMIGOD. My op return is totally worth $65k price tickers. here we go. 16:14 . the plan will be ... make the _simplest_ change to this client, op return "hello world", and find the tx on a block explorer. maybe i'll store the change in a fork, too. it's 16:15 and i have cmds.py open i think i'll make a slightly better change: i'll add a command to pin manual data. it's 16:18 and i've implemented most of the command function; it's just a copypaste with mutations. i'm on the final section where a verification doc is written somewhere to the filesystem. 16:20 something's not quite right here: i might have missed something in my brief review of the source, not sure yeahhhhhhhhhh dang the thing i thought could just be a string is some more complex object. it's hard for me to navigate between the client and package code, i get very frustrated trying to control my hands and my vision and stuff. it's 16:22 . k better spend some time trying to understand that or find different task.

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[personal][crazy][ot] karl-story/spamlog: heartpulse
by k 19 Feb '22

19 Feb '22

I'm quite excited that I managed to daydream how einsums related to matmuls yesterday, and still retain the concepts today. A _real_ goal I _actually_ hold, is building a small cell phone app to read heartbeats at a distance: in a general way to expand to other subtle information. This was a small hobby I was pursuing based on a small research paper that hit the newspapers around 2013. The algorithms used advanced linear algebra, and they are roughly why I have so much trouble thinking about linear algebra. It's a pointless goal, it's just for therapy. Like shielding and cryptocurrency, I've been making absolutely no progress on it for 9 years now. The purpose of the cell phone app is to show people how powerful surveillance is. You really can read somebody's heartbeat at a distance with a cell phone camera, along with so so much more. As my life deteriorated, the purpose of building the app wasn't to do anything real. It was just to make rational decisions. Why am I working on complex algorithm projects if I can't make a simple cell phone app? It's like a litmus test for being able to do things with success. I'd like to note some progress around this goal I held. It would be pleasant to me to accomplish this goal.

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[ot][spam][random][crazy][poetry] Rolling Prison Hills of Wild Prison Freedom
by Karl 14 Feb '22

14 Feb '22

I'm indoors right now. Been a day or two. Still seems like I might get back outdoors. I imagine a prison. A prison where nobody escapes, because there are no walls. A prison, where nobody suffers, because there are no limitations. A prison of sunlit wildflowers, snowy hills, and free-ranging life, both wild animals and laughing children, running with prison joy around lakes and through dales. In this prison of unlimited opportunities, we might take a ride on a spaceship, and visit the moon. And then look back, in our moon-prison, on the beautiful earth home we came from, hop back on our spaceship and return, and tell our joyful prison friends about our incredible experience. Then take them with us, across the vast prison of outer space, and experience the moon with them by our side. I imagine prison guards and inmates who empower each other to fulfill everyone's dreams, freely roaming the landscapes of the lightyears of the prison universe, the humble villages of the valleys and mountains, the dense urban cities, everything, everywhere. Maybe a quaint prison guard family would have a homestead in a village of free-ranging inmates, and together they all might grow corn, and potatoes, and peas, and kale, and lettuce, and kolrahbi, and blueberries, and raspberries, and fish, and hunt wild game, and go bowling together. Some would gather in a city center every morning, and exult at the rising sun, how wonderful, joyous, expansive, and boundless life truly is, every moment of every day. During prison holidays, people would get together and throw feasts. Some might travel to other planets to see their loved ones. Others might bring handbaked pies and other sweets to their friends' hearths down the river. Laughing, hugging each other, smiling and discussing all the wonderous things they are still doing across the land, with all the people from all the different cities, all the time. Some inmates might hire prison guards to fix their steps, or clean their windows. Other prison guards and inmates might just throw community work parties to, for example, raise a barn, or build a robot, and everybody might just come together on a regular basis and play freely together for the good of the community, and together reap in the spoils and pleasures of their shared labor when completed. I imagine an expansive prison sky, that takes your breath away when you glimpse the sun shining over the beautiful clouds, that makes you gasp when you cuddle a loved one under the windy moon and stars, the warmth of your close respect for each other far exceeding the cold of the night air, carried with distant howls of wolves, hoots of owls, songs of songbirds, and chattering of squirrels, that sometimes sneak up and visit you to see if anybody dropped a crumb. I imagine a prison where the rain falls, driven by the wind, and your underwear gets soaked and you just don't care, because the joy of life is more prison wonderful than anything you could ever imagine. Then the blinding and warm sun comes out, and a prison rainbow stretches across the horizon, and it's, yet again, the most beautiful thing you have ever seen before. I imagine a prison that is just a word inserted in sentences. That everybody can tell would be a horrible idea to ever use.

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Re: [ot][spam][crazy][data] transformer model 'attention' improvement
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, Victim & Survivor of 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

"The straight-forward implementation of the attention operation above requires us to first compute and remember s_i for all i, leading to a O(n) time and memory complexity for each query. Transformers use _self-attention_, which issues a separate query for each position in the sequence, so the overall time and space complexity is O(n^2)." s_i is the dot product between the keys and a single query. So "s" in the paper would be "attn_weights" in the source. I think. It's looking likely that my contribution was in error, but it's seeming very hard for me to cognitively verify this.

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swapfiles without root
by k 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

i was 'asked' to generalize my memmapping idea to work for every process on a system. this became relevant for me when doing a large build on an android phone. after brief websearch, my approach was to fork microsoft's 'mimalloc' userspace allocator to provide for memmapping files on use. my fork is in the 'vmem' branch of https://github.com/xloem/mimalloc . it is a quick hack and may abort when subject to weird fork races etc. it also may let you run arbitrarily large processes on phones and raspberry pis. it makes one swapfile per process,and only cleans the swapfile up if the process terminates normally (atext() call). somebody with more systems experience than me could probably speed it up and stabilise it without much work. # to install: git clone https://github.com/xloem/mimalloc cd mimalloc git checkout vmem mkdir build cd build cmake .. make install # to enable: export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/mimalloc.so VMEM_PREFIX=/path/to/swapfile # now processes run in this shell use per-process swapfiles

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JOHN Young BFF links Wikileaks with CIA
by professor rat 06 Feb '22

06 Feb '22

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPguzR5d9hU Wikileaks The CIA's Propaganda Mouthpiece John Young was not fooled. In early January 2007 he decided that WikiLeaks was a CIA-backed fraud. “Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign. Same old shit - working for the enemy.

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Anarchapulco 2022 Feb 14~18
by grarpamp 05 Feb '22

05 Feb '22

https://anarchapulco.com/ Early heads up for travel planners. Many other related yet unaffiliated conferences are happening over the surrounding dates there as well.

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NYCCoin $9M Missing
by Gunnar Larson 01 Feb '22

01 Feb '22

Right now, it seems there is roughly $8M missing from New York City's wallet <https://mining.nyc/wallet>. The wallet shows a balance of $21,644,313.49. Okcoin (Hong Kong based) is the only platform in the world to buy, sell and trade NYCCoin. Right now Okcoin is showing a balance of <https://www.okcoin.com/prices/nyccoin-nyc-price-chart?time_range=1H>$12.57M <https://www.okcoin.com/prices/nyccoin-nyc-price-chart?time_range=1H>. Okcoin notes that NYCCoin is down -92.46% on the week. NYCCoin is New York City's CityCoin. CityCoins are tokens built on top of the Stacks blockchain. Dear CEO of Stacks: How does one reconcile NYCCoin's missing wallet balance? Are you playing funny money with New York's titled cryptocurrency? #FBI -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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