Funny you mention this because I have a child with (severe) Autism and with so much misinformation out there about Autism I was blown away that her video about this topic was so spot on and incredibly well researched. In particularly she nailed the so called "neurodiversity movement" and its many problems it causes quite well.
Actually no it isn't proof of anything, the site is highly misleading, it's just searching for similar images using CLIP image embeddings and then claiming those must be the source. https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824
Your perspective doesn't seem exactly common in hackernews and I appreciate it.
1) I gotta say though when you talk of "the observer" it throws me off as it sounds like the typical quantum woo twisting of the observer effect, perhaps you meant something else? what do you mean by "the observer"?
2) Regarding "the universe is ordered and can be described with a set of rules. There is no full evidence of this, it's just an assumption." this has proven so far to be a good assumption (as seen by the massive amount of scientific knowledge and verified predictions accumulated) and if anything it seems all evidence points to exactly this. Is there evidence that there the universe is more than just 'a pile of particles'? (although that is a somewhat simplistic way to put it)
3) Trying to distill the comment, it seems the main argument is along the lines of "science can't explain life itself and/or consciousness, therefore there must be more" is that a fair assessment? and in that case what would you convince you of the oposite? for e.g what if "life" is well understood and can be reproduced in a lab etc.. what if we can reproduce most human-like intelligence with AI, etc... in other words, what would (realistically) change your mind to the opposite?
There are different solutions for that in the works, from sharding to plasma, etc.. and those have their own challenges & tradeoffs (namely in terms of security, etc..)
However engineering decisions 'on genesis' was over 3-4 years ago and at that time doing a blockchain with smart contracts was already challenge on itself. It's not really fair to take the knowledge and lessons from the present day and claim those in the past without that knowledge made horrible decisions. It's a bit like blaming google for not starting angular 1 with the functionality of angular 4, or saying that John Resig should have created Babel and ES7 features instead of creating jQuery.
This wasn't a flaw with Ethereum itself or its protocol, but rather an issue with one of the its client implementations (go-ethereum), other clients like Parity, Harmony, etc.. are unaffected.
- This update was announced almost 2 years ago from the very beginning
- Multiple Discussions in EIPs
- Multiple public dev meetings, with youtube recordings, discussions, etc..
Quite the exaggeration, this silly meme has to stop. You make it sound like writing even a hello world would have horrible vulnerabilities or something. There are thousands of perfectly safe contracts deployed, one can't take some isolated incidents and make such conclusions from such a small sample.
Calling it an attack is a bit weird. Attacks are typically meant to things like create double spends. An hard fork is the natural mechanism for a blockchain to update. The Homestead release for example was an update that was done through an HF, the next update Metropolis will also be done through a HF.
For the DAO HF: The DAO contract was replaced by a withdrawal one, that was the only change, No other contract broke because of the fork.
I was trying to be precise on what I meant and not using buzzwords or rebrand anything. It was being asked what was the value proposition and for many of us in the space the decentralized infrastructure and its implications is it. Often Ethereum is seen through a Bitcoin lenses in which contracts are just bells and whistles on top and that's not really what Ethereum is about.
Regarding the programming language, please note there is VM and Solidity is but one language (although by far the most popular currently) that compiles to bytecode for this VM. Much more restrictive/secure programming languages can be created for this VM and we'll likely see more work towards this as development continues, it's likely in the future developers will use different languages depending on the usecase they are trying to implement on the blockchain.
Also in regards to the code deployed (the contracts) they can be decentralized, but contrary to popular belief they can also be as centralized as one wants in order to be possible to an update if something goes wrong. However in either case the Infrastructure remains distributed and decentralized.
Regarding the other comments: "if you somehow manage to write it correctly, the DAO might reverse your code by hard forking" and "the only solution they have is to break every contract in the system except the one large enough to perform a 51% attack on the blockchain."
In one sentence it sounds like you're saying the DAO contract somehow reverses 3rd party correct code, and in the other that every contract gets broken (?) except one contract because it's large? and the contract (?) performs a 51% attack on the blockchain (?)
Honestly I don't understand those sentences which is why I didn't address them, I mean you no offense.
The main core value proposition (at least for me) is as an consensus layer for creating truly decentralized applications with a truly distributed and decentralized infrastructure, these applications don't necessary have money involved (ENS being an example). In this sense "smart contracts" are actually just pieces of code you deploy pretty much like one would with aws lambda, which is why the term "contract" is a bit confusing, but alas we're stuck with it now.