Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
A Surveillance state is not the same as police state. We already live in a surveillance state, but we are protected by three things:
1. The cost of arrest. Actually sending someone to pick the person up and put them in handcuffs, process and change them.
2. The cost of prosecution. Having lawyers build a case, schedule a judge and courtroom.
3. The cost of enforcement. Putting someone in prison or threatening to put them in prison if they don't pay back what is stolen. Tracking if they paid it back. If they get probation it is cheaper but a probation officer is required.
These are expensive and use limited resources. Policing and governments prioritize these resources for more serious crimes like murder. Constitutional rights, including due process dramatically increase these costs. Mass surveillance made investigation and determining who did what for minor crimes done in public much much cheaper, so we just hit the next cost bottleneck.
The solution to the enforcement bottleneck is automated enforcement. This will likely be rolled out over the next ten to twenty years. If you steal from a store, you get banned from the entire story chain. This means living life very difficult, so you pay a fine. It is likely that stores will make lots of mistakes and flag innocent people, but most people will pay the fine because it is more convenient.
The situation is entirely different in a police state with no constitutional protections. The government can simply lock you out of everything you need to live because you did buy enough Dear Leader portraits this quarter. You can't use your car, can't call a ride share, can't catch a bus, can't buy food, can't get electricity to heat your house to keep your family comfortable. Instead of a fine, you need to walk to closest detention center, confess your guilt, lock yourself in and do manual labor and reeducation until the state allows you to leave. This system requires no guards.
It was an accident, you can read the investigation. No one claims Nagasaki or Hiroshima were accidents.
> I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy.
A state can still make mistakes without saying it is good in everyway
> Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman.
No one knows but the Iranian leadership. The Iranian leadership has been famously bad at modeling the intentions and motivations of other nations leaderships. A bolt of the blue decapitation strike, followed by the US having plan if Iran closes the straits which is the obvious response by Iran, does at face value appear to be the work of a madman. Now in the US we might conclude that Trump and Hegseth are just wildly incompetent and unprepared, but it seems likely to me that Iranian leadership see irrationality instead of incompetence.
Threatening autocrats might work, but just bolt out of the blue decapitation strikes undermine future threats because they figure they'll get no warning. If you are threatening, you are bluffing and when you aren't bluffing, there are no threats.
> I think "Iran was considering a peace deal" is a bit of a stretch here.
Iran was considering a peace deal. I agree that the most plausible was they would reject it.
> What does Iran still have to lose? Well, a lot.
The US could do this, sure, but then Iran would have even less to lose. This might work if the US started small and threatened escalation to try to compel Iran, but the US started at massive escalation so any additional airstrikes are likely to be less escalatory and thus less of a threat.
Even worse, there is a fundamental problem with madman theory, if Iran believes they are dealing with a madman, then threats aren't effective because a mad man doesn't keep promises. If you think your opponent is not rational, then you should not expect them to follow cause and effect.
> Iran is never going to capitulate, until it capitulates. Their rhetoric is going to remain that the US has no more levers and can't change anything, because admitting otherwise invites those levers to be engaged.
I agree that we don't know exactly how much pressure is on Iran. Iran historically has been willing to suffer almost any cost. During the Iran Iraq war then sent enormous numbers of teenagers in human wave attacks over and over. It is my estimation that the current war with the US has helped to stabilize the Iranian government and that they benefit more from the war continuing than from a peace deal.
The only military lever the US has left on the table is an invasion of Iran. Maybe limited to the coastline or maybe complete regime change. Trump has not even attempted to bluff that he is doing this.
The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.
The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.
This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.
Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.
This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.
I'm not arguing against anything you have said, but there is an important connection here that I want to make between disillusionment and funding.
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. ... grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
If there was more research funding and more jobs for researchers in academia this would result in both better pay for PhD students and more academic jobs post-PhD. The disillusionment is related to the funding.
Imagine if the US currently had a new massive project for physics research, you would get a lot more people doing physics Phds and much faster progress in physics. We know this because Edward Teller tricked Reagan into pumping billions of dollars into optics research and that resulted in optics being one of few areas in physics to see breakthrough after breakthrough.
This unofficial Bitcoin roadmap and the official ETH (Ethereum) PQ roadmap present two very different philosophies.
* As one would expect the ETH PQ roadmap is ambitious bordering on hubristic. It proposes a very short timeline and aims to deploy protocols that will to push the frontiers of current technology.
* This proposed Bitcoin roadmap is conservative and focused. It is designed around managing risk and hedging against unknowns using currently available tech.
Reminds me of that Arthur C. Clarke short story [0]:
> "We realize now that this was our first mistake. I still think that it was a natural one, for it seemed to us then that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight, and we already regarded them as almost primitive survivals. What we did not appreciate was the magnitude of the task we were attempting, and the length of time it would take to get the revolutionary super-weapon into battle. Nothing like this had happened for a hundred years and we had no previous experience to guide us."
> but some portion of folks can attest to their ownership.
How? Alice pay's Bob 1 BTC at random address 0x1234. Someone shows up and says, I own that address and here is signature proving it. But the signature scheme is broken so anyone can do that. So you ask for documentation they own that address, well they have screencap of a message asking for payment from Alice. Is that real? Maybe you find the email of that user and ask them, but they could be lying. Now if you paid from coinbase, coinbase could vouch for you.
So you need some sort of court that sits in judgement over who owns what. That is going to be very expensive. While you are doing this, no one can move funds. What is the most likely outcome of such a system, well there is not CEO of Bitcoin, so you would probably end up with multiple courts producing conflicting rulings that no one would respect.
The whole notion of ownership courts is anathema to Bitcoin's philosophy and would completely undermine the social trust that makes Bitcoin valuable. If we are going to save Bitcoin from a CRQC we must act before a CRQC recovers everyone's private key.
There are three workable schemes:
* For public keys that in hashed addresses such as P2PKH (Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash) et al., if the public key is not known, then you could produce a ZKP that you know the public key (proof of pre-image). The main problem with this approach is that it only protects hashed addresses where the public key has not been leaked or exposed on-chain. It doesn't have enough coverage.
* You can do commit-reveal schemes, this makes miners far more trusted and again only helps with hashed addresses that haven't exposed the public key.
* You can do ZKP proof of HD Seeds, from most modern wallets have HD seeds. AFAICT You'd have to use STARKs but STARKs for HD seeds are too big for on-chain proofs. Not all HD seeds are protected and not all addresses have HD seeds. Just today Laolu published this demo for doing this, the proofs at 1.7 mbs https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/Q06piCEJhkI
> In practice there are very few bitcoin outputs that aren't linked to an offline identity and most users could easily produce a proof of ownership.
Any who is going to in charge of reading that proof of identity and moving the coins? A trusted centralized party? The point of Bitcoin is to avoid exactly that sort of trust relationship, otherwise use the banking system.
> Satoshi's wallet alone could crash Bitcoin's value as a currency if dumped on the open market.
No one knows, but the incentives are aligned with a softfork to burn Satoshi's coins.
That is not what I am hearing from people working on CRQC. A prediction of a CRQC with 10% by 2030 was made by own of the top experts in this field. 2045 used to be the pessimistic outlook by experts with a bunch of experts predicting earlier. Recent work has shown that CRQC is actual 20 times easier to built that previously thought, accelerating all timelines.
We are seeing significant progress in two different types of quantum computers, neutral atom and superconducting qubit.
No one really knows when it will happen, but the chance that it is practically impossible is held only by a small number of experts. Given what we have seen in 2026 has significantly shifted expectations.
> fork the chain at a snapshot before the attack, patch the protocol, and call that Bitcoin?
It won't work. The only way to authenticate who ones what coins is with signatures. If the signature algorithm is broken, you can't tell who the original owner is to move the coins to a safe signature algorithm.
You need to more to safer signature algorithm before the break, after the break it is game over.
> It’s worth remembering that Ethereum forked for much less
Ethereum could simply return the coins to the original owners. If the signature scheme is insecure, returning the coins just means the attacker can steal them again.
In this case, it seems like we are rolling dice but no one is quiet sure if the dice are fair, how many sides it has and what numbers are written on the dice.
The only thing I am confident in is if it the bigger the fire, the faster the work. I want the Bitcoin community to start the work as early as possible so that it doesn't have to rush because rushing increases the chance of mistakes.
"A CRQC is an existential threat to Bitcoin (you might believe this is very low-likehood). Your measurement of this threat should literally be:
(A) How likely you think it is a CRQC appears by a given time, multiplied by
(B) How likely it is you think Bitcoin will not successfully upgrade by that time."
It would interesting to survey people about their answers.
My off the cuff answer is:
2030: A=0.05, B=0.01
2035: A=0.50, B=0.001
2045: A=~1.0, B=~0.0
I reserve the right to change my mind on these answers at any point. This is not a serious prediction.
> See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
Wouldn't it be worse if it was all from the same root cause. That would suggest they can't figure out how to fix the problem. Multiple failures with different root causes provide almost optimal experimental data. I'm not saying the failures are necessarily good for SpaceX, but we are seeing progress and a willingness to push the envelope.
This IPO makes me more worried about the future of SpaceX then experimental rockets blowing up. That said, I can see why some people will invest in SpaceX, SpaceX has a significant lead in the space race and may end up gaining a near monopoly on access to space.
Not if the bigger models have diminishing returns. Lets say you figure out a way to reduce RAM requirements 100X, but 2x increasing RAM usage by 2x only gets you a 1% increase in effectiveness and 3x does not get you any noticeable increase over 2x at all. Sure you can reduce the price per token, but you might have already saturated the market. Even if you haven't saturated the market, your hardware based moat just got smaller and this is going to reduce your margins even more.
CTO and co-founder of bastionzero.com (now part of Cloudflare), author of OpenPubkey (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/296)
* https://www.ethanHeilman.com
* https://github.com/ethanheilman
* https://hexagon.space/@ethan_heilman