One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity.

Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.

1) I have had colleagues get grants cancelled doing basic research (e.g. computer security), no explanation, no DEI, can't get anyone at the NSF to answer questions why.

2) if you don't like the process, change the process. But have a democratically determined process. This is political fiat and the plan is to set up political thought police boards that control final funding decisions based on what the president personally likes.

3) if you like "basic research" and "important research", you must vehemently oppose what is being done to the NIH and NSF. Top researchers are already looking to flee the country, Canada and Europe are offering very nice incentive packages. In weeks, USA went from attracting the best talent around the world, to being radioactive for international researchers. Budgets slashed, the pipeline is being decimated.

4) the point is to crush universities, because that is where dissent is largest, damage to science and research is considered an acceptable side effect.

5) and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.

> and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.

Note that consent/support is partially result of this wedge being based on a real problems.

Note: I am not claiming that what is happening is a good idea. But there are multiple reasons why many people actually support this or see no reason to spend their energy on opposing it. And some of them are quite valid.

I think that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w... mostly matches my viewpoint

> It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!

> Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.

I don't much disagree with what you wrote or posted; but I do think that Trump and Musk never had an honest intention of fixing or improving the education and research system, and it's hard for me to understand how anyone could believe they did.

I would not be surprised if members of the new thought-police-style review board are very well paid.

Interesting. This terminology really makes no sense without more shared context, in my view. For example, I would not describe something that happens to me every month as a "remote possibility". Yet for a 3% chance event, repeated every day, monthly occurrences are what we expect. Similarly, someone who describes events as "nearly certain" would surely be embarrassed when one of the first 20 fails to happen, no?

A 1-in-a-million chance seems quite remote, yet if you are rolling the dice once a millisecond...

This applies to any repeated chance, so it probably doesn't need to be called out again when translating odds to verbal language.

I'm not only talking about repeated events, though. If someone told me about 20 different events that they were almost certain, and one failed to happen, I would doubt their calibration.

19 out of 20 could easily mean they get 119 right out of every 120 “almost certainties” and they just rolled a 1 on a die 6 for the “luck” component.

One off, 1 out of N errors are really hard to interpret, even with clear objective standards.

And emphasizes why mapping regular language to objective meanings is a necessity for anything serious, but can still lead to problematic interactions.

Probability assessments are will almost always sometimes certainly could be considered likely hard!

I think the parent was suggesting a much higher percentage for “almost certain”… like >99.9%

The terms aren’t causing this confusion, it’s that you’re applying them to less specific subjects, in particular omitting periods. “3% chance per day” makes sense, “remote chance on any particular day” makes sense, “remote chance” does not make sense, “3% chance” does not make sense. You’d also need to say “nearly certain over any 30 day period”, though if the odds are 3%/day then it’s only (just into) probable, not nearly certain—60%. It’d have to be 10%/day (not a remote chance, but highly improbable) to be nearly certain (96%) over 30 days.

Well, this is why I started by saying "without more shared context"

If something happens to you every month, that's a certainty. If it has a 3% chance to happen to you on any given day, its a remote possibility that it will happen to you on any given day

Thanks, this is really helpful. I had not even realized that every DNS query for .us (for example) goes through a single root registry before going to the actual nameservers.

It's usually cached

GoDaddy is the root registry for all .us ccTLD, MarkMonitor is the actual registar Zoom is working with. The issue seems to be more how GoDaddy assigned to the domain to MarkMonitor not something Zoom itself likely controls (such as NS records)

.us (and other many TLDs) uses EPP to communicate between registars (MarkMonitor here) and Registry (GoDaddy). It is probably an admin error rather than code[1], some manual approval or other human review workflow for high value domain and someone clicked/filled in the wrong value at GoDaddy or MarkMonitor would be my first guess.

[1] would have been observed and fixed long before today, transfers happen all the time after all

It didn't expire

It's not a very good analogy because federally-funded research is a public investment, a public good like roads. The research is supported by the public (the government) and becomes available for anyone to use, learn from, and build off of. And in fact most successful U.S. business are built on the backs of technological innovation that was originally funded by the government, or at the very least, innovation from PhD's whose educations were largely federally funded. (Disclaimer: federally funded researcher)

You couldn't replace that with a private company "buying" research and expect the same societal benefits.

Purism laptops were great when I was a customer. Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about. I wanted to support the company further, and I think they are doing sincere, good, important work, especially on the software side. But these communication and customer relationship issues didn't get better and I switched away.

> Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about.

Which issues? The phones were shipped, albeit with a long delay. Now, you can buy and get them quickly.

Sent from my Librem 5 daily driver.

Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.

I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.

> Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays

Yes, they did have huge refund and shipping time issues and I don't trust their time estimations anymore. They almost went bankrupt and couldn't issue refunds for a long time. However this is irrelevant today, as their devices are finally available to order and AFAIK the refunds were issued. There were never issues with security, backdoors (unlike Lenovo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...), nonfree software or the like.

The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.

I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.

Purism did have a lot of problems with delayed shipping. Today it's just not true though.

It's a pretty good article.

In that era I saw two major misconceptions around minimalism in running footwear. The first is the idea that heel-to-toe "drop" is the the main important metric -- of course, a shoe company thing. Actually what matters a lot more is proprioception -- the feeling of knowing where your foot is in space relative to the ground, and also the feedback your foot is getting from the ground.

The second misconception is that it's important to switch over 100%. Related to this is a misconception that somewhat more minimalist is better. As a competitive runner, I saw benefits from mixing in barefoot strides and a couple miles per week barefoot on soccer fields while keeping my training shoes the same. I'd recommend others do the same, and very gradually increase mileage.

The challenge for research in my understanding is that it's very hard to track long-term injury prevention and performance improvement in a statistically significant way. You can measure what happens when habitually shod people do a barefoot run, and you can go to Kenya and study how habitually barefoot people land when they put on shoes, but that's different from the long term impact on your gait of changing your footwear for a long period of time. (I'm not a researcher myself but I've talked to them.)

I think your proprioception point is huge. I sometimes randomly get a floppy foot. In anything but structurally sound shoes, I'm wrecked. Would barefoot running have avoided the problem or exacerbated the problem?

No idea, honestly. Normally I'd think a few minutes at a time of barefoot jogging on a soft surface isn't likely to hurt and might help.

You are highly highly aware of your feet when running in shoes with 3mm of total rubber/padding.

Same experience here (though I probably skewed more to barefoot than you did). There's a certain amount of immediate painful feedback for a heel striker once you start running barefoot. There's a certain amount of reconditioning and retraining of under utilised muscles that needs to happen so I think your advice to gradually introduce is make a lot of sense. What I've always found interesting is that even for runners like me that had poor form, as soon as the shoes come off we naturally shift towards a more efficient and lower impact technique.

After a few years of regular barefoot running my running gait had changed enough that I didn't feel the need to keep doing it and have been doing runs in race shoes almost exclusively for the past decade.

It's funny that people will hear about something new, misinterpret it, and then get angry about it.

what brands get proprioception well?

I think anything whose soles are really thin and not too hard. I'm partial to Xero, but there's a lot of possibilities.

I do think all shoes, except those original Vibram Five Fingers, are not a great substitute for barefoot running itself. Running barefoot on a nice grass field feels so much nicer and more fun, too! But the minimal shoes do help force you to feel the ground and not just slam into it, so I think they can help.

Whatever you do, I'd only make changes slowly: try 10 minutes of barefoot running or with different shoes, a couple times a week at the end of a normal run, and go from there.