When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
I'm not sure if you're trolling. Of course that's nonsense. The work is entirely the (artificially complex) computations necessary to get to the result. If someone were to invent a 100% efficient computer, based on superconductors, which produces no heat at all, the proof of work (the final hash value) would still be equally valid. As I said, heat is an undesired, unavoidable side-effect. You don't show anybody the heat you produced, to convince them that you did the work, you show them the hash value, otherwise you could just burn some wood.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
As some readers may not be familiar with the name Xavier Leroy, I just want to emphasize that he is one of the people behind OCaml and a leading figure promoting Rocq/Coq.
Shameless plug: eight years ago, I created the following website for posting plots of complex functions using similar gradients: https://kettenreihen.wordpress.com/
Those are really cool to look at. I kept trying to click them to learn more, I wish some of them were mini blog posts to give a little bit of grounding.
I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer.
At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a “real” app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used to the terminal menus.
The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms, generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when needed (to send invoices, etc.).
> It really is mind bending how fast this function grows.
While the BB function is obviously a well-defined function over the integers, I find it helpful to think of it as a function over qualitatively heterogeneous items—such as stones, bread toasters, mechanical watches, and computers. The key idea is to view the underlying computing devices not as “a little more powerful” than the previous ones, but as fundamentally different kinds of entities.
May I suggest the Greenchess website? https://greenchess.net/
It certainly has some huge potential: nice minimalist interface and probably about 50 or 60 chess variants for all tastes. Some of them are obviously more or less "recent". You can easily start a new game or accept a pending invitation. I would call the set of players quite "active" and certainly motivated.
But it is true that the pool of players remains small and you generally play against the same players again and again.
reply