Author Archives: Paul Crowley

This depraved rubbish got quite a few responses. Please let me know about any I’ve missed. Inner bullets are subtitles or exerpts. Open to adding good Twitter threads too! Scott Alexander, Statement on New York Times Article I have 1,557 other posts worth of material he could have used, and the sentence he chose toContinue reading “Responses to Cade Metz’s hit piece on Scott Alexander”

UPDATE 2020-06-25: Please sign the petition at DontDoxScottAlexander.com! The New York Times is planning on publishing an article about Scott Alexander, one of the most important thinkers of our time. Unfortunately, they plan to include his legal name. In response, Scott has shut down his blog, a huge loss to the world. This will doContinue reading “NYT plan to doxx Scott Alexander for no real reason”

On Reddit, u/spriteguard asks: Do you have any diagrams of smaller numbers for comparison? I’d love to see a whole sequence of these. I have work to put off, so I couldn’t resist the challenge. Like the previous post, these are Tromp diagrams showing lambda calculus expressions that evaluate to Church integers. Code to generateContinue reading “Some more numbers as lambda calculus”

One of the first posts I made on this blog was Lambda calculus and Graham’s number, which set out how to express the insanely large number known as Graham’s Number precisely and concisely using lambda calculus. A week ago, Reddit user u/KtoProd asked: if I wanted to get a Graham’s Number tattoo, how should IContinue reading “A picture of Graham’s Number”

A few more notes regarding target collision resistant functions, following up from my $1000 competition announcement. Second preimage resistance There is a simple way to construct a secure TCR compression function given a second-preimage-resistant compression function—just generate a key which is the length of the input, and XOR the key with the input. So ifContinue reading “More thoughts on TCRs”

In my day job, I do cryptography for Android. I have a problem where I need to make some cryptography faster, and I’m setting up a $1000 competition funded from my own pocket for work towards the solution. On Android devices, key operating system components are stored in read-only partitions such as the /system partition.Continue reading “$1000 TCR hashing competition”

Credits: This way of looking at probability is due to Bruno de Finetti; this particular framing was taught to me by Andrew Critch. Out of the blue, you get the following email from me: Dear You: I extend to you, and you alone, a chance to take part in my free lottery. Please choose atContinue reading “Subjective probability”

7,000 children under five died of malnutrition today. It is said that Cato the Elder was so passionate about the losses in the Punic Wars, the threat of further aggression and the desire to impose a total punitive destruction to strike fear into all who might think to raise arms against Rome, that he finishedContinue reading “7,000 children under five died of malnutrition today”

I loved John Baez’s three-part system on large countable ordinals (1, 2, 3) but something nagged at me. It felt like a description of an algorithm in prose, and I feel like I don’t really understand an algorithm until I’ve implemented it. But what does it mean to implement an ordinal? I found a couple of answersContinue reading “Expressing computable ordinals as programs”

I’m writing this now because I anticipate linking to it over and over again; this fallacy isn’t going anywhere. Journalists have got very good at using the word “comparing” to turn the most innocuous statement into a gaffe, through a simple trick of equivocation. Most recently, Jeremy Corbyn is accused of “comparing” Israel and ISIS, butContinue reading ““Comparing””