I have a cheap 25 euro PoE cameras from aliexpress that gives decent video quality. The night vision though is lacking in comparison to one Brillcam that I have. The cameras are connected to a cheap 20 euro PoE switches that advertise being able to put out 60W of power.
For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:
I agree that a system that enables anonymous deliberation is desirable, however, the power of vendor to surveil and deceive participants can be a lucrative opportunity for selling out democracy to the highest bidder. Hence to have a solution like that one first need to solve the remote electronic voting problem.
Apologies for the very slow reply; I had mistakenly assumed this thread was inactive.
You have raised an absolutely critical point about trust in the platform vendor. The problem you mention, is indeed a major hurdle for any system where the results have binding power, and the potential for a powerful vendor to manipulate the process is a significant risk.
I think the key distinction for my proposal is that it's designed not as a binding e-voting system for electing officials or passing laws, but as a large-scale deliberative barometer or a highly sophisticated poll. Its power is not in its legal authority, but in its ability to create a transparent and undeniable public record of popular will and consensus. The goal is, of course, to influence the political landscape by revealing the truth, rather than to formally decide an election.
You are right that this still requires a great deal of trust in Telegram as the vendor. This is a deliberate trade-off. While a fully decentralized, open-source, and verifiable system would be ideal from a security perspective, it would lack the one thing necessary for this project to work: millions of active, engaged users. The strategy here is to leverage Telegram's massive, existing network as a foundation, accepting the platform risk as a necessary trade-off to achieve the scale required to be politically relevant.
Thank you for bringing up this crucial distinction. It's a conversation that needs to be had about any tool for digital democracy.
An intuitive explanation is that of proving you can find Waldo in a picture without revealing his exact location. Digital wallets can be interpreted as fancy signature schemes that operate on third-party issued commitments C instead of public keys that directly link users to their identities.
A simple signature scheme is based on proof of knowledge PoK{x : pk = g^x}, which is transformed into a noninteractive variant via the Fiat-Shamir transformation, where the message is appended to the hash. Range proofs work similarly, with the simplest form being for a single bit: PoK{(b,r) : C = g^b * h^r & b(b−1)=0}. This proves that commitment C contains a bit b in {0,1} without revealing which value it is.
Arbitrary ranges can then be constructed using the homomorphic properties of commitments. For an n-bit range, this requires n individual bit proofs. Bulletproofs optimize this to O(log n) proof size, enabling practical applications.
The commitment C can be issued by a trusted third party that signs it, and the user can then prove certain properties to a service provider, such as age ranges or location zones (constructed from latitude and longitude bounds).
A key challenge is that reusing the same commitment C creates a tracking identifier, potentially compromising user privacy.
for explanation i've seen for the where's waldo analogy: imagine the single page of the where's waldo puzzle, and another giant piece of paper with the shape of waldo cut out of it.
by providing a picture of waldo in the cut-out, you can prove you know where he is without providing the location. a zero knowledge proof.
I think the Where's Waldo example, while not technically zero knowledge, gives a pretty good intuition of the idea behind it.
It certainly gives a "layperson" example of being able to prove you know something without revealing it, which isn't the whole definition of ZK but is the idea driving it.
Imagine it isn't Waldo, but an unknown figure and you are only given the silhouette to find. If you can draw what's within the silhouette or something, you've proven you've located it to high certainty without saying where.
Say the whole image looked like noise and was generated from quantum measurements, and the coordinates to hash for the problem were generated with quantum measurements, and you were given the silhouette and the hash of the noise within to look for. I could see it for proof of work: you could slide along a hashing window and prove you actually did work examining half the image on average or whatever.
I think my example isn't great and would need to be modified like maybe give the hash of a neighboring area to prove you found it, so your answer couldn't be used by others to find the location much more cheaply.
A scam is a strong word, giving the impression that there are malicious interests in selling it without working towards making returns to the investors. But a dead horse, for sure, it now looks like.
The next big challenge will be mounting the controlling hardware, currently connected via coaxial cables, onto the chip while preventing the introduction of new sources of interference so that error correction can run. That will take a miracle.
Of course, an alternative is a million coaxial cables connected to a chip cooled close to mK temperatures.
This looks great. The diff is quite inefficient for patching with the C preprocessor branches.
Since it patches the code, looking at its tree structure, is the diff human readable, and can it be edited directly? This is a major contributor to why I opt for sed for patching.
The productivity gains in activities will be countered by the same gains in counter activities. Everything is going to become more sophisticated, but bullshit will remain.
The birth rates have been low for a decade. I wonder if the change is triggered by US stock market downturn where majority of EU pensions are invested and expectation of a doom.
I wonder what a good answer would be here. Intuitively we are increasing productivity in activities that does not increase social welfare. Take corporate lawyering, marketing as an example.
The rising wealth inequality is a blunt answer. Similarly saying that we are increasing productivity in activities that protect interest of the rich.
It seems that significant amount of productivity gains are lost because of activities that profit from deception and counter activities that accounts for them.
The US could print itself out of debt, but with an unbalanced budget and economy, that may be a disaster if it needs to finance new budget deficits. The result seems similar to the default.
Henry Ford made an interesting argument for printing money to fund productive enterprise in the context of a gold standard currency.
Just as it's okay to print money corresponding to central bank gold reserves, so too it's okay to print money to pay for the construction of the gold mine. Either way currency holders have real gold on the other side of the ledger.
Taking this one step further, it should be okay to print money to fund any enterprise whose output can be traded into gold. For example if we printed money to build a silver mine then the silver could be traded for gold at some ratio, so the currency holders would be in a protected position.
In fact whether the enterprise produces silver, timber, cars or software doesn't really matter as long the output is tradable for gold; and produces enough "gold value" to justify the newly printed currency.
I think the economics on this actually checks out. Although politicians in the real world would realistically use money printing for consumption rather than production.
Yes, this is the entire point. Government needs to spend productively to grow the economy.
Any spending can be inflationary if it’s perceived to not be productive.
How that spending is financed is a footnote. Domestic debt works, foreign debt works, but the central bank can also purchase bonds and that works too (and is not inflationary). This is what Japan has been doing for decades to great success.
Not to say that the transition is easy, and if too much of the USs debt is owned by 3rd parties that means that there will be currency value shocks that have to be mitigated.
It does not mean that there will be a crash, or a recession, or a default.
The counterargument is whether the government should be directing the allocation of resources via its spending rather than private actors.
Any money spent by the government in an economy is going to cause a redirection of resources from other actors to its own spending. In an economy running below its normal potential it makes it easy to justify because not much is getting done anyway, but if everyone is already doing a lot of stuff and there's not much spare capacity, then the government is effectively overriding the preferences of private citizens to its own ends to a much greater degree.
There's other arguments as well as to how efficiently the government tends to be at actually getting productive things done with its spending.
It's up to you whether this is good or not, but I'd argue it should not be our default position.
That's how the current system works too: newly created money goes through the banks, and so the ones who spend it first (and benefit from seigniorage) are the financial industry and its customers: corporations borrowing to invest in productive activity. The key thing to note is that this system (and Ford's) represents a system of continuous wealth transfer from the working class (who hold most of their money in cash or low interest savings accounts, and suffer the most from inflation) to the owners of the means of production.
Unfortunately I don’t remember exactly where I read it. It’s been a few years since I looked into Ford.
The mostly likely place is probably his autobiography “My Life and Work” where he talks about business/economic ideas quite a bit. Although it could also have been a newspaper article he wrote.
FWIW beware there’s a lot of serious antisemitism in that book. Which is a shame because it stains an otherwise fascinating book about early cars and 20th century business.
There is always next time. Unless you are an oil state. And either deflation or massive over printing means that next time fewer are willing to loan money. Maybe domestic holders will. But investors and foreign surely go somewhere more stable and less inflationary.
For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007391354252.html?spm=a2...
I also plan to install Corall M.2 card within the unused M.2 SSD card slot.