It seems instead that the process of building a bureaucracy that can support an empire is tough. And that the conditions left behind after an empire collapses are particularly tough to re-consolidate under another empire.

One might argue that this is due to size of the software community, or commercial interests. But I do believe OP was right in his description of the response of the math community as different from the software community.

Really, linux is meant to give you control over the software that runs in your computer. Anti-cheat is inherently about limiting what you can run on your computer. Windows is much more aimed at allowing you opt in to hard limitations.

This will likely strengthen NATO in the long term. But only if it doesn’t get tested by Russia in the short term.

The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.

Model training is expensive. Model distillation is cheaper. If you train models, and that lets your adversary distill them for much cheaper, that gives your adversary an advantage. Giving your adversary an advantage is bad, so you address it.

It doesn’t matter whether the advantage was gained legally, not even if it was fair. The advantage in and of itself is bad, and sufficient reason to act. You couch it in less nakedly power hungry terms, but this is the reasoning.

Or put differently a wide exploration of long chains of obvious insights might be more valuable than a more narrow exploration of shorter chains of deeper insights. But perhaps that is a wrong sense of the difference between a small model and a large model.

It states regarding a visa: "A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a U.S. port-of-entry (generally an airport) and request permission to enter the United States. A visa does not guarantee entry into the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the port-of-entry have authority to permit or deny admission to the United States. "

This data already leaks whenever you travel legally to the US, because they take it from you as a requirement of entry. All this does is let them check the data they take on entry against the provided data. Which seems fair. The fact this data is already in passports is a very different matter, but that is something the EU has done voluntarily.

In Mathematics there is much more clarity on what question you want to answer. It's much less likely you get an answer to a question, and then realize that the question was useless. Whereas in software its almost guaranteed that your first implementation, correct or otherwise, will solve the wrong problem.

Now, that still doesn’t help an LLM distinguish between good and bad correct proofs. But it still really helps a lot. On top of that, taste in proofs is a lot more uniform than taste in coding. That helps LLMs be better at judging the quality of a proof, because there’s less disagreement in the wider world.

And does it make sense that at least some people do want your identity before interacting with you?

If a company can come up with a reasonable reason to check something, then a ZKP enables that check without wider harm to privacy. But it still gives the narrow harm to privacy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Put differently, privacy concerns have shielded us not just from surveillance, but also from powerful control. Control in the form of “you are only allowed X if you meet criteria Y”. With ZKPs, that shield of “why would I tell you enough information to determine Y” stops working. But those conditions on X are harmful more broadly.

Take the US border checks of Social Media. Are those more OK if all of a sudden there’s a ZKP you have to give of never having called Trump a cunt in any private message?

Then when you want to access something age gated, you locally generate a proof that says “I have a credential signed by X, with DoB N, and N < CutOff date” where X and the CutOff date are public but the credential and the value N are hidden through the ZkP.

The attestor isn’t involved so doesn’t learn anything. The Verifier only learns the public information, and generally won’t be able to tell if two proofs are made with the same credential.

Identity attestation isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s just something that can be abused.

Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.

Lobbyist giving opinions, isn’t anywhere near corruption. Lobbyist giving campaign support by the $100,000 is a lot closer though.