I really doubt we are anywhere close to this when there has been no published legit prime factorization beyond 21: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
Surely if someone managed to factorize a 3 or 4 digits number, they would have published it as it's far enough of weaponization to be worth publishing. To be used to break cryptosystems, you need to be able to factor at least 2048-digits numbers. Even assuming the progress is linear with respect to the number of bits in the public key (this is the theoretical lower bound but assume hardware scaling is itself linear, which doesn't seem to be the case), there's a pretty big gap between 5 and 2048 and the fact that no-one has ever published any significant result (that is, not a magic trick by choosing the number in a way that makes the calculation trivial, see my link above) showing any process in that direction suggest we're not in any kind of immediate threat.
The reality is that quantum computing is still very very hard, and very very far from being able what is theoretically possible with them.
The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.
If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
How much of a deterrent can the police possibly impose that would outweigh the deterrent for not driving illegally, which (in your country) is being starving and homeless?
The cops will never deter everyone from breaking the law, but they don't have to. They just need to deter a large enough % of the population to have a positive effect.
Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.
Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.
And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.
The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
> The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
And there's a large enough population for whom driving without a license is not a crime of desperation. In many places there _is_ a public transport alternative (even if its slow and crappy). I used to give a lift every day to a colleague who had lost his license. I enjoyed the company and he paid for my gas. Many people can make an arrangement like this.
> But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
Having been in this position many times: take an Uber, then Uber back to get your car the next day and plan better (or don't drink) next time.
>How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
When I was in college in Ohio, one of my suite mates had several DUI arrests. After the first, his license was suspended -- yet he was allowed to drive to/from work/school because public transportation was minimal. After the third DUI, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail -- served on the weekends so he could continue going to school without interruption -- and still drive his car to/from work/school.
I was flabbergasted by that. But I guess that's how things are often handled in places without public transportation. And more's the pity.
>But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
An anecdote related to me by a former (Florida) county sheriff's deputy answers that question:
Many police will stake out bars around closing time, awaiting the intoxicated to get behind the wheel so they can be stopped, breathalyzed and arrested.
However, patrons were aware of this and the deputy saw a patron leave, stumbling, drop their car keys several times, then get into their car and drive away.
When stopping said individual, the breathalyzer and field sobriety test showed the driver to be stone cold sober. As such, the deputy sent the driver on their way.
Returning to the bar parking lot, he found that all the other patrons had departed while he was wasting his time on the one sober person -- dubbed the "designated decoy."
I'm sure other variations are and have been in use in the US for a long time -- since most places don't have public transportation or reliable taxis.
The "cars first, public transit last, if at all" culture in most of the US makes the likelihood of DUI/DWI and crashes/injuries/fatalities much, much worse.
> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.
> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.
I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
Alcohol will likely always be a factor in the worst accidents. But France is doing something right because your fatal accident rate per capita is one third that of America's [0].
It's not France in particular though, America is the outlier among developed nations. In fact France is a bit behind most other European nations (but not by much).
> For example, if there is a formal language that contains "Good morning" and "My hovercraft is full of eels" as valid sentences, then nothing distinguishes these sentences any more.
Mind explaining a bit? Because I've no idea what you mean.
Aren't the elephants and whales orders of magnitude better than us at that though (they have roughly as many cancer as we do, but with respectively x100 and x1000 times as many cells.
Or is it the second layer that works better for them?
Different species do have different levels of protection, and different lineages tend to employ different methods of protection. For example elephants have numerous duplicates of cancer suppression genes, whereas naked mole rats produce a variant of hyaluronan which prevents tumor formation. When compared to other great apes, Humans seem to be worse at both layers of defense.
It's worth noting though that humans also have much higher levels of exposure to many carcinogens than most animals, and we screen for cancers at a much greater rate for humans, so just because a species has lower cancer rates doesn't necessarily mean their cancer defenses are better.
also, Elephants have a much higher copy number of a gene called p53/ It codes a protein that acts to force suicide in cells that have damaged DNA (think from UV light, cigarette smoke, age, etc). In cancer this is a common 'early' mutation that allows collection of further mutation and progession towards cancer. In having many more copies of p53, it makes it less likely the p53 function will be eliminated
I am not sure how much consensus there is around it but this is so cool I have to repeat it sorry: Whales and elephants do develop cancers but since those cancers also have mutations, well their cancers have cancers and overall the cancers are never able to grow big enough to threaten the whole organism.
The idea that tumors develop their own tumors, suppressing cancer is known as the Hypertumor Hypothesis and, while it works in computer models, there isn't actually any evidence backing it up.
The hypothesis doesn't really resolve Peto's paradox, the observation that cancer rates don't scale directly with the number of cells in an organism. Not only do large organisms like whales get fewer cancers per cell division, small animals like mice get more cancers per cell division, which can not really be explained by a threshold beyond which hypertumors suppress tumors. The actual evidence suggests organisms just evolve whatever level of cancer resistance they need to have low odds of dying of cancer before something else kills them.
That being said, the main observation underpinning Peto's paradox was actually just due to lack of good data. Over the years much more data has been collected from animal autopsies and it turns out that big animals do get cancer and cancer rates actually do scale with body size, just different species have varying levels of cancer protection, with the levels of protection being similar in closely related species of different sizes.
> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
But this can only be by comparison to something. And Apple is very good at keeping Safari up to date on the actual standards. You know—the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
So if it's not Chrome, what is your basis for comparison??
> But this can only be by comparison to something.
The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.
> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I am not remotely misremembering, and I'll thank you not to tell me what's happening in my own head.
IE 6 stood stagnant for years, while the W3C moved on without them, and there was no new version.
> The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox.
And can you name a single thing Firefox does right, that Chrome didn't do first, or that came from an actual accepted web standard (not a proposal, not a de-facto standard because Chrome does it), that Safari doesn't do?
The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
> actual accepted web standard
The only thing for which there is an actual standard that matters is JavaScript itself (or rather ECMAScript) and on that front Apple has pretty much always been a laggard.
Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
> The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
First of all, according to the IE Wikipedia page, that's not true—7 & 8 were available for XP.
Second of all, this ignores the fact that for five years, there was only IE6. And IE6 was pretty awful.
> Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
And now you have identified a major component of the problem: in the 2000s, the W3C was the source of web standards. Safari, once it existed, was pretty good at following them; IE (especially IE6) was not.
Now, there effectively are no new standards except for what the big 3 (Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) all implement. And Firefox effectively never adds new web features themselves; they follow what the other two do.
So when you say "Safari is holding the web back," what you are saying is "Safari is not implementing all the things that Google puts into Chrome." Which is true! And there is some reason to be concerned about it! But it is also vital to acknowledge that Google is a competitor of Apple's, and many of the features they implement in Chrome, whether or not Google has published proposed standards for them, are being implemented unilaterally by Google, not based on any larger agreement with a standards body.
So painting it as if Apple is deliberately refusing to implement features that otherwise have the support of an impartial standards body, in order to cripple the web and push people to build native iOS apps, is, at the very best, poorly supported by evidence.
That's what their marketing want you to believe, at least.
Their privacy policy is very clear it's not the case though:
> we may collect a variety of information, including:
> […]
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history;
> collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics
Is that even a true thing?
I'm asking because in my country (France) this has been a talking point of the conservative party for the past 2 decades and it's also 100% a urban legend. So I wonder if they just imported a (real) US educational controversy or if it's a urban legend there as well and they just imported the bullshit.
The switch away from teaching phonics, and the consequent drop in literacy, is real.
It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.
The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.
I'd like to read your sources on that, because from what I checked in the meantime it looks like it's more of a “culture war” thing that a real thing. See: https://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/great_plummet.pdf which provides figures for tests results between 1984 and 1990 showing no such decline over that period.
Also, the PDF I quoted is from 2002, 10 years after California had legislated in favor of phonics in 1992 (which had never stopped to be used no matter what the urban legend says).
You realize that your link talks about the same time period as mine, and not about something that allegedly happened in the “mid to late 2000”?
> Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America.
For some reason my brain read the title as “3D printed motherboard” and I was really curious about how this was even possible, and I ended up being disappointed by the lack of detail on the github readme.
It's only after a few more seconds back on the HN front page that I realized my mistake.
Less exciting than what I read but cool project nonetheless.
My understanding is that home etching is probably still more practical and neither of those are going to match professional quality, but conductive filament and the "print everywhere except where the metal goes and then add metal" options should both be in reach of the upper end of the hobbyist sector.
It's not exactly 3d printing but Bad Obsession Motorsports took a small mill, stuck a hot end into the tool holder, fed solder instead of filament into it, and "printed" traces onto a blank PC board.
I thought it was pretty clever but they admit it was tricky to make work at all, let alone get good results.
Yes but the fact it's primarily a Chinese export makes the profit as the cause narrative much less convincing. The US FDA is ignoring evidence to protect a Chinese supplier?
> Yes but the fact it's primarily a Chinese export makes the profit as the cause narrative much less convincing. The US FDA is ignoring evidence to protect a Chinese supplier?
Who said it was done to protect the pesticide's manufacturer? It protects the industry as a whole: the agro-industry aims for low costs, and that means using cheap pesticides to increase crop yield, even it it ends up harming farmers in the process.
Surely if someone managed to factorize a 3 or 4 digits number, they would have published it as it's far enough of weaponization to be worth publishing. To be used to break cryptosystems, you need to be able to factor at least 2048-digits numbers. Even assuming the progress is linear with respect to the number of bits in the public key (this is the theoretical lower bound but assume hardware scaling is itself linear, which doesn't seem to be the case), there's a pretty big gap between 5 and 2048 and the fact that no-one has ever published any significant result (that is, not a magic trick by choosing the number in a way that makes the calculation trivial, see my link above) showing any process in that direction suggest we're not in any kind of immediate threat.
The reality is that quantum computing is still very very hard, and very very far from being able what is theoretically possible with them.
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