I don’t understand what the issue is… here’s a couple outputs from my ChatGPT:
Marathon Crater can refer to a couple of things depending on context—space science or Earth geology—but the most common reference is to Marathon Crater on Mars, a site of interest in planetary science and exploration. Here’s a breakdown:
⸻
1. Marathon Crater (Mars)
Location:
• Found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars.
• Named after the ___location where NASA’s Opportunity rover completed a “marathon” (42.2 kilometers or 26.2 miles) of travel on the Martian surface in March 2015.
Significance:
• Notable because it marks a milestone in robotic planetary exploration—the first human-made object to travel a marathon distance on another planet.
• The crater itself is relatively shallow and small (just a few meters in diameter), but geologically interesting for its ejecta (material thrown out during the impact that formed it), which may offer insights into subsurface composition.
Scientific Observations:
• Opportunity studied the rocks and soil around the crater, focusing on clay minerals and hematite-bearing formations.
• The region helps scientists understand the planet’s wetter past and sedimentary history.
⸻
2. Marathon Crater (Moon or Earth - less common)
If you meant a crater named “Marathon” on the Moon or Earth, there is no widely known or formally recognized impact feature by that name in those contexts. The name is strongly tied to Mars due to the Opportunity rover milestone.
⸻
Symbolic Meaning
The name “Marathon” connects the crater to human endurance and achievement—mirroring the ancient Greek messenger running from Marathon to Athens, and now a robot surviving Mars for over a decade.
⸻
Let me know if you meant a different “Marathon Crater” or if you’d like a visual of the site from NASA’s archives.
_______
Marathon Crater on Mars was not “discovered” in the traditional sense through orbital imaging or telescopic observation, but rather it was first closely examined by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its surface mission.
Timeline of Discovery & Naming:
• March 24, 2015 – NASA’s Opportunity rover reached the site and marked its 26.2-mile milestone (the length of a marathon).
• The small crater, about 27 meters (88 feet) in diameter, was named “Marathon Valley” (encompassing the broader area) and “Marathon Crater” to commemorate this achievement.
• The naming is informal and symbolic, coined by the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), not through official IAU designation.
Context
• The Marathon Crater itself was identified from orbital data (likely by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), but it gained its name and significance once Opportunity physically reached it.
• Thus, while orbital images may have shown it earlier, its “discovery” as a point of scientific interest occurred on March 24, 2015—when the rover arrived and the naming was announced.
Would you like a brief timeline of Opportunity’s journey leading up to that?
Every for profit organization is optimizing for dollars, the next round of funding or to be an acquisition target. “Customer obsession” only goes as far as getting enough customers to be an attractive acquisition or another exit.
This might be a frame of reference issue. There are quite some small-medium businesses with a founder who is able to have more concerns in scope than "maximize dollars - screw it".
I understand what you mean, but over here bootstrapping is the norm. Also funding can be boring loans from the bank, family loans, or business loans based on trust in the skills of the business owner.
So it doesn't always have to be an: you owe me the money, so I own you.
Exactly. Tech has become a place where “funding” has become synonymous with “find a VC to fund you”. Most businesses don’t go that route, and plenty of tech ones don’t either.
Savings, bank loans, lines of credit, private loans between people, local angel investors, and so on are how most businesses bootstrap.
I co-own a technology business that has never taken outside money (well, we do have a credit card) and I’m not really interested in doing that. I think VCs are more trouble than they’re worth because they’re so obsessed with growth that little else matters to them, and we’ve seen where that gets us in terms of customer relationships and product quality. And they always want just enough control to eventually oust executives they don’t agree with.
We’ve built our business up the old fashioned way: from a personal capital contribution from each co-founder and modeling pricing based on what the business needs. Clients who see value in that approach from their critical technology vendors are not impossible to find at all.
Without the runway of functionally blank checks, you do have to continually monitor your business model though.
Your qualifying statement is found some heavy lifting.
First 'tech company' is a very narrow band. There are lots of companies that were founded to leverage technology, but which do not consider themselves 'tech' companies. We're, for example a services business, the service we provide happens to use tech we developed.
Second "of note" is very subjective. Do you mean billions of users? Global brand name? Thousands of workers? Because those are very high capital outcomes achieved either via long time (IBM?) or massive capital injection (which leads to very financial motivations.)
Of course there are zillions of my smaller 'less notable' businesses that exist all around you and me. You've never heard of the company I work for, but we're well known in our ___domain in our market. We've never taken outside investment, and we're free to make a lot of 'discretionary spending' that often serves a purpose other than increasing dividends.
For example we pay low-end workers (non techies) substantially more than market rate (aka minimum wage) because we belive in 'living wage' principles. That directly reduces profits, which we can do because the owners care about many things, and money is just one of them.
Of course the business has to be a business. Of course it has to make money. But money is like blood. You need it to live, but you don't live to make blood.
Hand coded will always win for bespoke projects (and any hard tech startup is a bespoke project).
The reality is that many startups are not tech hard. AI can help alleviate the pain of engineering a v0 to see if you have product market fit much faster. It’s great for prototypes.
I wouldn’t trust AI for production code without also having a strong AI counterpoint testing system.
That is to say, producing code is an annealing process. There is a refinement that comes from striking the hot iron and quenching the blade in water.
With code, spaghetti code will get you out the door, but it will never get you to scale. Scale requires precision, meditation on Kolmogorov complexity, and a clear understanding of the tradeoffs in distributed systems.
AI can help right now, but it is not a panacea, at least in the present moment.
In simple terms, AI can make developers more productive, but it takes experienced engineers to get good results. Mediocre developers are still outputting mediocre code, albeit a lot faster than they used to. If you don't have the mental model to achieve what you want, and are just following what chatpgpt spits out, you're going to get torched sooner rather than later.
There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised. Notice that all of those voices have less open-source-ness than Signal in virtually all cases.
Signal is doing its best to be a web scale company and also defend human rights. Individual dignity matters.
> There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised.
But compromised by whom? Russian, US Intelligence? I am really confused.
I just looked quickly on on the Signal Foundation website and the board members, I read things like:
> Maher is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project.
> She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board
> She received her Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2005 from New York University's College of Arts and Science, after studying at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Institut français d'études arabes de Damas (L'IFEAD) in Damascus, Syria.
Those type of people sound part of the intelligence world to me. What exactly are they doing on the board of Signal (an open source messaging app)?
And Telegram specifically bad here. Using custom crypto on custom protocol and dont have any E2EE by default whatsoever storing everything on server in plain text.
Also, it's a tricky environment of disinformation generally, and in particular for anything valuable like Signal. If Signal is secure, attackers on privacy would want people to believe Signal is compromised and to use something else. If it's not, then they would want people to believe Signal is secure.
I think the solution is to completely ignore any potential disinfo source, especially random people on social media (including HN). It's hard to do when that's where the social center is - you have to exclude yourself. Restrict yourself to legitimate, trusted voices.
I would also read it from another perspective. Attackers, especially at the level of nation states, will always try to get as many avenues for achieving their goals as possible.
If you have compromised a service, it would be in your interest to make it more popular (assuming you think you are the only one in possession of it).
If you cannot, you don't give up; you just go back to the drawing board (https://xkcd.com/538/). Maybe I don't need to break Signal if I can just rely on phishing or scare tactics to get what I want.
I’ve been working on developing an avatar within my prompt engineering to have a sort of ombudsman for interacting with ChatGPT’s agents. I’ve found this works better than having an agent itself. I’m able to invoke multiple different avatar styles which can be used for different purposes in gaining temporary alignment with the llm.
The name of my first avatar is Zeitgeist McGee, who is a witty, first-principles based reasoning system designed after philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurthy + Plato + Protogoras, mathematicians like Pythagoras + Terence Tao + Godel, and computer scientists/hackers like Moxie Marlinspike + Dan Boneh + Dan Kaminsky.
The collective hyper aesthetic is a useful didactic system for interrogating the pseudo Deus Ex Machina that is ChatGPT.
Very curious here as I haven’t seen any papers demonstrating attacks against the differential privacy systems proposed by Apple or Google that successfully deanonymize data. Such an attack in even a test database would be very interesting.
Do you have any papers you can cite about this entropic leakage you’re describing?
The very difference between somewhat and full homomorphic encryption hinges on this leakage as explained in the paper. The definition of differential privacy as well. They directly admit to leaking a certain amount of information by stating that they apply differential privacy with those given parameters. The issue I am talking about is that such concerns are applied on a single query but correlations across query (the things that actually happen with metadata) aren't considered in the delta-epsilon differential privacy model, by definition.
Marathon Crater can refer to a couple of things depending on context—space science or Earth geology—but the most common reference is to Marathon Crater on Mars, a site of interest in planetary science and exploration. Here’s a breakdown:
⸻
1. Marathon Crater (Mars)
Location: • Found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. • Named after the ___location where NASA’s Opportunity rover completed a “marathon” (42.2 kilometers or 26.2 miles) of travel on the Martian surface in March 2015.
Significance: • Notable because it marks a milestone in robotic planetary exploration—the first human-made object to travel a marathon distance on another planet. • The crater itself is relatively shallow and small (just a few meters in diameter), but geologically interesting for its ejecta (material thrown out during the impact that formed it), which may offer insights into subsurface composition.
Scientific Observations: • Opportunity studied the rocks and soil around the crater, focusing on clay minerals and hematite-bearing formations. • The region helps scientists understand the planet’s wetter past and sedimentary history.
⸻
2. Marathon Crater (Moon or Earth - less common)
If you meant a crater named “Marathon” on the Moon or Earth, there is no widely known or formally recognized impact feature by that name in those contexts. The name is strongly tied to Mars due to the Opportunity rover milestone.
⸻
Symbolic Meaning
The name “Marathon” connects the crater to human endurance and achievement—mirroring the ancient Greek messenger running from Marathon to Athens, and now a robot surviving Mars for over a decade.
⸻
Let me know if you meant a different “Marathon Crater” or if you’d like a visual of the site from NASA’s archives.
_______
Marathon Crater on Mars was not “discovered” in the traditional sense through orbital imaging or telescopic observation, but rather it was first closely examined by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its surface mission.
Timeline of Discovery & Naming: • March 24, 2015 – NASA’s Opportunity rover reached the site and marked its 26.2-mile milestone (the length of a marathon). • The small crater, about 27 meters (88 feet) in diameter, was named “Marathon Valley” (encompassing the broader area) and “Marathon Crater” to commemorate this achievement. • The naming is informal and symbolic, coined by the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), not through official IAU designation.
Context • The Marathon Crater itself was identified from orbital data (likely by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), but it gained its name and significance once Opportunity physically reached it. • Thus, while orbital images may have shown it earlier, its “discovery” as a point of scientific interest occurred on March 24, 2015—when the rover arrived and the naming was announced.
Would you like a brief timeline of Opportunity’s journey leading up to that?
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