fyi carbon emissions directly causes global warming and ocean acidification, so yes, mitigating carbon emissions IS very important to help your desertification, rainforests, kelp forests, and coral reefs
Many of these things are due to invasive species introduced by humans such as kelp forests being killed by sea urchins. Desertification has to do with capitalism and farmers racing to the bottom depleting the soil of nutrients - just like the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression wasn’t caused by global warming. Desertification has been going on for 40 years now
I think you're being a little selective in trying to show your point. Human-driven climate change is the biggest driver of ecological damage. Even the article you link to is based on a report that climate change is the biggest driver of desertification worldwide.
I agree with you that land management can mitigate desertification, the same way hunting invasive species can help protect native biodiversity.
This doesn't mean it's wrong to focus on climate change, and by extension, carbon emissions. If anything, they demonstrate that we should focus on climate change. It's like scaling an internet technology company: we want to build something small that has a massive impact.
Reducing carbon emissions will by far have a greater impact than trying to eradicate sea urchins from the pacific northwest. It is just as feasible as better land management. And for things like coral reef bleaching, which I'm personally very interested in, it's unclear if there's any other solution.
Consensus protocol researcher here. For what it’s worth, I think that the plethora of blockchain research in the last 10 years has made consensus much easier to understand. Raft (in particular, with all of its subtleties) reads (and implements) like Greek in comparison.
For a new beginner to consensus protocols, today, I would start them with Bitcoin, and then move onto Paxos/Tendermint/Simplex, and skip Raft entirely. (Simplex is my paper, a simplified version of PBFT).
A blockchain (without all the bells and whistles) is definitionally equivalent to a state-machine or log replication system (but handling byzantine faults). (Each log entry is just a block).
Not really; there are algorithms where many nodes propose proposals in parallel, but eventually only one of those proposals gets finalized (or they maintain only a partial ordering, not a full ordering). (See Bullshark and redbelly iirc)
The main issue is that someone has got to pick a final ordering. If there’s a universe of millions of possible orderings it seems that the most efficient way is to have a single node pick a single one.
Well, in a libertarian world, the moral high ground is that we should be able to trade anything -- who is the SEC to tell us what we can't trade? It's almost like freedom of speech.
Plus, I don't think consumers should be protected from dogecoin --- no layman in their right mind invests in doge with the expectation of profit (from common enterprise). Bitcoin is more of a security than doge will ever be.
> “no layman in their right mind invests in doge with the expectation of profit (from common enterprise)”
Influencers pumping the coin on Twitter is a common enterprise. You don’t think people bought DOGE because they hoped those influencers would continue what they were doing?
I mean, everyone hyping up kale as a supergreen on their social media doesn't make Kale --- the vegetable --- a security. Likewise, people shill GOLD on twitter all the time. Is gold a security?
If kale and gold are securities under the current interpretation of the howey test, then the howey test needs to be rewritten.
For the most part the SEC doesn’t tell you what you can and can’t trade.
It does however have laws around registration of the security, who can and can’t purchase it under a given registration, disclosure rules, conflict of interest rules, and so on.
Systems research papers do not represent all research papers out there, not even in computer science.
In cryptography, certainly a paper with formal definitions and proofs can be much more valuable than a corresponding blog post. It's a field where formalism is desired, if not necessary. Otherwise you can't check other people's "proofs", or even know what model you're working in.
I think, since people haven't come up with better formalisms, sometimes it's quite obtuse, which gets mistaken as "academic writing", when really it's a best effort to formalize.
Requiring formalism does not preclude attaching an informal but intuitional description of the formal definition or proof. Unless the authors don't understand very clearly what they are talking about, or they want to prevent others from understanding their concepts too easily, I don't see why there is a reason for the authors not to attach an EIL5 in addition to formalism.
Sure. But it's an ELI5 "in addition to formalism", not "in lieu of formalism". In theory conferences like STOC or FOCS, the first section of the paper often comprises such an overview.
Certainly some papers are better written than others. But sometimes a blog post cannot replace a paper, unless it also goes into the depth and detail that formalism requires. (Then it becomes a 30 page blog post, where most people don't read past the intro.)
Papers are mostly read by other researchers, where the added background is actively bad because it obscures the real meat of the paper to the main audience.
If you just wanted a digestible intro then you would usually buy a textbook.
I think the argument that every research paper ought to be a mashup of a textbook + the actual research to be a bit silly from a “people should specialize at what they’re good at” standpoint.
Put in another context, I also don’t want every recipe to reintroduce what it means to “fry” or “braise” or “marinate”. We have Google for that.
I've long wanted an informational slider to bits of text. Something where you can zoom in and out to the level of desired complexity. LLM's might be able to fill in some of those gaps. You could turn any paper into a introduction of the subject it's a part of.
This sounds like a good use case for local llm models. Browser plugin, precooked prompts for different levels of detail, maybe a lora to give the model some idea of expected output. I bet some of the 13b models could do a useful job on this even if they were imperfect.
I don't know that much about AI, but my experience in other areas has shown me that 'more grown up' literature that feels harder to parse when your starting out later becomes the precise technical information you need as you get deeper into a subject. Like W3Schools when you start out in web dev vs MDN when you're skills are more mature.
