musings

i feel like i’m about twenty years late to starting a blog.

i could have then. while i didn’t get my own domain name until 2006, i think i was already self-hosting email and creating web sites in 2001?

in the past i’ve attempted to do a wiki sort of home page, but inevitably there are more dead links than time to fill them in, and some of the content gets rapidly out of sync with my current thoughts on things.

so this is meant to be a sort of long-form version of microblogging. light organization, minimal proof-reading, no effort-posts, just an append-only repository of thought.

i most likely didn’t fully endorse any of them at the time they were written, much less as time passes.

published 2023-04-18

13.78126

there’s apparently technical guidelines¹ that talk about turning random bits into random numbers between 0 and something other than powers of two. unfortunately it’s lacking a bit of nuance.

13.78042

i’ve been using a pair of (relatively) cheap ar glasses as my primary display for a few weeks. overall i like it a lot, still need to get lens inserts to correct my elliptical (and a little interpupiary distance difference). but it’s only 1080p per eye, so of course i’m looking at how to build something better. which end me up looking at datasheets for ti’s mems display chips…

13.77934

i’ve been wanting a good way to migrate signature keys in converge. ideally a migrating key pair that:

signatures can be verified correct with merely the signing public key
the migrating secret cannot be derived from the signing secret key
even if the migrating public key is known

13.77906

in cryptography, we often require domain separation for different uses of the same primitives. roughly, this means ensuring that the inputs to a primitive for different purposes cannot overlap. so there are no instances where you can lift a value from one part of the protocol and use it in another.

i’ve been thinking about data confusion - interpreting the same pile of bytes as different types.

13.77882

i quite like the anti-spam property of converge that i described yesterday. but it also seems a bit too harsh to prevent all automated initiation of contact. how can we enable some unilateral initiation, as an extra that you specifically need to enable?

13.77878

the internet has a fundamental assumption that anyone can send anything to anyone. this assumption has of course been broken at the IP layer by firewalls and NAT, causing no end of headaches for application developers and users. that assumption permeates the whole stack - not only can i send a packet to any computer on the public internet, i can email anybody, i can message anybody on any of the messaging platforms. i can tag anybody on social media. on the internet everybody is next door and can come round whenever they want.

but what if they couldn’t?

13.77776

there are various exponential growth patterns in technology these days: compute, bandwidth, storage, display resolution… but not audio sampling rate.

we’re talking ten teraflops in game consoles, 10 gigabit wireless access points, 4 terabytes on a 22x80mm pcb, 7680x4320x30bpp screens… why don’t we have our podcasts streamed to us in 384kHz 64-bit surround sound?

13.77771

i realized that the extra byte of subtag in atlv unions was unnecessary and indeed harmful. in particular, it has been pushing me to overload tags when using a union would be natural, because the subtag wouldn’t indicate anything.