nibnalin's comments

What or whose writing or podcasts would you recommend reading / listening?

Hey HN,

I recently learnt about Halo 2 and PLONK zero-knowledge circuit design and built a Wordle clone that creates ZK proofs of the grid you share afterwards. This was mostly a fun intro project for me and I wrote up my notes introducing Halo 2 and my circuit design in specific in the README that would be interesting to folks here!

That’s a fair criticism - I like to think a blockchain is akin to a shared computer we all have access to (via programs/contracts) which makes it really convenient to use blockchains in such ways. Besides, the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance.

Hey folks,

Creator here, thank you for sharing this here - it seems there’s a decent bit of misunderstandings in the comments (particularly around the security model/monetary cost) so I’ll clarify some things:

- Your main wallet is never exposed to the game tiles, only a burner proxy wallet created for in-game interactions. This limits any attack surface area significantly.

- Frontend plug-ins are decently sandboxed and cannot learn things like “what’s your private key?” or make transactions on your behalf unless you explicitly approve it.

- This runs on a testnet L2 (Optimism Kovan) so it’s free to play - this is just meant to be a proof of concept exploration. Anyway, transaction costs are on the order of 1/100th of a cent on such L2s, so it’s really not prohibitively expensive to play the game even if it was with real money!

I’m a bit disappointed that most of the comments here pose rather shallow understanding of what’s interesting about exgrasia/blockchain as a data layer for games - I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it :(

The only work adjacent to this I’m aware of is MetaMask Snaps[1], a plug-in system that allows for arbitrary code execution in wallets.

I know some teams in the 0xPARC community[1] are interested in it and have been looking into using it, but nothing publicly shareable on that yet.

[1]: https://0xparc.org/

See 0xPARC’s recent blog post[1] on this topic (in particular, see the section “What can we do with zk-ECDSA?”)

[1]: https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-ecdsa-1

Thank you!

Those papers are some of the densest ones, so maybe as a starter I would recommend Vitalik’s blog posts on ZK[1].

If folks are interested in a complexity theoretic introduction to ZK proofs, incidentally, in the interest of being self recommending, I authored one myself I’d be curious to hear thoughts on :)[2]

[1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html

[2]: https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...

> Using a community chest to reward front-runners for submitting claims is clever. Would the ETH reward still need to be at least as large as the transaction cost to incentivize front-runners? Or is there still a cut of the token being taken, in the hopes the token value will make up the difference?

Yeah, it definitely needs to be at least as large as the gas fee (otherwise front runners will just run the transaction locally and notice that it’s not worth rebroadcasting). Our mechanism doesn’t take a cut of the token, mostly because it is hard to put a value to the token as we mention in the post.

> It seems like there would still be a basic gas problem any time the receiving account wants to use the (ERC-20) token, eg to send the token somewhere else via a wallet or some other standard UI?

That’s certainly true, but if, for instance, your primary use case was as a governance token, most governance happens off-chain(on Snapshot Labs[1], for instance), so that wouldn’t require any funds.

[1]: https://snapshot.org/

Hi folks, I recently made a small game using Zero-Knowledge proofs that awards players Ethereum NFTs for successfully solving a puzzle. Zero-Knowledge proofs are a pretty new crypto idea with lots of cool applications like this one.

I've also recently written up a long-form post on the theory behind ZK proofs that might be interesting to folks here: https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...

It's kind of mind-blowing that the universe allows us to do this at all: Convincingly prove that you have a solution to a puzzle without revealing anything about the solution itself.

On the sudoku example, I built out a playable version of zero-knowledge sudoku a few months ago: https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/snarky-sudoku

It doesn't use the same strategy as the article, but the underlying idea of non-interactive SNARK based proof is the same (just using the more general circom circuit library to compile the constraints into a ZK-SNARK).

Ah, looks like HN discovered our Introduction sheet was publicly editable and had some fun there: https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/shiit-coin/issues/2

<3

Would be interesting to see this dip relative to other tech subfields like javascript/react or even data science and other such keywords. Does anyone know of a public LinkedIn dataset?

The author disables tweet replies so I'm not sure where they get their numbers from.

As albertyezer’s comment noted, this was definitely a very influential project for film and art in general.

On the other hand, to understand the significance of the story, you have to notice the subtle “identity” of Tokyo. The city is described as “Neo-” Tokyo, and we hear the characters discuss that the transformation from Tokyo -> Neo-Tokyo occurred after a big explosion. And the film itself ends on a big explosion destroying the city.

In some ways, all these events are subtle references to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombings of Tokyo. At the end, we see the city’s natural state restore itself (with floods of water and sunlight) in an oddly meditative moment. I think for the Japanese population in particular, Akira portrayed an underlying message of hope, trust and humanity, something very important for a recovering nation.

The message is probably much harder for us to relate to, given our time dilation from such historical events.

Hey Gwern! Thank you for your note. You're right about the "its", I think a lot of them happened because quotation marks in my Latex setup need to be dealt with individually. I'll make a pass and fix those soon.

I suppose you are also right about the GitS section. The main useful observations I made there were the abundance of skin tone and the gothic look of the museum towards the end, but those are not as significant as the green in Akira. I'd love to hear your (and anyone else's) thoughts on the colors in GitS.

( Also, on a separate note, thank you for all your advice related to ML things in the TPU Discord over the past couple days :) )

I think Valve’s defense is one that’s perfectly strong too, in theory, at least. Steam Cloud saves (syncing game state online), steam workshop (for community game mods, maps etc.), achievements/ leaderboards (arguably, steam makes a social network for games) are all features with running costs, aka a subscription, even if their price to the user is included in the sale price of the game.

From a developer’s perspective, Steam actually handles many more pain points of building games (voip, playing with friends, build processes, DRM, anti-cheat etc.) so arguably, the user is a subscriber of _steam_, since the developer is a subscriber of those services.

I’m curious to know why you find this defense “obviously bullshit”?

The search for "Go" is actually quite inaccurate due to the verb "go" and the game "go". You can see most of the peaks have top stories related to non-language uses of the word.

It seems the effect of other meanings is way less exaggerated for Rust in comparison.

There is the open-source ActivityWatch[1] which is not perfectly feature complete but it’s a decent alternative.

[1]: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch

I think the point of the conversation is also to point out that if there is no fear of death, and population keeps growing, it is possible that quality of life of average humanity goes down.

Of course, multiple factors can contribute to that, including induced "laziness" in large sections of society due to infiniteness of life.

Maybe next time you should watch the actual video before commenting.

P.S.: it’s a troll.

So it finds similar images to a person and shows those comments?