@castarco@hachyderm.io2025-11-16 12:05:17
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
@sergiofdezsaez@masto.es2025-11-03 15:26:39
#fediconsejo del día. Los relojes Casio son muy molones y muy cuquis, pero por muy bonito que quede, no cojšis uno con la pantalla en negativo.
El mío solo tiene tres pequeñas esferas, ya que es de aguja, y ya apenas se ve (también porque tiene casi 15 años, las cosas como son).
En las fotos aún se aprecia algo si se amplía la imagen, pero a simple vista, como podéis observar, apenas se a…
@arXiv_csGT_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-12-10 07:45:10
Selling Privacy in Blockchain Transactions
Georgios Chionas, Olga Gorelkina, Piotr Krysta, Rida Laraki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08096 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08096 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08096
arXiv:2512.08096v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study methods to enhance privacy in blockchain transactions from an economic angle. We consider mechanisms for privacy-aware users whose utility depends not only on the outcome of the mechanism but also negatively on the exposure of their economic preferences. Specifically, we study two auction-theoretic settings with privacy-aware users. First, we analyze an order flow auction, where a user auctions off to specialized agents, called searchers, the right to execute her transaction while maintaining a degree of privacy. We examine how the degree of privacy affects the revenue of the auction and, broadly, the net utility of the privacy-aware user. In this new setting, we describe the optimal auction, which is a sealed-bid auction. Subsequently, we analyze a variant of a Dutch auction in which the user gradually decreases the price and the degree of privacy until the transaction is sold. We compare the revenue of this auction to that of the optimal one as a function of the number of communication rounds. Then, we introduce a two-sided market - a privacy marketplace - with multiple users selling their transactions under their privacy preferences to multiple searchers. We propose a posted-price mechanism for the two-sided market that guarantees constant approximation of the optimal social welfare while maintaining incentive compatibility (from both sides of the market) and budget balance. This work builds on the emerging line of research that attempts to improve the performance of economic mechanisms by appending cryptographic primitives to them.
toXiv_bot_toot