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Bram Cohen

26 Mar, 8 tweets, 2 min read

There are a few a vaccines out now, so what's the difference between them? Possibly more how they're used than what they are (thread) statnews.com/2021/02/02/com…

Pfizer and Moderna have similar efficacy. One has a second shot after 21 days and the other after 28 days. Can you take the second shot for either in a broad range of time or mix and match for similar efficacy? Probably yes, but we don't know.

Moderna uses 100 micrograms. Pfizer uses 30 micrograms and has fewer side effects. Could you use 30 of Moderna and have it be cheaper with less side effects? Probably yes, but we don't know.

Johnson and Johnson is single shot but less effective. Could you take two shots of that for similar efficacy to the others? Probably yes, but we don't know.

Personally if I were god-king (which I'm not, and this is not medical advice) I'd dilute Moderna by a factor of 3, administer single shots to the whole population, and only when that's done do second shots to everybody, and not worry much about mixing and matching.

That would get to herd immunity as quickly as possible, thus saving as many lives as possible. You might want to be more conservative when there isn't an emergency, but we most definitely have an emergency.

For people to claim that whatever's approved by the FDA already is science and everything else is superstition is nutbar. Science proceeds by testing things. Often it's reasonable to extrapolate from experience.

Evidence collects over time. There isn't a magical moment when the evidence goes from zero to definitive. For all the questions posed above, literally your guess is as good as mine.

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More from @bramcohen

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

17 Mar

Some thoughts on RandomX. The audits are more useful than the docs on this one (thread) github.com/tevador/Random…

Oddly the pop writeups babble on about virtual machines and such instead of straightforwardly saying it's based off Argon2. That's something which one should be proud of instead of obfuscating.

From the audits it's clear it went about how you'd expect. Some people with more CPU than cryptography experience took Argon2d and applied mixing functions which are reasonably spread out across the functionality on a standard CPU

Read 13 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

3 Mar

Came across some discussion the other day of academics talking about how hyperinflation killed Mojo Nation. Don't have a good link (maybe it was Ian Goldberg) but will reflect on Mojo Nation a bit (thread)

Mojo Nation was a glorious failure. It went down in flames, but directly lead to BitTorrent and Bitcoin. There are few failures anywhere near that successful.

I can confirm that hyperinflation did in fact happen in it, although I haven't thought about it much, and hadn't realized that that had been studied and the learnings incorporated into later projects, most notably of course Bitcoin.

Read 10 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

3 Mar

It's a bit emotional for me to talk about this, but I will say that Len posted pseudonymously on the cypherpunks list constantly, including at least one fleshed-out and long-lived handle, and even I didn't know what it was leung-btc.medium.com/len-sassaman-a…

Also I have a vague memory - mostly because Len told me about it and I wasn't paying close attention - that there was a nym called Product Cipher which pseudonymously posted the first ring signatures implementation to cypherpunks and then disappeared.

The implication with that one seemed to be that it was Hal or Len or some combination of the two, very unsure though, and don't know if it got clarified later.

Read 4 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

27 Feb

Got Clubhouse working again. It seems to have a better idea what it is now. It's talk radio. Like, exactly talk radio. Talk radio is fairly popular, and if it stays apples-to-apples the same there's no reason an app couldn't wipe out that whole industry, so it may do well

That said, the usage numbers still aren't terribly impressive, maybe a few thousand simultaneous users spread across a dozen channels at the most, which is decent but needs a lot more growth to be a real success

The content seems a lot more diverse than before, although when VCs are on they still seem to be trying to fit all the negative aspects of the 'tech bro' stereotype they possibly can. It's so weird how that stereotype is pinned on founders who are rarely that way

Read 5 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

25 Feb

Fixing the post office's finances is entirely doable. It has available a business model which would turn it to profitability quickly (thread)

The new service is: Portable addresses. You get one nationwide PO Box which never changes, even when you move. When you move you simply tell the post office where you're moving and on what day and all your personal packages get rerouted

It costs X/month. If X was $20 I personally would immediately sign up, stay signed up for the rest of my life, and never think about it. So would a lot of other people. That adds up fast.

Read 9 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

24 Feb

Serious question: What is an NFT? Meaning, what is its technical functionality? (thread)

From the descriptions (and very opaque specs) it seems an NFT is a singleton (or group of singletons, but that's just because contracts in the EVM are heavyweight) which is transferable and has a current value of some kind

And it's important that anyone can go look up this value on the blockchain? Or that someone can prove to someone else what the value is? And the database of the singletons and what they represent is held somewhere or widely distributed?

Read 6 tweets

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