https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIW9dWdLiwM
This is the last episode before Coingeek NY, and perhaps the last before CSW's self-immolation in the witness box in Kleiman. If so, it was a thought-provoking swansong.
05:00 - CSW and XHL enjoy a lengthy detour laughing about Greg Maxwell's interest in the activities of CSW and XHL. They joke about how he has nothing else to do. Well, nothing aside from defending a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, brought at the behest of CSW.
Turing completeness gets its weekly airing. CSW accuses Greg of claiming that Bitcoin is not Turing complete, "because there's no loops". CSW explains:
Actually, it doesn't need to loop. Doesn't need to be, sort of, anything but a finite string of characters.
Sure Craig. CSW goes on:
After all, I mean, ignore what Turing says, Turing shouldn't be able to decide how a Turing machine works [eyeroll]
Craig, I think the concept of Turing completeness was named after Turing, not by Turing.
17:22 - CSW embarks on a tour de force of informed technical criticism of the inadequacy of modern programming languages for his cutting edge work in the field of Graph theory:
As an example, in graph problems, I'm yelling and swearing because a stupid fucking clique problem that I've got keeps going out of range because, well, fucking Python fucking sucks [grins]. That's all I'm going...well it probably won't be all I'm complaining...but my bitch about that is the machine keeps having errors because they run out of...range problems...because well, there's limits on what you want to do and clique searches in graphs are NP hard problems so, as you might guess with NP hard problems, big problems get problematic quickly. So if you're trying to do too much at once on a MACHINE [loud], machines start complaining, that's a good way of putting it [laughs] Bloody stupid [???], and Python doesn't handle large things as well as C. I mean, it should, but it fricking doesn't [snigger].
This clearly rattled the Python faithful. Surely it is no coincidence that this week's Lex Fridman podcast featured a three hour interview with Travis Oliphant about the history, philosophy and future of NumPy, SciPy, Anaconda, Python & Scientific Programming, delivered with enthusiasm, modesty and humour.
Talking of the pleasure of listening to tech people speaking respectfully, I couldn't help comparing and contrasting CSW's rambling nonsense at the Satoshi Block Dojo launch event, and Charles Hoskinson's address at Carnegie Mellon University, at the launch of his eponymous formal math center.
Both speakers touched on the issue of Western dominance of STEM, and the desirability of encouraging diversity, particularly in the developing world and specifically in Africa.
In his speech, Hoskinson described the open source Lean tools that the new center will develop, and how the soul of his company is in Africa. After noting that there are only 100 or so practising mathematicians in the whole continent of Africa, he said this, at 11:40:
If these [Lean] tools are meant to be useful for all, my hope is they can escape the ivory tower and not just go into our high schools and go into various places in industry, but also become intrinsically global. That same notion of inclusive accountability of mathematics should ultimately make math the most inclusive of all fields.
Hoskinson ended his speech by fondly recalling his meeting with an enthusiastic President Kagame of Rwanda (yes, that country), and thanking the staff members he had brought with him, calling them, "legends in their own right".
By way of contrast, when CSW addressed the Block Dojo launch on the issue of developing world opportunities, he treated the audience to his usual potty mouthed rambling schtick, at 01:03:46:
Bitcoin is a predicate system: true, false. And there isn't anything else. There's no, somewhere over there, truth; your truth my truth. There's truth, and that's it. And for all the shit we're facing in society right now, that matters. Yes, the British did a whole lot of shit. Yes, and the Americans did a whole lot of shit. Everyone's done fucking shit. Get over it...If we can stop fucking warlords. And the only word is fucking arsehole fricking piece of shit warlords [applause] actually wanting to take other people's money; good.
CSW went on to imagine a golden future for the poor, but intelligent, of Kenya, "the Congo" and Zimbabwe. President Kagame could not be reached for comment.
I hope that CSW's enthusiasm for African learning will lead to his endowing his own eponymous research institute. If I may humbly suggest a worthy candidate, it would be the mathematics department at Charles Sturt University, a university that already has a developing world feel about it. The obvious field of specialisation should surely be complex analysis, given the founder's alleged fondness for imaginary numbers.
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