Home birth is absolutely a rational choice in many cases. The author had a very strong reason to require hospital birth but in scenarios with lower risk it is safer in some respects to avoid the hospital.
It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.
Pain relief is a major reason to go to a hospital. There is no safe way to get pain relief in a home birth. It is obviously a very personal choice.
> if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child
Of course not. This wrong in two important ways. Midwives are medical professionals. They can administer medicine. Most notably they can administer Pitocin to stop hemorrhage after the placenta is delivered. This is the most common cause of maternal death during labor.
The other way this is wrong is it ignores the option of transferring to a hospital in an emergency. Midwives assess medical risk and can make the call to transfer. Delivering mothers who are overwhelmed can also make the call.
> And you actually pay for this?
The midwife model of care has many advantages over common OBGYN practices. As one example midwives are often delivering 2-3 babies a month instead of many every day. As another example the person delivering your baby is someone you have actually met before and have built a rapport with. Some hospitals try to make this happen with doctors but it is commonly not the case.
Overall the tradeoff is worth it to many people -- it's about 1% of births in the US.
Perhaps it’s that a global solution in the language of set theory was hard to find, but distributed systems — which need to provide guarantees only from local node behavior, without access to global — offered an alternate perspective. They weren’t designed to do so but they ended up being useful.
They’re literally exploring the same object: properties of networks.
That you can express the constraints of network colorings (ie, the measure theory problem) as network algorithms strikes me as a “well duh” claim — at least if you take that Curry-Howard stuff seriously.
Curry-Howard is not some magic powder you can just sprinkle around to justify claims. The isomorphism provides a specific lens to move between mathematics and computation. It says roughly that types and logical propositions can be seen equivalently.
Nothing in the result in the article talks about types, and even if it could be, it’s not clear that the CH isomorphism would be a good lens to do so.
Curry-Howard literally says that a proof your object has a property is equivalent to an algorithm which constructs a corresponding type.
I’m not “sprinkling magic powder”, but using the very core of the correspondence:
A proof that your network has some property is an algorithm to construct an instance of appropriate type from your network.
In this case, we’re using algorithms originally designed for protocols in CS to construct a witness of a property about a graph coloring. In the article, it details exactly his realization this was true — during a lecture, seeing the types of things constructed by these algorithms corresponding to the types of objects he works with.
Do you have any actual evidence that this result can be viewed as an instance of CH?
The networks on the measure theory side and on the algorithmic side are not the same. They are not even the same cardinality. One has uncountably many nodes, the other has countably many nodes.
The correspondence outlined is also extremely subtle. Measurable colorings are related to speed of consensus.
You make it sound like this is a result of the type: "To prove that a coloring exists, I prove that an algorithm that colors the network exists." Which it is not, as far as I understand.
It seems to me you are mischaracterizing CH here as well:
> A proof that your network has some property is an algorithm to construct an instance of appropriate type from your object.
A proof that a certain network has some property is an algorithm that constructs an instance of an appropriate type that expresses this fact from the axioms you're working from.
> You make it sound like this is a result of the type: "To prove that a coloring exists, I prove that an algorithm that colors the network exists." Which it is not, as far as I understand.
This is the crux of the proof, as I understand it: to classify network coloring measurability, I classify algorithms that color the network.
Which I can do because there’s a correspondence between network colorings (in graph theory) and algorithms that color networks (in CS). Which I’m arguing is an instance of CH: they’re equivalent things, so classifying either is classifying both.
> They are not even the same cardinality. One has uncountably many nodes, the other has countably many nodes.
[…] Measurable colorings are related to speed of consensus.
Yes — this is why the work is technically impressive, because proving the intuition from above works when extending to the infinite case is non-trivial. But that doesn’t change that fundamentally we’re porting an algorithm. I’m impressed by the approach to dealing with labels in the uncountable context which allows the technique to work for these objects — but that doesn’t mean I’m surprised such a thing could work. Or that work on network colorings (in CS) turned out to have techniques useful for network colorings (in math).
> It seems to me you are mischaracterizing CH
You then go on to make some quibble about my phrasing that, contrary to your claim about mischaracterizing, doesn’t conflict with what you wrote.
Edit: removing last paragraph; didn’t realize new author.
CH as I understand it has nothing to do with this. As an example that illustrates why, consider the simple infinite coloring discussed in the article that uses the axiom of choice. You could not write an algorithm that actually performs this coloring (because Axiom of Choice, and because it requires uncountably many actions). CH says that the statement "all such graphs can be colored" can be computed (in finitely many steps) by a program from the axioms. Even though the colorings can-not be done by a computation.
What CH does not allow you to do is turn an existence proof (a coloring exists) into a constructive proof (a means to actually construct such a coloring). In fact, this is generally not true. Mathematical statements correspond to computations in a much more subtle and indirect way than that.
Honestly, I get the impression that you have a very superficial understanding of the topics at hand, but I am far from an expert myself. If you really know a way to see this as an instance of CH I would be very intrigued to learn about it.
It is an expensive research project. Actually doing this starting from no experience or tools you're probably looking at 6 months - 1 year and 10k. A little support from trained biologists would help a lot though.
Using DIY tools and not being a trained biostatistician or whoever usually looks at these things you are very likely to face errors you don't know how to account for. I would guess the odds are high you'll encounter scary false positives for example.
It sounds really fun though, something I've always wanted to do with more time.
No major changes professionally other than that I have become a bit more careful about keeping my geopolitical opinions to myself. Also having some coworkers living in the Middle East makes the two recent Qatari strikes feel scarier. I had a lot of trouble doing anything during the week of the Iran war besides refreshing the news. I felt quite awkward around my Iranian coworkers knowing that my tax dollars were funding the bombing of their families.
It has taken a small but noticeable toll on my personal life. Amongst my family we find ourselves talking about the state of the occupation and how hopeless it makes us feel about humanity probably once a week. I can see my liberal Jewish friends having a lot of trouble being criticized and rejected from both sides of discourse in USA. I recently saw two jewish people shouting obscenities at each other while waiting to get off a plane and talking about Israel. Antisemitism on the street seems to be increasing -- I met someone a few days ago who started saying baseless hateful things minutes into our first conversation.
Probably like other people here I've spent a lot more of my free time in the last year learning about the history culture and politics of Israel, Palestine and Iran.
Most Iranians outside of the US hate the regime, so probably were in favor of the bombing of Iran. But best not to talk any politics at work, its better.
I have no idea the current status but five years ago I knew an acquaintance who was building this: https://sourcecred.io which I think is pretty close to what you're talking about.
Thank you!
This is very similar to the protocol we are building.
Your website taught me a lot — I really appreciate it.
By the way, is SourceCred still active?
It looks like the Twitter and GitHub repos have been quiet for a while.
Is your acquaintance still working on it?
Blockchain people consider Ligero as a modern construction worth using. At least last I checked 6 months ago. This work isn't reinventing the wheel and appears to be targeting a nice problem in service of a practical system. The author's country of origin also makes the work seem more legit because everyone knows Italians are the best at zk.
The surprising part of STARKS and SNARKS comes down to the nature of polynomials. It's surprisingly easy to tell two polynomials apart with a small number of random checks (Schwartz Zippel lemma). In light of this it's not surprising there is good reading comparing them to erasure codes which rely on exactly this property of polynomials.
The non-interactive piece is pretty straightforward you just simulate challenge response conversation with unbiasible public randomness and show the transcript (Fiat Shamir transform).
Another area worth exploring is how some of these proof systems can have such incredibly small proofs (192 bytes for any computation in groth16 zk snarks). That relies on the much more difficult to intuit theory of elliptic curve pairing functions.
This is my setup too. It's nice to keep the Claude tasks on a remote machine with no important state so there's no chance of privacy leaks or in case you accidentally allow them to rm -rf ~
It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.