jnxx

Also: Eroding the checks and balances and state monopoly and legitimation on use of violence.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Here in Germany, the Pirate Party has discussed the topic at length, since they (1) love voting innovations, and (2) have generally good knowledge on CS stuff, and so far I think no real solution is known for anonymous, confidential, secure digital voting with verifiable results, which is easy to reach with paper ballots and public observers of the counting.

Especially since all the above is designed as additive tech which uses a lot of brain hacks: Infinite scrolling, dopamine maximization, "check for new messages!" and so on.

How do you reduce your consumption of addictive stuff, in the easiest way? You quit, full stop.

It is the same as if you want to quit smoking, or as if you realize that you are drinking four cans of beer each summer evening and realize this is not good for you. It is far easier to quit, and decide what to do instead, than to "reduce".

The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database.

Very similar to the "EU settlement scheme" which would gave EU citizens which had work and settled in the UK pre-Brexit after a very lengthy and non-deterministic application process the right to stay without any paper document to prove that they actually got that right. Just a database entry on a government computer. Too bad if an extreme right-wing goverment came to power and something happened to that database.

There is another technical reason:

A digital ID requires essentially a digital signature running on a secure device (for example, a smart card).

Thus it implements public key cryptocraphy. Which makes confidentiality and integrity of computing two inseparable sides of the same medal.

You simply cannot break confidentiality of communication without practically breaking integrity of digital signatures at the same time. (Otherwise, a user, for example could generate a fresh random public key, sign it with their digital id, and send it to any communications partner).

Breaking this in turn means that the government can sign on behalf of you, without your knowledge.

Human communication is based on symbols and whatever the means are to transport these symbols, cannot work without trust.

I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy. They’re doing it blindly.

That is often a variant of Hanlor's razor brought up on questions like this. How do certain actors turn reliably to a course of action that is so damaging - but to any expert or even rational mind seems stupid! That can't be what they want?!

I do not think that this reasoning holds.

Hannah Arendt, when writing about totalitarism, came to the conclusion that there is a kind of complicity between evil and thoughtlessness. (I am still trying to find her exact words on this.)

would this scale?

Consider how much space you do need ahead for safe travel as a pedestrian, on a bicycle, on an interstate highway in a car, or on a plane taking off at an airport, and you have the answer.

Cars already require a ridiculous amount of space for safety. I live in Germany and there are cities with 200,000 inhabitants that are smaller in area than a single highway intersection.

The argument is like it is unethical to lock my front door because this also stops people which genuinely only want to enter to have a look at my living room.

That's not how boundaries work.

What I think he is wrong with is that LLMs are, despite being named as "Artificial Intelligence", not intelligent .

I guess that some people confound the source of information with its medium. A book might contain Newtons equation of motion, Gauss' works, Maxwell's equations, or an introduction of Einstein's theory of special relativity. But it is not the book that is intelligent, it is the people that wrote up the ideas.

You can see that confusion between the medium and authority by the holy scriptures of the large religions which were among the first human organizations that employed written words for their purposes - for example, muslim and Jewish people treat their respective foundational books as holy themselves.

With LLMs, it is clear that when you average the writing of many more or less intelligent people, the result might appear more or less intelligent. In the same way as common sense, sometimes, does make sense. But it is still not the medium that is intelligent, but the authors of the input.

But what the blog author is probably right about is persuasion by influencing communities which in turn influence individuals. That is exactly how Googles or Facebooks practices that violate privacy - like offering free emails accounts which use data from personal mails for advertising - became widely accepted even if it is clear they are not good for individuals.

I think that dimension of persuasion might be often overlooked when people, for example, think about the Cambridge Analytica scandal:

https://longform.org/posts/the-great-british-brexit-robbery

https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/great-british-bre...

https://ia601000.us.archive.org/28/items/civ53332855/great-b...

The foundation of quantum physics being developed with plenty of hikes and walks outside is almost a science meme. These researchers took a lot of very productive breaks.

So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".

Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.

Too bad that the language we use is also a demonstration of social status. If I think about it, it could have a somewhat corrosive effect on that glue that keeps society in shape.

We already treat spam and unsolicited commercial email that way.

Trust is also essential for any form of symbolic information exchange.

Humans communicate using symbols. That could be patterns of sound waves, gestures, or written characters.

If we can't trust that the communicated symbols match their agreed meaning, what is the use of them? Communication breaks down quickly, and being social individuals which inter-depend on others, we can't live without communication. Nobody likes a liar, and the reason is, the words they give us do not match what they mean. (Perhaps not only humans. I read that dolphins readily come and rescue individuals which are drowning - including humans - but they punish individuals which fake drowning.)

And that goes from every stratum of social interaction, from big treaties to selling a bagel. Would you sell a bagel for a fake dollar bill? The number on it is a symbol as well, it has a meaning.

So it is right down one of the very bases of human cooperation.

What are the main differences between OcamML and a statically typed Lisp?

what do you think about pre-scheme?

I am aware that reports on the topic have been submitted before.

This is a fantastic, well-written article by world-class climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf.

Being fully in the know of the consequences makes a very big difference - both ethically, and legally.

In the realm of electricity production, things are now changing very quickly, though not yet as fast as needed.

Where a huge amount of works needs to be done is carbon-economic transport, housing and construction, and agriculture. And, yes, we will need to say farewell to a few things. That's OK, we are also not using steam engines any more.

Politics is just a proxy for people’s desires and motivations and willingness to make trade offs.

It is not people as in "a democratic majority" which want to destroy the habitable state of the Earths atmosphere, ecosystems and our own food chain for very little short-term gain. People have children and younger relatives, and we do care about them.

It is a very small minority of very greedy individuals, and there are also massive amounts of disinformation going on so that the democratic majority confounds the interests of these with their own.

I would love to learn more what can be done! (And especially for projects in Southern Germany where I am based).

Apparently, a huge part of the opportunities are in embedded computing. One observation I have that there is an AI hype now, but very few people in that area realize how much can be achieved with "conventional" methods like classical signal processing strategies, for example predictive filtering. A huge part of embedded computing is just concerned with getting a board running, at which point you are not farther than when you have powered on a PC and finished to log in.

In respect to Common Lisp, you could look into "Common Lisp Recipes" by Weitz[2], and "Practical Common Lisp" by Seibel[1]. These are industrial-strength systems which were used to built large airline reservation systems.

Scheme is in a way more minimalist and Schemes are not as large, but this might also be give an erroneous impression because they build on the enormous experience with Common Lisp and have boiled down to the most essential parts - it is not the kind of minimalism "the simplest things that could work" but "what turned out to be indispensable in practice", which is a very different thing.

[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] https://weitz.de/cl-recipes/ or https://www.amazon.com/Common-Lisp-Recipes-Problem-Solution-...

It has a great backwards-compatibility story -- a lot better than Python's, for example, which I use in my current dayjob.

I think this is a really important point. I worked intensively with Python for years, but it was a deep disappointment to see how little the core devs and the community care about backwards compatibility in the 2/3 transition, and things have not improved. That might be due to what Python is dominantly used for today (The Numeric/Numpy transition which happened around 2000 was totally different). Breaking things every few years might be OK for unicorn startups or companies that move fast and, well, break things, but there is a lot of valuable programming from people and in organisations which can simply not afford, or do not see it as a priority to re-write mature algorithms every few years.

You might find Guile interesting, I think it is more immersed than Racket, especially when debugging, and more similar to Common Lisp (SBCL).

One feeling I have is that while Clojure is incredibly tasteful, well-designed and elegant, it is less focused on Correctness as Racket. And this gives me the feeling that if I make some mistake (say, erroneously swapping arguments of a complex function that e.g. computes on list as sets), I do not know what is going to happen.

I think Guile is a good example that one can have an SBCL-like workflow of live coding (with debugging and jumping right into a stack trace) in Scheme.

I have heard that this is not possible because Racket needs to make a stricgter separation of compile time and run time... but I am not sure whether this is actually true.

I guess one can think of Clojure as a very Scheme-affine Lisp. Which is not surprising since Scheme was a kind of distilled iteration of Common Lisp as a common denominator.

Are there any Schemes which are as "Batteries included" as Clojure with broad and deep library support? (I think Racket has quite good support!)

I am using Racket once in a while, and I like it. Though I have also learned that some Lisps, and especially Common Lisps (and, I suspect, Guile), are a bit under-hyped.

But a question to people who know it better: What are features of Racket which at first might not seen practical, relevant, or useful, but are surprisingly useful for programming when one gives them a try?

That critique adresses security aspects.

Yes, I think if a project has backdoors and its old maintainers are unable to review them, I am more critical than with normal projects. As said, compression is used everywhere and in embedded systems, it touches a lot of critical stuff. And the project went straight for that since the beginning.

And this is in part because I can not even tell for sure that he even exists. If I had met him a few times in a bar, I would be more inclined to believe he is not involved.