spragl

I basically agree with you, and I have a profile on LinkedIn.

A number of companies only announce job openings on LinkedIn, and if you are looking for a job (as I am) you would handicap yourself by not having a profile there. HR departments around the World are infatuated with LinkedIn, unfortunately.

My strategy is to give LinkedIn a minimum of information, use it for job search, and filter away most of their emails.

I look forward to the day where I can close down my LinkdIn account. But until then I have to put up with it.

Yes I know.

When I wrote Turing Machine, I was thinking about the classical determinstic Turing Machine.

Im not super knowledgable about Quantum Turing Machines, but as far as I know, they dont do better than the classical deterministic Turing Machines when we are talking about computability.

Both P and NP are computable. That is, a Turing machine can compute both of them.

Those quantum processes are interesting. Take the random numbers generated from radioactive decay. They are (after some cleanup) truly random. That is what we think. But how could we tell the difference from pseudorandom numbers, generated by a sufficiently advanced algorithm? We couldnt. So particles could simply be Turing Machines running sufficiently advanced algorithms that we cant reverse engineer. If so, quantum mechanics is computable even if we cant compute it.

(Particles being TMs doesnt mean they are FAs with an infinite tape, but that they are computationally equivalent to TMs.)

I dont know what to say. I relate a personal experience. Yours was different. Good for you.

My problem was not using apps, but the other stuff. I did as I was used to, stubbornly bumbling around, feeling sure I would run into the solution. But I never did. I had to look up instructions, several times. That was never necessary with my old iPhone.

Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.

That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.

I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.

Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.

I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.

It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.

The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.

The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).

Yeah, he seems confused to me. Well meaning, but not so consistent.

What is good is that he is a wrench, that throws itself in the works repeatedly. This is a healthy thing to have.

That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.

/etc/hosts scales like a lead balloon.

For small groups of servers, with limited egress communication, it might nevertheless make sense. And then go for it, by all means. As a general replacement for DNS, not likely.

It is hard to see how Ansible should be simpler than DNS. Maybe if you have worked with Ansible and not DNS, you might think so.

I havent looked into the details of either, but what would prevent Germans from using the Austrian implementation?

You can get that, even if you have a phone with the app on it. MitID is perfectly okay with that. At login time you will be prompted for your token code, but there is an option to switch to the app ("Skift til MitID app" in the bottom of the box).

The MitID design is strange, but in this regard it is well done.

That sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization. Having the same timezone in Poland and Spain possibly made sense 30 years ago, but now that all communication goes through computers of one kind or another, time conversion is seamless.

For those companies that have offices in both countries, and for which the synchronicity matters, it is not that difficult to just have special office hours.

Solvespace can also be used for 3D.

It is sad that FreeCAD gets all the attention. If Solvespace had some of it, and the development time following from it, it could get improvements and some of the cool stuff in their pipeline. That would IMO make it a much better CAD program than FreeCAD could ever become.

I really loved Miranda back when I learned about it. I still have the book. I think it never took off because it was quite expensive for universities to use. Im sure David Turner regrets his price model today. Now he has made Miranda available here https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/

I think you are right that the shady actors pretty much can use existing bugs.

But you are also right that this is not the only way they work. With the XZ Utils backdoor (2024), we normal nerds got an interesting glimpse into how they create a zero-day. It was luckily discovered by an american developer not looking for zero-days, just debugging a performance problem.

Modern keyboards = some keyboards. In the Nordic Countries modern keyboards have parantheses on 8 and 9.

I assume by third party you mean the authority, and yes, the authority would need to know your personal information. At least enough of it to verify your age. So the ideal is that the authority is the entity that already knows your personal information. Like the entity that issued your passport to you, or the one that issued you drivers license.

But even if the authority was a private company, I think it would be an improvement compared to the current situation. In this situation your personal information would be held by this one company, and not whatever provider that needs to verify your age. Also, you would be able to use the commitments, that this private authority gave you, without any coordination afterwards. The authority would not know about your transactions.

That is what the example uses. In the real world that would be a digital signature. Look under the heading "Fitting the parts together" to see what the real world solution could be like.

I think that whatever organization that issues your passport, would be a natural choice for setting this up. But it could be some other authority. In a way it is the identity owners and the providers that decide who they will trust as authorities.

Hash-chains allows the solution to be token-less. You no longer need those per transaction information leaking API calls. You also avoid dependency on a single provider.

The communication in connection with a transaction would only go between the identity owner (Bob) and the provider (Cycle shop).

No, the solution does not require that.

It requires that Bob proves posession of a private key, that only he has ever had. That private key could be generated specifically for the commitment that he got from Alice.

Yes. I think that wahtever organization that issues your passport, would be a natural choice for setting this up.

But nothing prevents it from being a private company, although I cannot see a sound business model for it. Also it would need to project great credibility for customers to trust them with their information.

I think the way to go would be for Alice to give you lots of commitments. They are computationally light-weight to generate anyway.

That would at least be a good and also simple solution. Maybe there is a perfect solution, but then I dont know it.

I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy.

It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives.

Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find quite a bit of information. My introduction to hash chains is for for age verification specifically: https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/

Another fun fact: German registration plates use a font for which it is difficult to change one digit to another, for example by adding a bit of tape. The font is called FE-Schrift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift

Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down. They mostly contain simple Ikea-like instructions and a lot of legalese CMA warnings. That is not a dig at Ikea. Their instructions are great for assembling flatpack furniture. But servicing a faucet, a garage door or a lawn mower is on another level.

This state of affairs is partly due a change in the nature of products. They are in general more complex and no longer meant to be repairable. They are meant to have shorter life spans, and if serviceable are meant to be serviced by professionals. How much that is an improvement for the consumer, is questionable IMO.

You are absolutely right!

https://spredehagl.com/

Its different for different children. Some of them understand more than you think, most of them dont.

I think that reading the classics can be beneficial to the first type. But some of the classics can be very bleak. Its not fair to the children to make them read those. 1984 is probably in this category. Read Animal Farm instead. It is also better for the second type of children.

If done properly, and in moderation, I think reading classics is beneficial.

Yes, wellknown solutions have a strong grip on you. In this case it is unfortunate.

I know that the preparations for eIDAS 2.0 (the European thing) did contain many good parts. Taking inspiration from SSI. So at that point their specifications were rather good. I havent kept up with it for almost one year now, so that might have changed.