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taink

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Whole Earth Index 9 months ago

He specifically references the last page of the last issue, and concludes his commencement speech with its words "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." [1]

Pretty nice to see it context, next to all the other editions.

I wonder what obscure (probably online?) source of information of today we'll be comparing to the mainstream sources of tomorrow.

Maybe this very website will be among them?

[1] https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...

Unlearning OOP does not necessarily involve forgetting abstraction and the concept of an object. "Unlearning OOP" involves freeing yourself from the notion that all programming should be designed as an object hierarchy. There is/was a tendency in object-oriented programming to consider that it is the only way Real Software™ is made. You tend to focus more on the architecture of your system than its actual features.

Notice the prerequisite to unlearning something is learning it first. I don't think anyone proposes that the concept of an object is useless.

The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.

Quoting from the article:

  Things came to a head in 1958 as France struggled to decolonize. There was strong opposition within France to Algerian independence and part of the army openly rebelled. Important generals threatened a coup unless de Gaulle was returned to power. They sent paratroopers to capture Corsica in case anyone missed their point.
The article even fails to mention Operation Resurrection. Hopefully we don't need coups every time we want a new constituent assembly.

I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

Also, I think it solves a different problem: it prevents spoofing/MITM but what about legitimate certificates? We would still need CAs that actually curate their customers and hold them accountable. And we would need email servers/clients to differentiate between strict CAs and ones that are used solely for encryption purposes.

I don't know that DNS should be applied to emails as is anyway but I find it could force spammers to operate with publicly available information which would make holding them accountable easier.

Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.

First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?

At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.

For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.

Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.

Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.

How so? Where are the bugs you speak of? I don't find the UI to be nightmarish either. Can you point to specific issues the site maintainer can look at?

If this is the worst modern website you've seen, you're very lucky.

It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.

The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".

The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.

The pivot 9 months ago

Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and processing these resources is becoming more and more complex. Especially when you consider we would need these resources not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to improve it.

Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment.

What do you mean? What would free software requiring redistribution payment look like? Say I send a copy of a free-as-in-freedom game that I may or may not have modified in some way to a friend or on a forum, should I pay its author(s) for this? How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software? I think a simpler definition, like Stallman's, is less restrictive of software modification.

Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power, especially when you remember the idea behind free software is that you get to have control over your software. Copyleft is such an example -- it is highly restrictive.

I get the financial issue one could have with free software as defined by Stallman; freeing the software you distribute is a difficult decision. Free software is advocated from the point of view of its users, who are ignorant to the difficulties one might face when developing and publishing software. If this is a decision you can make, it is kinder to your users to free the software you publish.

Side note: free software requires one to examine how they value commodities. Do you value the object itself, or the human time it took to make it? In a world where software is thought of as free by default, developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch. I believe such a world would be better for software quality because I agree with you that competitive markets are better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.

The initial sale never has and never will be the issue with non free software; in fact, they can sometimes be acquired free of charge. I get your sentiment and I agree with you that some software can indeed be proprietary without being predatory or abusive.

I think there is an issue with your definition of "user freedom". What do you mean by it?

Stallman, when defining free software, does not bother with standards or terms: he relies on his own definition of what "user freedom" means and from there states that free software is software that is not restrictive of this freedom.

Free software simply does not restrict what the user can do with a program. It is not a matter of interest. People that choose a free license when they publish something (and respect the license's terms, obviously) are voluntarily letting go of their ability to restrict the user's usage of the program.

The issue I would have with "non-predatory" or "non-abusive" non-free software is that it does not allow me to fix problems I might have with the program. But this is only a problem I have. In other contexts, maybe a user needs to send (modified or otherwise) copies to other people of the software without being able to make sure the author agrees that this transaction is ok.

Fundamentally, non-free software restricts the user's freedom, even if it fully respects what the user would want to do. Similarly, a typewriter that can only output English text would restrict your freedom to type anything beyond English text (which is not something you would care about if you only wanted to write English).

That's the idea anyway. What do you think?

What exactly does your diet consist in? What other adjustments have you made, e.g. in sleep or exercise?

From what I've read[1] the risk with a long-term keto diet is an increase in cholesterol (LDL and total), which can be attributed to lower micronutrient and fiber intake, replaced by more animal-derived foods.

Reducing inflammation is interesting, I'll have to look into it.

[1] e.g. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmaa006

Thank you for your input. I was familiar with proper noun capitalization (e.g. Moon/moon and Earth/earth).

French (my first language) is different in that it differentiates language, adjective and demonym through capitalization (languages are common nouns and when used as adjectives are not capitalized), which is sometimes necessary because of how French sentences are structured.

The more you know.

Exactly, I completely agree with you. This is what baffled me about the parent comment: "Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats".

Compare the right to privacy with other human rights, and I find it as clear and succinct as its counterparts (if not clearer and more succinct in some cases).

At the same time, given the international nature of these laws, I disagree with you on their problematic nature. They are (in my view) meant as a basis of diplomatic debate and not enforcement (which would be impracticable). They are to be complemented by organic law, because on their own they are unenforceable.

What would pass "clear and succinct" in your opinion? I don't see how it is less clearly defined than any other human right.

Let's take international law[1]. Right to privacy is defined as protection from arbitrary interference with privacy.

Is this definition problematic? Privacy itself has a short definition too: the ability of one to remove themselves or information about themselves from the public[2].

I don't see what is unclear or verbose here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#International [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy

Again, I don't see the problem with new regulation disabling old design.

And I don't see how your points make the game impossible to morph into a playable state. For one thing, that's not what the campaign advocates for anyway.

Let's start with the basics: why would it need to remain in a playable state? The game is free-to-play. You could make such a game without micro transactions and the new regulations would be powerless. Second, these regulations wouldn't be retroactive, so Pokemon wouldn't have to comply.

But let's assume they want to anyway. Let's review what's blocking according to you. First, servers. "Reasonably playable" can be a subset of the features. I mean, the game could be made to run offline and things would be fine.

But maybe the game is too coupled with multiplayer features. Again, you could allow the player to select server IPs, and allow people to run server binaries on their own hardware. The initiative is very lenient on what you would have to provide, and I can imagine people determined to run big servers would exist if they still want to play. Player limits and server choice are not a major problem for other community driven games (WoW private servers, which I would argue are vastly more complex than Pokemon Go, do not really suffer from this). There might be friction, but that's reasonable.

Who needs anti-cheat? The game would still be reasonably playable. If the servers have a problem with the induced load, they could moderate and/or introduce their own anticheat. That's completely outside the scope of the regulation, though.

Map tiling is not an issue either. First, this responsibility could be offloaded to community servers. Second, I'll admit I might be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure low resolution maps are available for free, maybe some under the Open Street Map project. I'm unfamiliar with it though.

I doubt that when developing the game smaller development servers did not exist so developers could test their changes. Or local mocking. Anything.

So... I don't think such a game would be impossible to make. Harder? Sure, maybe. I do believe, however, that when you ask for payment, you are also supposed to act responsibly and allow your customers access to what they purchased. If they purchased a service, they ought to know when it stops at time of purchase.

If you decide to pull the plug, that's on you to untangle. Either make the plug repluggable, or make it so it doesn't need the plug to be able to run. That's all there is to it.

How is this problematic? New law impedes on previous practices and renders them unfeasible all the time.

In the specific case of Pokemon Go, and with end-of-life plans in mind, you could probably design the game around that expectation. GDPR has had similar consequences, at the very least.

Also, this text is not law. This will be negotiated and I doubt the gaming industry would leave the initiative as-is.

Reminds me of this quote from Douglas Adams:

  I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
    1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
    2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
    3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's been used to criticize anyone who rejects new technology, but it's just a funny quote that has some truth to it.
  One of the things I'll never understand was why the attacker was replaying my traffic? They were clearly in my network and could access everything without being detected, why replay all the HTTP requests? So odd.
I was thinking about this while reading. My guess is that the vulnerability was limited to reading incoming requests (to the modem) or something along those lines, not full control of the network. Replaying the requests is a good way to get both ends of the traffic if you can only access one. For instance, a login + password being authenticated. Just a thought!

EDIT: I'd be hard-pressed to know how one could exploit this, given TLS would encrypt the requests. Maybe they're counting on using badly encrypted requests, encrypted with e.g. TLSv1.0?

Equinox.space 2 years ago

I can recommend Tin Can, which is somewhat similar to what you're talking about.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1315980/Tin_Can/

You maintain an evacuation pod for as long as you can to survive the small journey (I think it can take as much as 30 minutes?) between the ship you're escaping and safety.

It's not perfect but it might scratch your itch.