Steel-man angle: A desire for data provenance is a good thing with benefits that are independent of utopias/humans vs machines kinds of questions.
But, all provenance systems are gamed. I predict the most reliable methods will be cumbersome and not widespread, thus covering little actual content. The easily-gamed systems will be in widespread use, embedded in social media apps, etc.
Questions:
1. Does there exist a data provenance system that is both easy to use and reliable "enough" (for some sufficient definition of "enough")? Can we do bcrypt-style more-bits=more-security and trade time for security?
2. Is there enough of an incentive for the major tech companies to push adoption of such a system? How could this play out?
Anyone have experience self-hosting? Maybe with https://www.npmjs.com/package/scimgateway running standalone, or proxying to an existing user store? Curious if there be dragons— do you need a few hundred users before encountering them?
I really enjoyed the author’s explanation of undecidability.
I found this bit was really helpful:
“This to me is a strong "intuitive" argument for why the halting problem is undecidable: a halt detector can be trivially repurposed as a program optimizer / theorem-prover / bcrypt cracker / chess engine. It's too powerful, so we should expect it to be impossible.”
I'm not sure about that. These are also easily solved with a general-purpose CPU, if you don't care about running time. And there's nothing that says that a halt detector would be fast. The impossibility result is more interesting than just "it would take a million times the age of the universe to complete if every atom in it were put to the sole purpose of computing it" as we often see with cryptography.
That's not necessarily true. Consider the program `x := 4; loop {if !sum_of_two_primes(x) {return true}; x += 2}`. If we run this on a general purpose CPU, this will halt if and only if Goldbach's conjecture has a counterexample. Otherwise it will run forever. So even if a working halt detector takes 14 million billion years, it will definitely tell us if the conjecture is true or not. Whereas if the general purpose CPU is still running after that time, we still have no way of knowing whether it's because it's going to run forever or if it simply hasn't reached the first (ludicrously large) counterexample.
I think you're agreeing with me. The problems listed as something that a halt detector can be "trivially repurposed" for are problems that a normal CPU can also be trivially repurposed for (ignoring the issue of execution time), and my understanding is that normal CPUs are not impossible. The halting problem is different because it is provably impossible even with unlimited resources unless you're somehow able to make something more capable than a Turing machine.
They’re saying that chess and bcrypt and some others can be brute forced.
You are correct that Goldbach cannot be proven true via brute force. But again, a hypothetical general halting machine may require impractical time — 14 million billion years.
So the idea that “if this existed we crack all sorts of hard problems/optimize” is not necessarily true.
The thing that boggles my mind most is the UK libel laws where stating a true, verifiable fact can be illegal if it makes the subject look bad. Someone tell me I’ve got that wrong.
That was in a specifically protected area covered by a PSPO that explicitly banned prayer. He then refused to move on, so this was a deliberate protest against abortion.
> On the day, he was asked to leave the area by a community officer who spoke to him for an hour and 40 minutes - but he refused.
I don't think you've got a clear understanding of how PSPO orders work. Do you really think that standing and thinking would be a criminal offense? Maybe if you stood somewhere awkward (e.g. blocking the doors to an A&E department) and refused to move when asked, then I can understand it, but I think you're being disingenuous.
In the linked article, the criminal was not alleged to have obstructed anything. He did message the town council saying he was holding a silent vigil, which he had done before apparently without incident. This time he was arrested, PSPO was applied, and he was fined £9000.
If his message to the council
said he’d be standing there reading the newspaper, would the arrest and conviction have been made?
The PSPO specifically prohibited activity in favour or against abortion services, including protests, harassment and vigils. He was blatantly holding a vigil and even then, I expect he could have just moved on when asked and faced no charges. Reading a newspaper would be fine, obviously, unless he specifically concocted his own newspaper with slogans on it which would then surely be a protest of some kind.
The whole point of the PSPO is to protect the people who are considering using abortion services. If someone is "secretly" doing something, then it's not likely to be harassing others and so wouldn't be illegal under the terms of PSPO.
It's not a difficult concept to understand and nothing to do with trying to police people's thought, but merely stopping the harassment that would otherwise take place. This particular incident would not have happened if the individual was praying somewhere else or not making a particular point about praying exactly where it would harass people using the clinic.
It's fine to have religious beliefs, but it's not fine to go around imposing those beliefs on others - that's how a lot of wars get started.
If I stand in a particular spot and do nothing, it’s OK. Now I do exactly the same thing, except beforehand I say I’ll be thinking a forbidden thought while doing it. My previously legal action is now illegal because I am imposing my religious beliefs on you. Am I understanding correctly?
I would imagine that he made the act of praying to be noticeable to others to act as a protest (e.g. typical head bowed and hands together). If he was simply standing there and minding his own business, then I can't see why there would have been any issue. The idea is that people should be allowed to make use of the health services without feeling undue pressure from others - it's typically a very difficult time for the people involved.
I did have it technically wrong but practically correct.
Do go have a quick conversation with your favorite AI about this. Ask if anyone in the UK has ever been punished for saying a true thing, and whether the cost on the defendant to prove innocence is not so exorbitant as to allow libel to be weaponized by the wealthy against their critics.
Who decides which facts and truth are "correct"? The same arbiters of what is and isn't "antisemitic" is who simply because speech criticizes IDF or Likud propaganda and/or genocide.
Well … it’s even true in Germany, not libel but you can be convicted of „Volksverhetzung“ even if you state something that is true, like that a certain person of a religion would be today be called a pedophile.
It’s literally stated in the religions holy book, but if the statement is ment to push racism it can be still a crime.
For any codebase destined for a team to develop, primary consideration goes to the technologies the team prefers, not my own preferences. Which makes for a fun guessing game when you’re green-fielding and before you’ve built the team.
The vast majority of the teams I worked in, I got forced to use shithole technologies, with shithole tools, and as a matter of fact, forced to work on legacy codebase. The part with legacy codebases is a fact of life when working in teams at companies though.
This is just my personal preference - but I tend to be affected by development workflows and developer experience profoundly and my output is directly proportional to that. I hate projects where testing workflows haven't been setup correctly or not set up at all. The last job I had was one where my team fucked itself up, along with our entire engineering org by setting up layers and layers of microservices and introducing unnecessary complexity hence making trivial changes hard to ship into production. What would take 30 minutes to debug ended taking days because abstractions between teams were not properly set up. Visibility into pipelines was severely lacking and it was all nothing but a circus shitshow.
I tend to have the greatest happiness working on personal projects where I get to choose everything, so I relate myself to the post very much
In the context of this submission, one will want to exercise caution because they and their forgejo friends are using forks of nektos/act, with all the caveats of both "act" and "fork"
It's easy to generate random new @duck.com aliases for the primary.
I have a browser plugin (mobile and desktop) that recognizes email form fields and offers to generate a new random @duck.com alias for the field.
When an alias starts to receive spam, I disable it.