Notices by trystimuli (tryst@fedi.imu.li)

@whitequark @gsuberland

and the key point here is that our programmers are googlers, they’re not researchers. they’re typically fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned java, maybe learned c or c++, maybe learned python. they’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language, but we want to use them to be able to make good software. and so the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand, and easy to adopt.

i just can’t.

@dalias @novenary > because erasing that wealth would require erasing the belief […]

erasing that belief is part of the transition to an anarchist society. which is what i mean by building a parallel society first - the belief in legal property (and states generally) is founded in people’s experiences and you cannot remove legal property (or the state) without providing a different experience first.

people outside that society may still hold those beliefs, and provide them the corresponding influence. but, e.g., “how do you defend against an invasion by a billionaire with mercenaries?” is not that different a question from “how do you defend against an invasion by a state?”.

guillotines are authoritarian.

if you’ve reached the point where you can round up the rich, perhaps hold trials, then lay them down one by one, and decapitate them in front of a crowd? you’ve already won, and are now showboating the power you’ve collected.

it is understandable, even for anarchists, to fantasize about “our side” wielding such power, given the authoritarianism pervading our societies. but we strive to disperse power, not to wield it, and power fantasies do not promote that.

if those fantasies are helpful for you in the moment? have them. write about them. talk about them. process them. but, if you aspire to disperse power, please keep them, and the symbols from them, out of your activism.

@novenary @lanodan you can formally-verify subsets of C too. seL4 does :) that said, openzfs is probably not written in an easily verified subset of C.

@xgranade @cthos @aud except this is symmetric encryption we’re talking about, right? (c) is still relevant, sure, but the answer to (b) is both 256-bit AES and ChaCha20 are everywhere already.

@hipsterelectron @be do you have a source for that? because it sounds extremely speculative. like i am not a lawyer, but contracts need mutual agreement - like clicking “i have read and agree to the [contract]” is a bare minimum and some sort of signature is pretty typical for an actual contract.

@lispi314 @icedquinn @gentoobro @rheaplex QUIC jumps straight to cryptographically authenticating each packet - it provides a rather stronger check than CRC32 :)

@icedquinn @lispi314

from a practical perspective getting rid of it entirely puts you back at that trade secret corporate espionage dystopia again,

i disagree on that point, but more generally on the framing.

the whole stated purpose of patents is to encourage invention and technological innovation. the claim is that they do this by promoting sharing via monopoly grants instead of secretiveness. whether getting rid of patents creates a trade secret corporate espionage dystopia is the wrong question - the question should be does removing patents increase invention and innovation?

prior to patents you had a lot of trade secrets where people would hide everything. mathematicians for example kept a reserve stock of proofs to win competitions

firstly, patents have never covered mathematical proofs and so any secretiveness amongst mathematicians is irrelevant :) more importantly, prior to patents (in the modern sense) you had royally decreed monopolies with indefinite term and ill-defined scope. much like modern day patents the incentive was to keep the invention secret until a patent could be secured - and no incentive to innovate because the monopolies were granted by product rather than process.

however, there have been various industries and times that were not subject to such state-given monopolies. the record there shows significant innovation that drops off when patents are extended to cover the industry. that drop off is probably a combination of patents slowing innovation (by diverting resources from research into litigation) and by the field maturing and the low-hanging fruit being explored.

see Against Intellectual Monopoly, in particular Chapter 8 about whether monopolies increase innovation and Chapter 9 on the pharmaceutical industry.