I managed a tech team back in the late 90's and we were building a product used in a semi-industrial process. Every software dev joining the team spent their first week on the factory floor actually doing the job. Then when they started looking at the code they had some context.
Readit Newsmarcus_holmes commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso
> UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough.
As a Brit I personally went through a phase of not really existing — no credit card, no driving licence, expired passport - so I know how annoying this can be.
But it’s worth noting that we have this situation not because of mismanagement or technical illiteracy or incompetence but because of a pretty ingrained (centuries old) political and cultural belief that the police shouldn’t be able to ask you “papers please”. We had ID cards in World War II, everyone found them egregious and they were scrapped. It really will be discussed in those terms each time it is mentioned, and it really does come down to this original aspect of policing by consent.
So the age verification thing is running up against this lack of a pervasive ID, various KYC situations also do, we can get an ID card to satisfy verification for in-person voting if we have no others, but it is not proof of identity anywhere else, etc.
It is frustrating to people who do not have that same cultural touchstone but the “no to ID” attitude is very very normal; generally the UK prefers this idea of contextual, rather than universal ID. It’s a deliberate design choice.
Same in Australia - there was a referendum about whether we should have government-issued ID cards, and the answer was an emphatic "NO". And Australia is hitting or going to hit the same problem with the age verification thing for social media.
marcus_holmes commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso
If you're really curious about this, there's a place where people discuss these problems annually: https://internetidentityworkshop.com/
Various things you're not thinking of:
- "The person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies" is a high expectation, and can probably be avoided—you just need verifiable credentials and you gotta trust they're not spoofed
- Many official government IDs are digital now
- Most architectures for solving this problem involve bundling multiple identity "attestations," so proof of personhood would ultimately be a gradient. (This does, admittedly, seem complicated though ... but World is already doing it, and there are many examples of services where providing additional information confers additional trust. Blue checkmarks to name the most obvious one.)
As for what it might look like to start from the ground up and solve this problem, https://urbit.org/, for all its flaws, is the only serious attempt I know of and proves it's possible in principle, though perhaps not in practice
that is interesting, thanks.
Why isn't it necessary to prove that the person at the keyboard is the person in the ID? That seems like the minimum bar for entry to this problem. Otherwise we can automate the ID checks and the bots can identify as humans no problem.
And how come the UK is failing so badly at this?
marcus_holmes commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso
> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans
Not until they get issued government IDs they won't!
Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government.
1. Despite what Sam Altman's eyeball company will try to sell you, government registers will always be the anchor of trust for proof-of-identity, they've been doing it for centuries and have become good at it and have earned the goodwill.
How does this work, though?
We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID.
So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too easily spoofed. It's not really surprising, though, because identifying humans reliably is hard even for humans.
If we do it at the network level - like assigning a government-issued network connection to a specific individual, so the system knows that any traffic from a given IP address belongs to that specific individual. There are obvious problems with this model, not least that IP addresses were never designed for this, and spoofing an IP becomes identity theft.
We also do need bot access for things, so there must be some method of granting access to bots.
I think that to make this work, we'd need to re-architect the internet from the ground up. To get there, I don't think we can start from here.
There are specific philosophies and missions behind various kinds of software for which you might have access to the source code.
The most formalized and principled original one, was unfortunately named "free software". (Where RMS expects to be able to explain that it doesn't mean "you don't have to pay money for it" like everyone already thought, but he wants it to actually means "free as in freedom". And he imagines having this conversation, and people being intrigued by the wordplay, etc.)
Of course what happened is that everyone wanted stuff without paying money for it, which is fine, but most people never learned the principles behind the various philosophies, nor why they are that way. Installing a Linux-based software distro is the same as downloading a freebie "community version" of software decidedly not in the same spirit, is the same as downloading a cracked version -- it's all just "free".
A related thing happened with the Internet, in a sense. The early people tended to be egalitarian and principled, and actively onboarded new people into the culture, etc. But when the dotcom gold rush happened, most of that was quickly swept aside. And most of what was already known and taught about cooperative online behavior was never even learned.
Thanks for replying and explaining.
efficiency
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
This. German bureaucracy is a nightmare, especially if German is not your first language.
German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records.
No, I'm saying that you are making the advocacy mistake of using the term "free software".
I don't understand this. The software is free. But calling it "free software" is a mistake?
And I don't understand the advocacy angle. Is any reference to "free" or "open" in any tech-related conversation automatically advocacy (even if the author did not intend to be an advocate for it)?
Genuinely curious. Apologies if it doesn't read like genuine curiosity, I am genuinely curious.
marcus_holmes commented on Shamelessness as a strategy (2019) nadia.xyz/shameless... · Posted by u/wdaher
The problem with shame is that the people who use shame as a tool do not understand how to use it conservatively.
You see, they shame for playing music in public. Okay, great.
But they also shame for your weight, your sexuality, the color of your skin. Your job, your hobbies, your family. Your clothing, your skin, your hair.
And now, shame, as a tool, has been worn down to its bones. Of course then society at large begins to reject it.
Yeah, agree. It has been overused, and it's good that that doesn't work any more. I'd like the line to be drawn just a little further back, though, please ;)
marcus_holmes commented on Shamelessness as a strategy (2019) nadia.xyz/shameless... · Posted by u/wdaher
Authenticity doesn't mean you act in a way that the majority approves of, in fact it's often the opposite case. It also doesn't make any presuppositions about the morality of specific behaviour. To be authentic is to be your true self, despite what others think which requires bravery and that is something people admire. If something is considered shameful is a subjective judgement about behaviours that may or may not be authentic.
In fact, people who act authentically are often liked not despite of but because of their flaws. To be human is to be flawed, we're all guilty. And it turns out a lot of people crave permission to not be perfect.
My point is that your definition of "authenticity" seems to include behaviour that is plain inconsiderate of other people.
I think there's a line there. You can wear what you like, think what you like, speak how you like, but only behave how you like up to the point where your behaviour negatively affects other people. If you want to listen to shit music in your own home, you do you, that's fine. But inflicting it on everyone else in a train carriage is not "being authentic" it's "being an asshole". You're not expressing your true self in a brave way that should be admired. You're annoying everyone around you by being selfish. It's a huge difference.
Think of the negative reputation the Unity engine gained among gamers, even though a lot of excellent games and even performant games (DSP) have been made with it.
More competitors does also raise the bar required for novelty, so it is possible that standards are also rising in parallel.
Unity + Steam just makes this process a bit easier and more streamlined. I think the new thing is that as well as the dickwads who are trying to rip people off, there are well-intentioned newbie or indie developers releasing their unpolished attempts. These folks couldn't publish their work in the old days, because making CDs costs money, while now they can.