namark @namark@qoto.org
Joined Jan 2020
abstract whining
@amiloradovsky@functional.cafe If random toys, browser tabs, file systems(under version control) do it for me, it means I don't have a life, right?
You wouldn't follow the list anyway, but it would still be a cool list, and it can come in any form, not just boring strictly ordered text. Occasionally might get hooked on something tangentially related to one of those things, and after a while find out that you just deprecated or halfway completed several unexpected things on some other lists. Much fun...
frivolous variable naming
auto table = x - floor(x);
auto swing = ceil(x) - x;
@snow Why of course, who would disagree with that? Violence can only be solved with greater violence. But in this case violence is not the problem even, no no, clearly it is human nature, so it must be solved with violence. Violence is just a tool that all of us should embrace and use more often to resolve various problems in our daily lives. Castrate your neighbourhood lewd tooters today!
@louiscouture For those who are confused, and might think to argue the vagueness of good and bad, and all sorts of grey areas, and the impact of such thing on societery as a whole, I would like to clarify that the image presents a clear and objective way to identify the good guy in every situation: it's the one with the bigger gun.
1. Sure everything is hard. My point was cryptography is hard in the same way as building a 5 story stone building is hard, while surveilence avoidance is "solve human beings" kind of philosophical problem.
2. The question was mostly to demonstrate that you would have a hard time coming up with such an example, because free software/hardware was never adopted in any significant way, so your argument that it was and it didn't work is not true. Free software being abused by existing/new monopolies to further their goals is not free software facilitating it. What happened would have happened regardless, and what little freedom and privacy we have today in software is thanks to free software. If free software ideals were truly adopted and not circumvented in every way possible the problem might have been more or less solved by now. I don't see how this comes in conflict with any governance system. Not being able to blindly follow the exacty same practices as before in a completely new industry is not exactly an unexpected and unresolvable conflict. Why can't a surveilence (capitalist/state/other???) system run on free software/hardware? My whole point was it can and it should, and if everyone does the absolutely embarrassing situations like the one in the OP can be avoided.
3. Well we might be arguing different things, but from my point of view it's you, who is bringing in philosophy and politics into purely technical and much more severe issue. In the context of the issue OP presented there were no vague _emerging properties_ or _capabilities_ or anything else as complex as you are trying to imply. It was a simple failure of a very real and tangible system, it's literally the locks to your house being master keyed without your knowledge, not because it was hard to figure out, but because you were not allowed to look inside or have a local locksmith look inside and that was(still is) considered normal. And because it is considered normal there actually are no local locksmiths who would evaluate even "free and open" locks, because it's not a profession one could make a living off in a world where people are not allowed to look inside most locks.
4. It was not an ad hominem, it was an exaggerated analogy. I threw in the caveman for some extra spice not a central point of the argument. A modern 5 story building is much more complex than a tent or a cave. It is BOTH much more capable and much more reliable, even if you include human factors... not philosophy though, I guess a philosopher would argue that a building is a "simplification" of a mountain with caves, and a tent is way more "complex"(or "reliable" take your pick of nosense) than either of those.
@amiloradovsky@functional.cafe @fsi
I have no doubt of your good intentions, and if my argument seemed like a personal attack, I apologize. I am not talking about privacy issues in general, but specifically technical implementation of cryptographic systems, my main argument being that your pessimism about their feasibility is unfounded.
Now to continue being the abrasive pedant that I am:
- Crytpography and surveillence avoidance are hard.
Cryptograpohy and surveilence avoidance are two different thing, and the OP was about a critical cryptographic system failure. They didn't manage to somehow steal some keys or break into a house with some state of the art metaphysical mambo jumbo(I'm looking at you, quantum computer!), they just had a master key to every house and people didn't even have a clue.
- Past proclamations that FS/OS systems will inevitably result in greater freedoms and less surveillance have ... proved premature.
Can you give me an example of free and open source software running on free and open source hardware today? Fully free and open source systems have never even been deployed on anything but passionate hobbyist scale, and my whole argument was that in industry crippled by proprietary software norms, even the few existing FOSS projects are measuring up to the same norms, and their success or failure doesn't prove anything. But I guess you just TLDR, as you repeat this argument verbatim.
- Security and freedom aren't products, they're processes.
The only thing that is a process there is the human factor, again the OP was not about the human factor, it was a most embarrassing system failure. The system themselves, as a whole including the hardware, are most definitely products.
- Complexity increases capabilities but reduces reliability.
That's what a caveman would say about building a skyscraper(or even a humble 5 story building) looking at a bunch of others miserably failing to put a tent up. A very compelling argument in that setting, except that it is false.
Are you basically saying "we were terrible for years therefore we will be terrible forever and there is no point in trying"?
Secure and stable systems are achievable in software (mechanical systems don't even compare, as they rely on security through obscurity and not cryptography), and open hardware is a necessary prerequisite. Currently the entire industry is crippled by proprietary software norms, and that affects even the foss projects, as they (only) have to adhere to the standards set by those norms. When we have international standards of quality and a number of companies competing to produce objectively the best implantations/builds of completely foss cryptographic software/hardware, with mandatory warranties and guarantees(just like any normal engineering industry), and they continue to miserably fail for several decades, then and only then it might be reasonable to doubt the feasibility of such systems.
This is a long standing feature request, so probably not very high on the priority list for mastodon. Meanwhile there are forks. Fedibird has implemented a feature called "domain subscription" which allows adding one or more instances to the usual lists. Qoto has also incorporated those changes. However because of how activity pub protocol works you will not get full local timelines of selected instances this way (you don't get them on global/federated timeline either).
Some clients (Subway Tooter, Fedilab) allow you you directly request the timeline from specific instances (not through activity pub but mastodon specific API) if that feature is enabled on that instance (it is by default), and that is the only way to get the the full local timeline.
@rudolf Literally every CPU today comes with proprietary digitally signed firmware designed to control the system remotely, with ample opportunities to be back-doored and kill switched to the brim, not to mention all the proprietary software most people have to use. Apparently it's ok when US companies walk all over people, but a Chinese one? Noooo, not evil China!
Nobody actually cares about security or freedom, it's all just politics.
@davidpgil I know nothing about electrical engineering, but these seem promising to me
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-spring-2007/index.htm?utm_source=OCWDept&utm_medium=CarouselSm&utm_campaign=FeaturedCourse
at least as a starting point maybe.
@ndegruchy@fosstodon.org
"Literally anything you take..."
Keyword, "you take". What you are arguing sounds more like "Literally anything shoved down your throat..." as if that is normal.
@ndegruchy@fosstodon.org
wow, I don't know what constitutes an anti-vaxer, but with a determination like that, would you also advocate for killing disabled people for the good of the healthy?
Adverse effects of vaccination is not an example of a accidental injury, it is everyone doing everything by the book, everything going "right" and people suffering(sometimes to death). It is valid criticism of the systems in place and the science behind them, and until they are improved to properly address it, people should be allowed to opt out. You can't just throw money at something like that and consider the problem solved. Sure many things involve risks, but ideally and usually no one would be forcing you to take them.
rant
@amiloradovsky@functional.cafe wow wow, you better not say such things in public, you might end up in some special secret lab with your intuition being forcefully extracted for the good of human kind.
rant
@amiloradovsky@functional.cafe then there are progress indicators that get stuck at some random points, or even go back sometimes...
conjecture: the more likely the program is to go infinite, the more meaningless is its progress indicator.
brave corrections to OP: "...do you think of themselves(erm...) as such a fucking experts that your code simply CAN (get?) stuck in an infinite loop..." (plz don't delete-redraft >.<)
@Absinthe also that thing doesn't work on my laptop/browser, I just run the previous project locally, hence the past in ix.io instead of the fork there
@Absinthe no, sorry, I must stop, its sleep time here, and I should have been working on my game of life, not getting distracted with katas... TDD vs primes was just too juicy not to snark on...
@Absinthe but... but... my whole point was that it's not simple, and is an ultimate troll kata for TDD... oh well, I tried...
Here is a link to REPL.it Where it has been done via TDD
I wonder how did you come up with the 5993 test? I find it hard to verify, though I'm a particularly lazy person. Is there some sort of a trick?
Here is what I would have came up with given that sequence of test and the rules of TDD presented (not at all what I would come up with just trying to tackle the problem)
http://ix.io/2bgk/py
with the list of primes there growing with each new unit test . I think it's much simpler and also runs much faster. By any objective metric, with those TDD rules in mind, this is a superior solution, and I believe you would not be able to beat it without introducing a prime number generator or a primality test, or both, with one or the other not being tested.
Even if that's the case, the question was what is the proper TDD approach? Generating prime numbers for the test by hand? Or factorizing a couple of numbers by hand?
Thinking about it, wouldn't that make copying the hand calculated results into the implementation the best way to comply with rule 3? That's what I would arrive at with that approach, and nothing necessarily wrong with that. In one of my recent toy projects, I needed a factorization, and I just included a short list of primes, that I used as "only/all primes", knowing that the number to factorize would be small enough (and even if it wasn't that wouldn't affect the final result much). Totally sufficient for some use cases, but I see no way to move on from that point to anything more complete or sophisticated with the strict TDD approach, for the prime number problems specifically, which I think is an odd choice for a TDD kata.
Well, from our brief discussion with @freemo we arrived at needing a prime number generator to write the test for factorization, which itself would require at least a trivial primality test, which will have to be written without a unit test. How was your approach different? Did you generate a certain amount of prime numbers by hand and deemed that acceptable?
@freemo @Lossberg
