robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@lauren Have you seen http://nitter.net/ellagirwin/status/1601084794288640000? I don't know if there are any inferences that can be drawn from it though~~

Writing a description of oneself for one's fedi profile reminds me of the standard responses to "who are you" and the whole discussion on (a) why those reponses are typical (b) what does this question even mean.

@VergaraLautaro @jsdodge

It works for me. Is it 404 for you, or is the website unavailable?

Anyway, the book is "The Cold Wars: A History of Superconductivity" by Jean Matricon and Georges Waysand.

@SwiftOnSecurity I really wonder whether random delays on the order of small number of minutes before collecting a preview would make sense.

@SwiftOnSecurity Has it gotten hugged to death by preview collection?

@grrrr_shark

Aside, I think that what makes me more annoyed is when I see people around me accept the non-self-consistent state rather than the state itself. Not sure whether there's any reason to consider latter worse "objectively" (i.e. whether that's some sort of a better proxy for outcomes, as opposed to something a mostly-unmodified version of me would be better off not being annoyed by).

> (b) if that doesn't cause things to change, avoid the area

BTW. The main reason why this is hard is if that area is something that many other things rely on.

@grrrr_shark

> I don't usually go looking for people's employers for privacy reasons (...)

If that was unobvious, this is exactly why I said anything explicitly (to make it obvious that I don't mind).

> I think there's a healthy dose of "I'll do that because I have to", but it helps to be in a position where you know you have management who will push reality checks back up the line.

It seems to me that you're referring to two things at the same time: one of them is having support for doing things that obviously further stated goals, and the other is having support for getting a discussion (that ends with everyone being convinced of the final result, or at least with the differences being distilled to some differing assumption) about whether some subgoal actually furthers the goal it's part of[1]. Do you see them as the same thing/do you see different distinctions here? I'm really curious about different viewpoints in this area that I can grok, because in a wider area around this topic I see viewpoints that I find not very comprehensible.

(One thing that I can't get past is an expectation that, pithily stated, modus ponens works. I can't really see how one can work in a multi-person organization without communicating in a way that can be transcribed in terms that admit logical[2] reasoning. Maybe that's a source of a large part of my issues?)

> where requirements were squishier because we were making something totally new

I find this curious. I see squishier requirements not in the areas where something genuinely new is happening, but rather from the areas where newish requirements and pre-existing architecture have an impedance mismatch, or where a new, very high-level requirement is translated into verifiable ones (which IMO end up not being that verifiable often). Do you mean "new" as in "new things that needs to be designed" or "new requirements applied to existing system"?

> those requirements were usually bound to someone's ego, and then the calculus was "what is the personal impact of challenging this"

Thankfully, I've mostly/completely avoided thinking about such considerations. When I try imagining working with such constraints, it seems sadly eerily similar to some problems I had with (IMO non-self-consistent) interpretations of vague requirements I've had experienced in the past year.

> And I think some people are more fundamentally irritated by those requirements than others - my daughter would flip her shit

I'm afraid I'm much closer to your daughter then :)

> I kind of integrate it into the challenge of the constraint system if it's not going to break everything

ISTM that these blast radii would usually be quite large, if someone wishes to use standard logic (where e.g. false actually implies everything and so where reductio ad absurdum is trivially valid) to reason about the whole thing.

> How do you deal with such things?

Somewhat badly, which is why I'm currently on somewhat long vacation. I mostly try to (a) point out the problem (b) if that doesn't cause things to change, avoid the area. Sadly, either due to changes in the company or changes in which parts of the company I'm exposed to, (b) is happening more often.

I'm also worried that all of infosec is going to become more vague in these ways (because many of the vague requirements are IMO downstream of externally imposed requirements that are not phrased precisely enough to achieve the goal the phraser had), which will probably hasten my move to some other area (data compression?)~~~, both for direct reasons and because this must have downstream effect on which people choose to work in the area, and thus on me feeling understood (and v.v.) by my future coworkers.

[1] Please tell me if I'm confusing here; tips of how to be less confusing would help (I find it hard to go with 'provide examples' one, because then it either gets very verbose or I'm unhappy with examples being misleading).

[2] in the meaning of "you can assign truth values to statements"

@DaltonRoad @sargent @aurynn

In Mastodon there are two moderation actions you can apply to an instance (ignoring the "do not fetch images" thing): stop communicating with them entirely and stop showing any content from them to users, unless showing content to followers.

Do you think that it's useful to do the former instead of the latter in cases similar to this?

@niconiconi Is that O(z^1*0) meant to be O(z^{10})?

@zebrask @jefftk

On one hand, _some_ of those problems would be solved, because the requests would be spread over more time (many instances won't have anyone looking at the new post within 60s). TBF, that can be done manually too.

Alas, this rules lawyery interpretation is already used for embedded images in e-mails: fetching them when the recipient is reading the email is considered perfectly fine and ~everyone does that (without any knowledge about any relationship or lack thereof between the owner of the site the image is on and the author of the email). An email with an embedded image sent to a mailing list is essentially equivalent to the situation here.

@grrrr_shark

How do you deal (if that happens) with problems that contain requirements that, upon closer inspection, look like they are performative?

// I'm not sure if we share employers; in case you want to e.g. not answer if that's the case for any reason, know that I use the same username everywhere and it's pretty unique.

@jsdodge @VergaraLautaro

So the field inside would remain constant over time, right?

Thanks for the reference, it's even in a local library \./

@VergaraLautaro I'm surprised by the gap between 1911 and 1934.

I would expect the lack of magnetic field inside to be theorized ~immediately (or at least once it was noticed that the zero resistance also applied to AC), given that Lenz's law was formulated in first half of 19th century.

So was it just hard to directly observe the magnetic field around superconductive samples?

@janice_e_ Do you have a link to a summary of what the dispute between NewsGuild and NYT is?

@niconiconi

http://cba.mit.edu/docs/theses/08.09.Prakash.pdf is a _practical_ attempt at gates, memory, and synchronization primitives (for signals that enter gates) using real-world water with nitrogen bubbles. I expect that you'd want to do standard error correction on top of that (incl. error correction by doing the same computation multiple times and comparing results).

What was the thing that suggested this (referred to in the first quoted sentence)?

@jayrope @rysiek Jurisdiction of what do you mean?

@rysiek

Doing so introduces a feedback loop. That incentivizes people to try to game your system (not only preventing themselves from being marked as bad, but also trying to cause random bystanders to be so marked).

If a majority of such behaviour is premeditated and organized, I expect that this will ~destroy the signal. If most of it is single trolls doing things on the spur of the moment I agree that this would probably be helpful.

@rysiek

I think that at first approximation these two problems are only distantly related. You can argue that Twitter is solving a problem in this area and is not solving a problem in that area, but I think that this is a vastly weaker[1] argument than pointing out that the latter problem is a consequence of their choices.

The public flagging is interesting: I have no predictions whether it would make people try to avoid or seek out being so marked.

[1] eristically maybe not so, sadly