johnecheck

Looks like the work to create a real standard via the IETF has begun.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...

Your definition ignores international recognition.

Ultimately, whether you get to act like a country (go to the UN, engage in diplomacy, hold territory) is in large part based on whether other countries recognize you as such. I don't know that it defines country-hood but it's part of the puzzle.

The Vatican is a fascinating example since it's clearly a very different sort of entity than the rest of the countries, yet is still recognized by most of the world's nations.

Yeah. If an authoritarian government controls the network infrastructure, there's no way to use that network infra without risk.

To actually bypass this, you need your own network. Does anyone know of any sneakernet protocols that would be useful here?

Indeed. Capacity to do the hard parts of software engineering well may well be our best indicator of AGI.

I don't think LLMs alone are going to get there. They might be a key component in a more powerful system, but they might also be a very impressive dead end.

I remember when I realized just how little host language code was needed to bootstrap a Forth. Before that I was making the same mistake.

OP, I strongly recommend the book Threaded Interpreted Languages [1]. I had to read chapter 2 several times before it clicked (short and dense), but it's an excellent resource.

[1] https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

Ah, but which assembly? If you just roll a simple VM in the host language, your instruction set becomes the assembly Forth integrates so well with. I'm assuming that's what they did in their C implementation.

Indeed, labels aren't useless. But when a label means one thing to one person and a totally different thing to another, it actually becomes an impediment to communication and is best avoided.

Apologies, I was mistaken. I'd confused the self-certifying bit with decentralization. did:plc relies on trusting a central server to accept all valid events and not allow users to rewrite their history.

The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.

The userbase is not fully centralized. It's mostly centralized, but users who care can manage their own data independently of bluesky.

While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.

did:web (DNS) is just one option for identity. did:plc is what you want, it's not reliant on ICANN or BlueSky. Any PDS should be able to resolve a did:web or did:plc.

https://atproto.com/specs/did

That's more or less what atproto is, except the indexer is called a relay and provides the data directly. Currently bluesky is providing their relay for free, but I don't believe there's any reason they couldn't make it paid in the future.

The right platform will allow users to choose between any of the algorithms you described and more.

I see! Thanks for the info.

This is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone.

I frequently say the same thing about the word Capitalism. (Communism too). They're second only to 'god' in terms of historical baggage.

If you say 'I like Capitalism', a significant minority will hear 'I love US imperialism and hate nature', despite that almost certainly not being what you meant. Similarly, if you say 'I like Communism', many hear 'I love dictators, gulags, 5 year plans and famine'.

A word of advice: if you actually want to have valuable political conversations with people, don't start by identifying yourself with ideology that's arguably responsible for various atrocities and millions of deaths.

> that shouldn't even be on the table

I wish that were so.

A trend indeed. You know what each of those stores charging 30% have in common?

They each come bundled with the OS on your device and have massive advantages over any competing stores (if they even allowed them to exist).

Since devices are so expensive and users tend to be loyal, [company] isn't going to see much increase in sales by lowering their fees. With no competition and no downward pressure on prices, they just pick the 'industry standard', effectively price fixing without true collusion.

I'm pretty sure this isn't ideal but I don't pretend to know the answers. Until then, I'll just be focusing on building my ideas as web apps. (Flutter apps, so I can release elsewhere if the terms are reasonable).

Interesting, I hadn't known that silicon is itself a semiconductor before all the circuits are added. Am I correct in saying that the etching process transforms a single semiconductor into billions?

A spreadsheet is a programming language and I will die on this hill.

The 30% cut hurts every developer, not just the minority building bad games that make the world worse.

You're right but also wrong. Flash is just semiconductors etched in a different pattern than logic, but you don't print on semiconductors. Semiconductors are 'printed' on wafers via photolithography.

This is a debate over semantics, let's conclude by presenting our competing definitions.

A blockchain is ledger shared between multiple computers. Entries in this ledger contain the cryptographic hash of the previous entry, creating an append-only data structure where existing records cannot be modified.

While blockchains are generally used in p2p and open networks, this isn't a requirement. Bitcoin was a blockchain when Nakamoto was the only node. Popularity and openness are not required to meet this technical definition.

I don't know, you didn't provide any stats. Without that context, the total compensation of all employees isn't a terribly meaningful number when discussing disparity.

My claim was that your argument isn't well supported, not that you're wrong.

If you measure 'profit' as 'how much does the net worth of our owners go up', stock buybacks make a lot of sense.

This seems like a particularly terrible measure of success for everyone but those owners.

No, large tech companies are not paying out tens of billions of dollars to the average worker.

Did you mean that tens of billions of dollars are going to ALL the tech workers combined? True, but a single absolute number means little when the conversation is about relative distribution of resources and how those numbers change over time.

While it's definitely possible to train a model for that, 'very easy' is nonsense.

Unless you've got some superintelligence hidden somewhere, you'd choose a neural net. To train, you need a large supply of LABELED data. Seems like a challenge to build that dataset; after all, we have no scalable method for classifying as of yet.

'There's so many cliffs around that not jumping off that one barely helps you'.

I meeeeeannn... sure? I know that browser fingerprinting works quite well without, but custom headers are actually a game over in terms of not getting tracked.

Sadly, touching the user-agent header more or less instantly makes you uniquely identifiable.

Browser fingerprinting works best against people with unique headers. There's probably millions of people using an untouched safari on iPhone. Once you touch your user-agent header, you're likely the only person in the world with that fingerprint.

You misunderstand. The analogy wouldn't be Napster with networking code disabled. The analogy is Napster on a LAN. Only those on the LAN can access it so it's not open to the world, but nonetheless you've still got a p2p file-sharing client.

And yes. I'm using the engineering definition. I don't believe in letting a gaggle of marketers and scammers define my terms. A blockchain is a specific technology. It doesn't mean 'whatever scam is happening this week', even if said scam involves a blockchain.

I don't blame you for associating blockchains with scams and fully open projects, that's undeniably what we've seen it used for. But that's not what defines a blockchain.

"A scalpel can only be used for surgery"

"If you use a scalpel to cut a steak, it's still a scalpel."

"There must be some new aspect to scalpels! We've been able to make steak knives for decades!"