He reads like an academic. This is a really interesting perspective; I’ve never thought anything of his writing because it’s what I’m used to from normal journals. There is a style, good or bad, that comes from this stuff.

My degree is in combinatorics. All of the fancy words you’re not a fan of are core ideas (the Petersen graph is really neat). I view The Art… as an academic work for academics who aren’t necessarily excited about the real world (which is my approach to combinatorics). If you’re not one of those people, you’re not interested in becoming one of those people, or you don’t work/research something that needs incredible optimization, you can safely skip it. Once you go into heavy proofs, the utility is very debatable.

I have more important things to do than to lobby the government to send a tax bill.

Why would the CEO be dumb enough to say this in an interview? If your business model is fucking people, your CEO has to have a cool head when asked if he’s fucking people!

Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.

All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.

While I’m all for opening up codebases after release and seeking contributions from constituents, the landing page has some terrible ideas.

Similar applications don't have to be programmed from scratch every time.

Unless there are very solid guidelines that offer a lot of flexibility to do the opposite and code things from scratch every now and then, you get very pervasive legacy antipatterns. I have struggled to effect positive software change as an SRE at massive enterprises because of this idea. Conway’s Law does a good job describing how this stratifies code. I have also spent more than year trying to get disparate acquisitions on the same tech stack with ballooning requirements as everyone tries to get their interests in. I left that one without any real movement.

Major projects can share expertise and costs.

This goes against lean principles that see the best outcomes and exponentially increases the waterfall slog most government projects are. The more stakeholders the more scope creep. Your platform team can be shared; you don’t want your stream-aligned teams to get stuck in this mire. They need to be delivering the minimum viable solution for their project.

Assuming the software is just released with an open license and the public can contribute, hell yeah. I have contributed to so many projects that I actively use in my day job and there’s plenty of shitty government software I'd love to poke at. The two things I called out require a serious amount of executive buy-in for developer tools and experience which turns into a project itself. In the private world most companies chicken out when they realize they’ve got serious cost centers just making development easier, even if their product is serious software development. I worked for a major US consultancy that talked this big game and dropped everyone the second they were on the bench. In the public sector? Fuck. It’s hard enough to get people to understand attack surfaces much less the improvements a smooth DevX with a great pipeline can provide.

If you’re using any work-related anything to post “anonymously” or talk to journalists, don’t. That Blind redirection is chilling yet it’s well within the capabilities of employers. The right way to talk to journalists like 404 is to find their anonymous contact details eg Signal using your own internet connection and your own device. Work computers can be monitored. Traffic on work computers or work VPNs can be monitored. Company email usage can be monitored. Company phone usage can be monitored. You don’t need to be incredibly private with a VPN over tor and anonymous services; you just need to not use company resources. Whether or not this should be legal is a different story; you just gotta know you have fuck all for privacy on company resources.

I’ve only heard of Blind in passing; that corp email makes it too close to Glassdoor for comfort and it’s very clearly not private with that requirement.

Mullenweg is an original WP dev along with Mike Little. He’s fucking batshit and completely in the wrong but he did create the FOSS.

AWS makes this impossible in a few places such as a fair number of ACM use-cases.

I think your cert-per-session idea is interesting. We’d need significant throughput and processing boosts to make that happen, probably at least on the order of 10X computing speeds and 10X transmission speeds across the board minimum. These operations are computationally intense and add data to the wire so, for example, a simple Lemmy server with hundreds of users slows to a crawl and a larger site eg Mastodon goes to dialup speeds or worse. You can test at home by trying to generate an x509 self-signed cert before connecting to a website every time.

I read the Wires article for the first time just now to try and understand this article. I don’t really think it attacks SimpleX at all. I think it states the fact that nazis have moved to the platform, the fact that SimpleX is a very private platform, the fact that SimpleX claims to prevent extremist content and growth, the fact that extremist content is being spread and growing, and the fact that SimpleX is unaware of claims. As someone who has been following this discourse for decades, this is the kind of thing that gets published. There is a balance between privacy and extremism. Privacy-focused individuals like myself will always focus on the privacy provided there are tools to combat the extremism (where applicable).

I feel like SimpleX is being defensive because their claims are not panning out. Their response calls out all of the things I feel were said in support of them while ignoring the actual critiques of their system. Not adding a backdoor? Great! That’s law and smart! Supporting groups of over a thousand posting extremist content?

We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance

SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

This is the stuff that needs response, not the privacy stuff Gilbert is arguably a fan of.

Unhinged was not an option for my introduction. Survey ruined.

I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.

Oh, so we run mesh networks across the ocean? Very interesting. I’m sure we’ll be able to just use a metal with fake value that has nothing to do with fiat currency to buy all the equipment we’d need to power all that. Is there a big Monero group out there with the coins to pay all those local installers? They’d probably need to define some standards for what a network would look like and how they connect and how the local installers how and who gets paid what and how the networks interact. Standards? Regulations? I’m sure there’s a word for some sort of governing body that does all that.