I agree. My main keyboard is a Microsoft Internet Keyboard that I have been using for many hours daily since 1999, surviving five different computers (all running Linux). It's the most comfortable keyboard I've ever used, and it shows no signs of wear other than having some stains, plus partial fading of a few of the key symbols, and the Ctrl and C keys are beginning to show dents where my nails have been hitting them.
With all respect to Tim Berners-Lee, I think the principle of least power is overrated. For example, even binary Horn clauses are Turing complete[0]. Whatever configuration language you can come up with (HTML, CSS, or whatever), it's either Turing-complete or not, and if it's Turing-complete there is no danger of executing infinite loops as long as you have some cutoff for resource requirements. The only thing that matters is whether the code is properly sandboxed before it tries to do any I/O.
Not sure I agree with you overall, but I do agree with the distinction between computational power and I/O (or capabilities). That's a very important design criteria for languages for distributed systems.
I think the problem would be that the computation would get cut off at different points on every machine, leading to an unstable ecosystem. Remember the browser has to run on devices with at least an order of magnitude difference in resources, probably 2 orders now.
Generally, you want to guarantee that your style computations terminate. Now it appears that CSS doesn't actually provide that guarantee, since it's Turing complete :) But I guess it's close enough in practice.
People have always obsessed over "news", since humans are information-hungry by nature. But the modern tech crowd seems to have forgotten that there are two kinds of news: the kind that is objectively new (i.e. recent data), and the kind that is subjectively new (i.e. I didn't know that before). I think the situation is a bit similar to the distinction between objectively established frequencies and subjective Bayesian priors.
The theory behind the singularity is all about exponential trends. But most exponential trends tend to turn into some kind of S-curve[1] after a while. This insight goes back to Thomas Malthus, even though he never derived the sigmoid function (as far as I know).
The AI singularity could happen before the inflexion point of the S-curve, or some time after, or never. And as others have already commented, it depends on how you define "singularity". So I am not holding my breath waiting for the rapture.
General relativity also accounts for gravitational/accelerational effects, in addition to the speed-related effects. For example, in the Schwarzschild metric[1], effects such as time dilation are on the order of 1-phi/c^2 where phi=GM/r. Or expressed in terms of "g-force": phi=gr.
The article says: "I don't want to worry about per-file passphrases. Everything should be encrypted with/to the same key."
To me the above looks like the only differentiating requirement, and in my mind the solution is trivial: just use the same high-entropy encryption key for everything, and the problem is solved.
I wonder where the sweet spot is between a centralized service like Slack, and extremely decentralized scenarios where people just try to cope with a multitude of one-to-one channels?
Federation is a given for this hypothetical sweet spot of course, but how do you find the spot? Are there any HN readers who can point me to research in this area?
djb half-proposed IM2000 as a replacement for SMTP and POP and IMAP.
Briefly: you send a message from your user agent (mail program) to your own mail server. Your mail server sends a notification to all the destination mail servers, a notification basically consisting of the headers.
The destination mail server lets the recipient know that the notification has arrived, possibly doing filtering and sorting and prioritization and stuff.
The recipient fetches the mail body from the originating mail server, and then does whatever.
The big change here is that the notifications are store-and-forward but the mail itself is not. The originating mail server needs to be up and functional in order to get a message body delivered.
Spammers are severely impeded: the message body can't be sent unless they have a reliable, traceable machine up when people get around to reading mail. Botnets won't work. Yet anybody who can run a reliable server can run their own mail server.
Mailing lists only send the full body to people who request it. Unsubscribe is actually worthwhile for any legitimate company to implement. Mailing list servers can easily implement archives by just keeping mail available.
And finally, the holy grail of Outlook users is actually implementable: you can cancel an email after you sent it and have that actually work, as long as people haven't pulled the body down yet.
Federation works just fine - the problem is getting "non-techies" to care enough to join in, discoverability, and ease of joining. So they almost all suffer from lack of a social network and are used by only a niche community.
People will use what most of their friends use. If their friends and people they want to follow all use Twitter, why would they use GNUSocial? Answer is they won't.
I agree. I have been self-hosting my personal email since 1998, and there was a period when this was difficult due to technical issues related to encryption. But for the past decade or so those issues are gone. The benefits are great. For example, being able to block entire netblocks at the routing or firewall level is an amazing anti-spam tool that is completely free when you self-host.
Yes, a common modus operandi of Holocaust deniers is to make lists of people who were in some camp but never witnessed any gassing. This is then brought forward as a reason to question the existence of any gas chambers anywhere. It's such a stupid logic fallacy that there isn't even a name for it.
