It is self-evidently not correct that companies that can't keep DNSSEC running can't keep certs running. Entire TLDs have fallen off the Internet because DNSSEC has broken. A certificate never took Slack down for half a day. It's just obviously not true.
There's just no way this can be true. Every project I've committed to has been a bet made with incomplete information. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn't. Every time I've made one of those bets, I've had to shoulder the opportunity cost of 2-3 other 1/8th-finished but promising projects I could have driven to completion instead. Not having that opportunity cost anymore wildly changes the dynamics of what I build.
This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player (everything I'm doing lately has been Swift/SwiftUI, itself a radical change from just a couple months ago when everything was a TUI, and then a few months back from that and all the way back to 1993, when everything was a CLI) with a Responses API hookup that turns the player into an agent, with tool calls to let the model see what I've been playing. "Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop".
Worked a treat. I'm genuinely interested in where I can take this. I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. Problem solved-ish. I never, ever, in a million years, would have built anything like this before.
It's really hard to sell me on the idea that nothing profound has changed here in terms of the projects we now pick up. Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Mine has smoltcp hooked up to a Rust virtio-net driver Claude pulled out of its butt.
Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.
Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.
Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.
I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.
Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.
The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.
I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.
I think the thing here is that if you're simply declaring yourself to be in a different religion than Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV, there's not much to be gained arguing with them. Like, a Zaidi Shia Muslim would also disagree with Vatican II. There's nothing wrong with that. They're just, you know, in a different religion.
Right, so that's initially how I thought this would resolve itself: sedevacantists elect a pope for themselves and just have a separate religion and let the Vatican be (see "conclavism")
Except it doesn't seem to have happened like that and seems to be more in character in my view like the Western Schism, where there was confusion about who the pope was or if there was a pope for 40 years (except this time it's longer and there is added confusion with a false council and false teachings that appear to come straight from the "pope")
Hence I argue since a lot of people seem to think these teachings came "from the Church", there is "legitimate confusion" and more of something where the Vatican will have to be straightened out as reverting to previous norms in order for things to move forward.
It's possible it could resolve in this direction though of just separation (but, from "our" view, all the Catholic churches are practically possessed by a false movement; not unlike the East-West Schism though where half the churches went in a non-Catholic direction)
I'd just say that none of this has much to do with "Catholicism" in the sense that the overwhelming majority of people worldwide mean when they use the term. It's not jarring or problematic or controversial to believe in some adjacent but incompatible Catholic-like religion; at this point we're literally just discussing names.
I mean, the commenter you're responding to has assumed the position of sedevacantism, so I don't think you're going to be able to justify Vatican 2 to them from first principles. :)
I think you're not reading it in the spirit it's intended. There's a section towards the end (Chapter 5, I think) that is full of policy prescriptions. But most of the encyclical isn't "about" AI, it's "about" Catholicism, and is using AI as a lens to talk about principles the church has been building up over a century. In that sense the document is less concerned with frontier models and disinformation than it is with establishing Catholic social doctrine --- subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, etc.
As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.
You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.
(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)
Perhaps, but I think that's a bit generous. Let's look at Chapter 3, titled "TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI."
This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?
For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating
That's a demand for AI regulation.
Then take the paragraph that starts with:
> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]
The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.
Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?
All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.
I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:
Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.
> if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast
The fact that the bloody Pope sounds like what appears to be a left-wing party in the US' Overton window should be a big kick in the arse. In most of the rest of the west, these are classical conservative values, and indeed more aligned with the gospel than anything coming from the Republican Party these days. As a leftist, I find Magnifica Humanitas to be interesting, because it's a view point that is rooted in a rich history and profound thinking. But that's not a socialist doctrine at all. Its situation is very close to Rerum Novarum: it was more social than what the capitalist magnates wanted, but it was really far from things like communism or revolutionary socialism. Leo XIV does not hide his admiration for Leo XIII, and he sees many similarities with the state of the society they live in. On that, I think I agree with him.
So, I'm not sure about your religious background but conversing about this will get tedious very quickly if I have to hedge everything I'm saying, so from the jump let me just say I respect your writing on HN and I assume you're not Catholic, and you can correct me if I'm making any broken assumptions about you.
Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.
Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.
I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).
I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.
I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!
But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.
rsync has specific running modes for the super-user. It also pumps arbitrary data from the network onto your file-system. openrsync is about 10 000 lines of C code: do you trust me not to make mistakes?
No, but that's why almost nobody runs it outside of strict trust boundaries. This security section would make more sense if rsync was like curl, which routinely deals with hostile counterparties. If the other side of your rsync is hostile, you probably have bigger problems!
(I'm not an rpki person so I don't know if there's some part of that problem domain that changes this equation. I'm not dunking on the project, just saying this snagged me in the README).
No, but that's why almost nobody runs it outside of strict trust boundaries. This security section would make more sense if rsync was like curl, which routinely deals with hostile counterparties. If the other side of your rsync is hostile, you probably have bigger problems!
I disagree. While rsync is most often used to transfer data between "friendly" systems, it's inherently crossing a security boundary. It's important to make sure that an attacker can't leverage it to transform the breach of one system into the breach of multiple systems.
That solves the traffic tampering problem, but not the "malicious peer" problem. You want to be able to sync files without accidentally sharing root privileges.
> almost nobody runs it outside of strict trust boundaries.
I guess you can define "strict" however you want, but from what I saw ~10 years ago, most linux distros handled mirroring with rsync. That's a lot of usage in a pretty core part of the foundational open source ecosystem.
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