cheatsheet

Computer security has more subfields than cryptography.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...

Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.

That would be fine, if the 'people who perceive' would realize perception is much more variant and undecidable than 'people who perceive' acknowledge.

Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation.

If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?

> That's fine, but your reason seems suspicious.

I prefer to avoid living my life in a fishbowl.

> provably private

This does not have a mathematics definition. Private means not accessible to anyone aside from the owner. That is something that is provably private.

> information theoretic guarantee

This sounds like hand waving to get rid of actual concerns.

I am not particularly looking for a debate today; but this seems to be a disagreement of terms when using the word "provable". Just because a polynomial time algorithm can not be constructed to distinguish a single record does not mean private information can not be derived.

I still would prefer a choice in the matter - a required small check box that says "record my data" or "do not record my data" XOR "erase my data". The term 'reasonably' has a very different meaning to me (assuming many unknowns in the future) over the long term.

It is either that, or people should literally stop making such a hard line distinguishing person A from person B. If the data is going to be used to make an inference from the collective to the individual, and it doesn't matter whether my data is included or not, well, shrug and thumbs up. It really depends on the context of the application. Does it determine whether my imaginary future children get to go to college or not?

The problem with data and private organizations is that we do not know what the data analysis is being used for, and as private citizens we do not have any control over how that data is mathematically reasoned about and qualitatively assessed aside from forging the data itself it (garbage in, garbage out).

> provably private

citation?

I just sort of abstract over the specifics of the implementation of arrows and assume there is an arrow that denotes the 'kind' of arrow. Does it express a monotonic function (order preserving), does it express a non monotonic function (permutation of elements, ordering of computation of 'typical' threads).

It groups functional operations into kinds that you can make assertions about after a selection of the operations have been performed.

Haskell does -

add :: Integer -> Integer -> Integer

so the compiler can check all the branches of code to ensure that statement is invariant.

I scanned through the first 50 slides or so. I've read and drawn out the first few chapters to myself of "Categories for the Working Mathematician", so for me - this was a very nice presentation that graphically illustrated the key forms and key semantics.

I look forward to reading the code parts.

But I have to agree with other posters - it took a lot of studying to get to the point where I can understand your slides. I think by the time you can read mathematics like this, it is because you already understand it verbosely.

As for people who don't agree that this is for beginners, I don't think you will be able to feel like you get it until you sit down with the work and stare at it a lot until it makes sense to you. It sounds stupid and silly, but that's the only way I can really communicate how to learn this stuff with a feeling of adequate understanding. The simplicity and elegance of the pictures do not adequately convey how difficult this stuff is to comprehend, especially if your mathematical foundation involves reasoning about real things. It is descriptive of abstract layers of terms, and the relationships they construct. Category theory is essentially the math of maths.

I think a wise person would hesitate at judging a task hard or easy.

Sure, but there will still be bugs. We might have to figure out what a bug is semantically on the next layer of abstraction as we are developing it (and have the capacity to formally describe it), but there will be opinions, and thus there will be bugs.

It is a long tail distribution and it happens because of different computational complexity classes. I don't really know if there is anything to be done about it.

I'll give you a high grumpy old forum five though.

> This is why most algorithmic art is so uninteresting. It falls on one side or the other of the randomness/repetition valley, without hitting that sweet spot that the best human creativity finds.

> That's not even thinking about emotional associations, intellectual abstractions, social awareness, and models-of-mind. You might need all of them to make a genius-level creative AI, but I'd guess that the more you have, the more likely you are to get something worth keeping.

I don't agree. I find all of those things boring in art. Mathematics and computer science are much more interesting when you think about how it relates to the mind, and why people may choose to create abstract art instead of metaphorically painting themselves naked.

There's little point to understanding it unless it affects you. Most people think things don't affect them, and sometimes it can seem like just thinking about it can make it affect you when it didn't affect you before. Even I suggest I have a higher level of skepticism than the norm. But I can't really measure that without affecting my level of skepticism. So my psychological understanding might be high right now, but my logical correctness and scientific methodology are probably reduced.

This might have made me upset when I still had my eating disorder, but otherwise I chalk it up to a habit of complaining. The other insight I guess is that people can have correct, rapid switching thoughts and ideas that continuously contradict one another until they achieve a kind of abstract balance.

To me it's one form of maturation. Other people could experience the same thing without the capacity to verbally express it. They may have the insight without the words.

Nevermind, I'd like to delete the previous comment I wrote, but you helped me be a bit more mindful of appreciating the experience while I am experiencing it.

I started using Photoshop when I was maybe 12 years old. I learned to be skeptical of every image, every advertisement, and there is so much more psychology, philosophy and art theory I could go into. I am 'female' and I grew up thinking the Photoshopped pictures of myself on social sites were the 'right' pictures, the 'right' self. To put a long story short, an eating disorder very mildly describes the kind of maladaptive clash I experienced between my physical form and my intellectual one.

I imagine the same thing happened when journalism was revealed to be yellow journalism, and other technologies slowly reveal their effect through generational adaptation.

In one sense, it's the same thing that happens because of the cycles of birth and death; technologies and cultures are born, and they are subject to death too. It's not surprising, but it is surprising, because the stuff that changes is not always the stuff you expect to change. In another sense, it's screwed up, and the only thing I can really hope for is that some kind of overarching balance can be intelligently directed towards and balance can be achieved. The idea that this is actually progress, and not just yet another side of the same coin that will eventually flip again.

I can love both family, friends, coworkers, and research. It's a slow process of the accumulation of a lifestyle. It doesn't happen over night, and I can't force it. That's the biggest thing I've learned since leaving college.

> communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the giver.

I feel like science and mathematics (and even computer science) attempts to counter this.

If we can mechanically generate mathematical proofs, and those proofs can be proven equivalent to one another, then we have essentially simplified the abstraction mechanics of the individual brain and transferred them to a computer.

I view abstraction as a means for expanding all potential permutations of a given model and it's application, and then a reduction to a different set of terms that connects models.

We might be able to prove that we can agree with one another, but we might not be able to prove that we agree with our own selves. We can always make the problem more difficult individually by guessing and creating more questions.

To me the process is two sides of the same coin. One side is creation, the other side is destruction. You can't convey an idea without having an idea, and you can't question that idea without having another idea. Negation is still a logical mechanism. You can question whether there is more to think about than a choice between [(exist) or (does not exist)].

I really prefer to think about possibility and potential. It's an open space to me.

Yes, but that essentially is saying the same thing as "people's assumptions can differ".

This can be an assumption about the meaning of a word or subtleties in the collection of concepts that connect to that word (as often seems to be the case with most computer science and mathematics material on the internet). Engineering interestingly enough does not seem to suffer from this insanity.

This can happen from overgeneralizing and even correct simplification. The pattern still fits, but both people have applied the pattern to different 'other stuff'.

We both have different points, so we both are directing this dialogue towards unrelated directions. I will attempt to connect them. I agree with you. Meaning can be an issue in communication. Form can be an issue in communication as well.

> (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided)

Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity. Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature, music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems like people don't care. It's a balance.

Maybe it's accepted over time, or maybe it isn't. Maybe a lot of time makes it easier to deal with losing literally a chunk of yourself. But I don't think it does.

"It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

~Junot Diaz

When I left graduate school, I came home for three years with no one that I could have the kind of intellectual connection with I had at college. It was like I was speaking a foreign language to my family and coworkers. Of course, I could go on the internet and talk about my computer stuff, but it's not the same when you are with people you trust your understanding of your knowledge with.

It's scary, and I'm still clinging to my own sense of self, even though I don't get to know whether it's still there, every single day. But I won't be marginal.