thingification

I don't disagree that it can have that effect.

Just to note: this use of "turn back the clock" is quite distinct from "turn back the clock on technology".

> Assuming this is solved not by banning the tech but by making progress elsewhere, some pretty worrisome implications come with that.

My point was not that we can make progress elsewhere to solve resulting problems (we can) but that we can also not use the technology in the "inevitable" bad way. It happens!

> One antidote to deepfakes would be even more progress on identity verification and tracking the source of digital media for purposes of authentication / validity.

One other antidote (of many I'm sure) would be to do less identity verification in the first place.

Sorry can't resist

I think I agree with everything you wrote except what I'm unfairly reading into this phrase: we don't need to and should not irrevocably "decide" once and for all. We might have been quite wrong to ban some poisons even in the situations that applied at the time when we banned them. If we were right to do so, times may have changed and we don't any longer. Even nuclear weapons perhaps, in certain situations.

Similar to a previous comment of mine in this thread, of course I don't know from your passing use of that word what you think about this! But I do think that that worldview, that these things are or should be "decided" in a permanent sort of way, is commonplace.

Videos aren't the only way to understand the world, and there was never any such thing as "direct observation" in the first place.

But: are those really the only options? Paranoid stop-the-world wishful thinking or all-new-trends-are-inevitable?

I realise I'm almost certainly wildly misrepresenting your point of view with the latter label! I don't really mean to ascribe it to you. But I think the conversation often ends up tacitly as a debate between those two positions, both of which are mistakes. But one other option -- as an example -- is to find more complicated ways to stop doing <bad use of tech>.

A striking historical example to me because it's so old it can hardly be said to have been an invention that needed to be responded to -- rather just an apparent invitable fact of life: For the longest time, it seems everyday brutal violence on a level we find hard to imagine was common. At the time, that would have been obviously inevitable. Nothing else had ever happened. Then it basically stopped -- turns out it never was inevitable. Why? We didn't for example ban knives as a technology, but we did a lot of things over the centuries that, to a good numerical approximation, stopped us using them for violence (banning them in certain situations is only one, I suspect not the most important and maybe not even necessary).

Perhaps you're just saying that probability is useful in some practical ways? Deutsch agrees (see video below). But if that's not all you're saying:

If the "domain of possibility" (which I interpret to refer to quantum mechanics and thermodynamics) can be described without the whole concept of probability, why not eliminate it? Why eliminate it, though? As Deutsch says "We don't need a reason: Physics likes to do without things"? [1]

You may say constructor theory adds new fundamental concepts. I don't know constructor theory so I don't know whether that's true. In cany case, what's not to like about probability concepts? In what way are they "fuzzy or something", as you put it? Deutsch points out here [2] (few minutes later in the same talk as the other link) a sense in which probability statements don't describe physical facts: for example "drawing to an inside straight is very risky" is logically consistent with any sequence of cards in a poker game. I think that's the "fuzziness" they want to eliminate from Physics. He then goes on to deal with some objections to that idea such as "in the long run, probability statements describe physical facts".

If the game of Physics is describing physical reality, and we don't need that specific kind of fuzziness, success would seem to me an advance in Physics.

[1] https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc&t=13m12s [2] https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc&t=14m18s

beeminder.com

It seems that requirements to "consent" to TOS for things like major transport systems (government or not) or government health services (NHS services in the UK for example) just aren't consent in anything but some technical legal sense.

> Kinda bothers me that everyone is just going along with any terms for convenience. It's ripe for abuse and doesn't have to be this way.

I think it's not so much convenience as a change in the laws of the game? With TOS presented human-to-human, people in the past would have been more likely to react in a human way to the person offering them the TOS, businesses and governments would be constrained. Even if they got TOS in the post, there was a human in the loop to complain to and argue with. With TOS online, it's a fait accompli, which changes the costs to both parties.

In fact, intervention wouldn't have to be to change SMS. They could instead mandate a standard like U2F or FIDO2. If they really don't like those for some reason, EU states could get together and make a new standard and mandate that.

Thoughts similar to this one are often deployed here - like this:

commenter A: This makes <problem related to surveillance> worse

commenter B: It's only incrementally worse, so it's OK. Besides <other parts of problem> mean there's no practical difference currently (at least if you've already basically admitted defeat about <problem> as I have), so what possible rational basis could there possibly be for not going ahead?

But many steps that make a problem incrementally worse can lead you to a bad place. Many steps that make things incrementally better would lead us to a better place. And with a tangled problem like this is by now, I think you do sometimes have to accept that not every step may always make a practical difference for many people, if you want to move towards a solution rather than forever away from it.

In this case I'm surprised to see you use the word "only" - government starting to mandate something is a significant step over even a duopoly doing so, because the cost of trying to ignore a government mandate can be much higher even than ignoring the smartphone duopoly - right? I can and do avoid the smartphone duopoly currently, but good luck to me if the government mandates it, eh?

Also given government power, in some ways it's a lot easier to make progress on knotty problems like this one than it is for a company, because government has a lot of power - so in that sense they have less excuse than private industry for moving us backwards here. Of course the public, though I think they see the problem to some extent, don't really believe in solutions yet. It's up to us to give them confidence that better solutions exist.

There's also U2F of course, but in the absence of more pressure I guess that everybody who was using that will use FIDO2 or nothing (seems like a regression from my point of view - I don't have any need for passwordless login).

> The real victims of this move aren't the privacy enthusiasts who run Qubes on their coreboot-enabled Thinkpads, they'll find a way. I'm worried about the elderly and other less technically minded who have no idea how any of these apps work.

The real victims aren't any individual but society - the real problem is destabilisation through centralisation of power.

I think that's good general advice...

> Even so, you know very well what these placard brandishing plebes meant, despite your pedantry.

... but I don't think it's pedantry in this case but a stupendously important point: I think both me and the GP think "Believe the Science" does very often correspond to some sort of belief in the importance of sources of knowledge or the need to shield ideas from criticism. "The Science" seems often very much "The" with a capital T.

Why stupendously important? If all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and all knowledge is conjectural, then damaging traditions of criticism is maybe the worst thing anybody can do.

Isn't that a meaningless distinction? If I've tested my hypothesis, isn't "believe" perfectly fine as a label for how you think about it then? It is, but when people use that word they often have in mind that the source of the knowledge is important -- it isn't. I think that is what's behind most of the "I believe in Science" statements. What's really important is rather how vulnerable to attack an idea is.

Edit: "believe in" also tends to get used with the implication that a time needs to arrive where you make a decision that a hypothesis is true. That also goes against Popperian epistemology, which says rather that all ideas remain subject to correction forever.

This isn't true

> different versions don't work at the same time

Within one stow directory: true. But nothing prevents creating multiple directories (I don't think I've ever done that).

If I understand correctly, in saying that this is scientism, you're saying something like that people on the other side of this debate think science and technology are the only relevant things going on here? Another possibility is that they do think other things are relevant (cost, political considerations, ...) but that they think that the expense is not intrinsic to the technology.

While I'm sure you've heard the "but it's expensive because of the anti-nuke people!" claim many times and have your own well-considered reasons to think that mistaken in some sense -- if I'm wrong and it turns out that it being expensive has nothing very much to do with anti-nuke protests, does that really make me a scientist? "Scientist", the way you're using it, is a statement about somebody's epistemelogical beliefs, I think?

> It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.

This could be seen as ad hominem and could usefully have been omitted I think

> the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis

In that particular sense, it's not a crisis: if you think N megadeaths will occur in time T as a result of climate change (making no comment on that because I don't know much about N as a function of T), there are still (10000 - N) million humans around at time T to suffer from lack of a solution. In that situation, it doesn't make sense to say "it's a crisis, so a solution that helps after time T can't possibly help"?

So for people who think that we won't have a solution until we build a lot of nuclear power, the slogan "climate crisis" seems likely to badly damage those 10000-N million humans because it gives us an excuse to never solve the problem. People could reasonably disagree with the antecedent ("won't have a solution until we build nuclear"), but I hope you see a bit how the other side sees it?

Greetings from an ex-Physics grad student on the other side by the way! Other side both of this debate and of being a grad student I suppose. Have a nice day over there :wave:

If you hit a poison message, block just that smaller stream, not the aggregated larger stream. Once you fix the problem, reprocess the entire small stream starting from the poison event, or the next event after that. The "entire" stream here might be just a handful of events.

Greg Young's Event Store (https://www.eventstore.com/) works this way (there's a $by_category projection that produces the aggregated streams).

Caveat: I haven't actually implemented this mechanism because I've been able to get away without it, because we have some legacy event streams that aren't split up in this way, and because nobody else has yet added support for it to the tools I'm using.

The agency in London responsible, Thames Water, will replace any lead pipe in the public network leading to your building if you agree to replace any lead pipe on your property within 3 months.

But I live in a "leasehold" flat (common in London). So "you" for the purposes of that agreement would be not me but the "freeholder", who is responsible for building maintenance. To get them to do anything, I have to go to a lot of effort to get action out of the "management company" hired by the freeholder (and probably then be blamed by other leaseholders -- most of whom don't live here -- for costing them money to replace the pipe). I followed up with them maybe four times before giving up. I'm not the customer of the freeholder or of the management company. Reading up on the impact on adults (thought to be low compared to the impact on kids), I decided to just run my tap for a few minutes every day and store water to drink for that day (wasting lots of water in the process). I notified the other residents, some of whom have children, suggesting I could help take it further if others helped out. Nobody responded.

The boy's story in the article involves lead paint.

I'm doubtful that painters here in the UK take great care over it. And from what I've read, it may be the costs fall heavily on kids and not so much adults.

Are saying the article suggests that but does not support it? If so, where does it suggest that? I don't see that, scanning the article -- but I do see:

> it was not the company’s intention to become a leading contributor to security risk.

It seems like they're not suggesting some evil plan, but something more like just the operation of the market?

Would anybody like to compare/contrast this with https://mirage.io/?