Sure, but would that be one that contains services and apps ordinary people use everyday, or would they all have jumped ship like Netflix did? That version would still be an open web, just a very different one.
634 karma · joined November 19, 2019
The article mentions the IETF is working on standards to deal with the proposed legislature and frustration of site operators. Almost any solution is going to be at the expense of user convenience and privacy. I see two interesting solutions mentioned here: micropayments, and proof-of-work. It seems unlikely the future of the open web will land on either. Both are inconvenient but at least could be done by anybody, potentially in a privacy preserving way. Using reputation based decentralized identity is another one (eg. proving you’re coming from a web domain or group), that seems more inconvenient for the platform because of false positives that could come through.
Meanwhile, a worse outcome is requiring attested hardware to get access to anything on the web. This already exists from the media companies pushing for controlled access to streaming. Netflix requires an hardware attested device to stream in 4K. Imagine a future where you now need one to read a New York Times article.
I can see some pushback against the alternatives (eg. digital ID), but if privacy preserving proofs are built in from the get go, it’s much better than not being able to see recipes because I have a rooted Android.
> Sprow then laid out an agenda for how to achieve those ends.
> With modeling critical to climate science, he wrote, “it could be considered important to be at the forefront of this modeling effort.” Sprow proposed “supporting a person on staff at one of the leading modeling centers (e.g. Princeton) or by sending one of our people to work in such a center.”
The picture this article paints of academia seems pretty bleak to me as a layperson. I thought shady science by corps just meant publishing a few bad faith studies and pushing them hard in media, but apparently it's possible to do "incentive-driven science" in a fashion that lets you sow seeds that can influence decades of downstream research.
I would hope that the framework of science itself has guardrails to prevent these efforts from obscuring more globally relevant results in favor of "technically true" pieces that do everything the right way but are badly motivated and omit methodologies which lead to undesirable results. For people who have experience in this area - how much critical thinking do you need when reading papers on climate research? Can the research be good enough by itself on merit, or is any opinion incomplete without evaluating the journal, affiliation of the authors, funding sources, etc.?
Glad to see this type of hardware still included in the testing flows!
You could split use cases by scope. One is internal organization and IAM cases, which makes it easy for you to use a centralized identity provider (IdP) to issue some sort of token grant access to an app.
Use cases where you don't want to fix an IdP, like payments or verifying the someone's credentials before giving access on the open web, get more involved. You could have multiple valid IdPs, reputation / claims linked to IDs (since being on the IdP itself is no longer sufficient for an app to let the actor through), inheriting authority through multiple hops (giving your authorization to someone), enforcing narrowing permissions for those use cases, handling revocations. And then there's also the matter of being compatible with other emerging standards that are coming up (eg. A2P for agent payment authorization).
We settled on the core primitives of W3C DIDs for identity, Verifiable Credentials for delegations, and StatusList bitstrings for revocations as the "minimal set of ingredients" that address all the above. They are all open standards. DIDs are particularly cool because you can have them bound to passkeys, web domains through existing PKI, and even ledgers.
We did need to add a few specs of our own on top to address how it would work with use cases like MCP (for replacing OAuth flows, which have had messy implementations on coding agents since inception.) Our MCP example [0] also tries to make it incrementally adoptable and work alongside OAuth, so for example an operator could add it as a wrapper today and start collecting logs with identity claims for each tool call for auditability. It's a work in progress so hearing feedback on what seems confusing / hard to understand would be helpful.
Speaking only for myself, that is absolutely accounted into my despair when I see an AI poster. Not just the fact that we're having a wide range of cultural and regional artifacts being stamped out and homogenized by the convenience of AI posters, but the fact that I'm only able to point them out right now because the public backlash is somewhat limited to the online sphere, so most people are okay with the default result it spits out. And we're one default ChatGPT/Claude "curated diversified aesthetic selector" feature away from making my current discernment completely useless.
Of course there's an argument of "if it's so good you can't tell, is there really a problem?", but here I'm responding specifically to the argument of a negative reaction to AI posters not taking the above into account.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1192222-a-lot-of-fans-are-b...
There were really two components to it I valued - the inherent interest in the topic itself of course, but also the sense of community and recognition you got as you dove deeper and created cooler things to share with people. At some point the second overtook the first, and I internally started to value the outcome or reaction to something I would create more than the satisfying pursuit of making itself. Doing a thing wasn't valuable unless it would be acknowledged by some group of people. It's been a long process trying to get rid of that mindset and I'm still not done, and has caused a lot of anxiety and questioning my interest in the hobbies I love.
A lot of the questioning has been driven by the absolute saturation of my online feeds. The algorithm can so quickly figure out the type of stuff I like and show me so much of it that it begins to start feeling meaningless in 10 minutes of scrolling - deconstructing that value system in real time (and I guess technically helping? hooray for accelerationism). If there is so much out there, what am I supposed to create that could add to the pile in a meaningful way? It really takes a lot of effort to sever yourself from the algorithmic mindset and remind yourself that you got into it because you like doing the thing.
Not to mention the second order effects, like the ancillary feelings of guilt that show up because I start questioning why I want to avoid seeing things about topics I supposedly enjoy. Part of it is personal flaw - I find it difficult to see something cool without feeling some imperative to figure out how I could do it myself. When I don't want to feel bothered, I'm driven towards more mindless consumption that doesn't run the risk of reminding me that I should be doing something. I feel I would be much happier engaging in the hobbies I have if I was a bit less aware of everything related to them going on in every part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not just hard because "phone feels good", but also because it means completely giving up on the value system I grew up on, where you could know if you were doing something meaningful if it got attention from other people in the communities you wanted to be a part of. "Attention" has been too commoditized at this point to use it as a fulfilling indicator of return (but unfortunately, some people have to play this game if they want to support a living off a creative endeavor - at least I can ignore that part because I just make music or do creative coding as a hobby).
I've been scraping instagram posts recently to identify AI misinformation accounts that all repost each other's carousels and get hundreds of thousands of likes in engagement. Thinking of ways to present it and your dashboard looks very helpful. Did you experiment with any other types of visualizations before deciding on a stacked area chart for the clusters?
A notable exception would be people like CEOs and managers higher up in big tech, who might be used to skilled engineers and domain experts reporting to them in unfamiliar lingo. Maybe that's why we don't hear as much on the everyday annoyances of Claude's language from that camp?
And somehow, the programming language he made (that currently bans AI contributions outright) ended up being instrumental for a tool that's in the center of the whole craze, and doing Tony Hawk 900 aerial spins with agentic AI software rewrites under a frontier lab. I'm not commenting on the effectiveness of the rewrite, but it seems fascinating that for a moment Zig found itself at the intersection of two very different camps that the software world seems to be divided into. It seems in retrospect like a bomb waiting to go off even if they didn't jump ship to Rust!
I think my downfall might have been questioning the efficacy of my method beyond it just "feeling right" and trying to find ways to show myself that I am learning.. maybe the correct approach is to just do whatever and hope for the best
That's a very good question. In my case, when learning in the mode I described above, my brain is often more worried about the amount of unknown stuff versus focusing on what I am working on at the moment. With that, learning starts to feel like a burden and leads to burnout (even though I enjoy solving problems). I can become closed off to new information, and disheartened at everything I don't know.
The problem I'd like to solve is being able to retain excitement about learning while working on projects without it feeling like an obligation. There are probably more base issues to address for this (eg. being less controlling of outcomes). And there's particularly a lot of doubt now that AI coding is the norm, and I feel uncomfortable with moving faster because I feel attached to all the details. That has turned the debate much larger about what anyone really needs to know if they can blitz through stuff at the speed of prompting.
> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign
I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.
When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.
One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.
But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things.
I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!
Edit: I'm enjoying seeing all the other examples linked in the responses. I decided to make a public Semble collection (https://semble.so/profile/vadhub.bsky.social/collections/3mr...) to track more, feel free to add to this!