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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PL
Posts
12
Comments
380
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.

    If the magic contract from the Internet is not actually likely to be enforced by the county, then the county is not actually using the magic Internet contract system. If the system were adopted by the county, then the official records from the system would be known to be enforceable.

    I sound like I am for and against blockchain because I am. I don't think you can stand up any existing blockchain system and start slapping government functions onto it and get a good result. People won't understand it well enough or have sufficient resources to be true peers in the system, and if they did it wouldn't scale very well.

    But I do think that governmental systems can be improved by taking inspiration form blockchain technology and drawing on its underlying philosophical principles of accountability and consensus.

  • But one would like to be able to still play Half Life 2 today, even if Valve weren't helpfully around to update it. One would like to be able to read an old Word document or display an old blog post along with its scripts. So either you support the old standards and, for active content, the old APIs, or you lose access to anything that doesn't emit enough cash to pay a person to keep it current.

  • Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.

    The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.

  • I think the requirement for constant progress, and the expectation that all software be able to change arbitrarily with a year or so of notice, is in fact a problem with software development.

    I do software development all the time, and I find this to be an impediment to my work. I also make the kind of breaking changes that cause this problem.

  • If you don't have a system of law that even its designated enforcers are obliged to follow, you don't have a legitimate government, you have a mafia.

    The easier it is to make cases where a law is broken common knowledge, the easier it is to gather the political will to enforce the law. That mechanism is what obliges the enforcers to actually follow the law, and it can work more or less well depending on the structure of the society, the relative power of different groups of people, and the communication technologies in use. If the President guns someone down in broad daylight, they get thrown out more often if you have a reputable newspaper than if you don't. An election is a convenient substitute for everyone trying to kill each other until we find out who is left.

    Blockchains are one technology for establishing common knowledge among a group of participants. They're not magic, they don't even usually work particularly well. But they do offer techniques for binding the administrators of systems of rules to actually follow those rules, which have the potential to be applied more broadly.

  • Something has gone wrong in software development where software can never be finished.

    If you release an app on Google Play and never touch it again, eventually Google will pull it from the store and customers will complain that it no longer runs on new devices. Android 16 will require that all applications now do something, and refuse to run any that do not.

    This is the real structural source of the constant subscription demands. Nobody is willing to commit to supporting a stable API for 10 or 20 years, and nobody will keep coming in to bump dependency versions and rewrite systems to Google or Apple's new whims every year unless they get paid for this apparently useless work.

  • If the county isn't actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.

    If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.

  • One of the good things about using a blockchain system is that it forces you to set out and follow a set of programmatic, and thus at least minimally fair, rules for how the system is going to work. It means you are running on some kind of rule of law, and for it to work everyone involved has to be able to replicate the history of the system and agree that it is correct.

    It seems a fairly natural fit for something like land, especially in the US, where we know for a fact that huge swathes of it were seized in the past from Native Americans, or revoked after being given to Black folks at the end of the civil war, or otherwise moved around by the government in suspiciously ad-hoc ways that we have later come to regret.

    If you can design the entire system to grind to a halt if rights are not respected or someone tries to rewrite the rules on the basis of they have the guns, it could be a powerful force for the rule of law and the maintenance of a consensus reality.

  • A central database would be just a list of all the land and who owns it.

    Right now, the deed system is a bunch of deeds that say "remember when I got this land, on page 302 of book 75 in the county recorder's office? Well now Jimantha owns it actually, since they bought it from me for ten dollars and a peppercorn.". This is great for accountability: it lets you trace ownership history and provides a piece of evidence to substantiate every transfer, and so helps you answer inconvenient questions like "why should you own that house when it was my grandmother's house and I want to own it?". It also lets you roll transfers back if they are found to be fraudulent, and neatly captures how all current ownership is contingent on the theft of the whole place from any disposessed original inhabitants.

    This is also basically how ownership works in many current blockchain systems: you select something you own based on the transaction that gave you ownership, and then you say who should own it now in a signed message.

    But the blockchain systems verify signatures cryptographically, whereas the county recorder verifies the authority to transfer stuff on the "you think someone would just tell lies? On the Internet?" principle. And the centralized database doesn't even keep the transfers around for review, it just has the database operator in charge of who owns any given thing at the moment.

    Would you rather walk up to a grumpy person with a shotgun and demand that they move out while brandishing a printout of an SQLite database recently recovered after the ransomware attack at the county administrative building? Or with a deed with their spouse's signature on it?

    Then the problem is to make the deeds more machine-readable, and to get better at not putting in deeds from people who have no business writing to that part of the ledger, for which pieces of blockchain technology might be useful.

  • I don't think a person selling an app is capitalism. There's no means of production, there's no apparent attempt to appropriate and profit from stuff that rightly belongs to the people who actually made it. Unless Sync is actually written by a bunch of people who are not getting ownership of the project?

  • There's a difference between "unpolished" and "can't keep what posts ought to be on the page straight". Like Ruby on Rails can get that right 100% of the time out of the box before you write any code, I don't know how Lemmy's web UI manages to do it wrong.

  • There's plenty of reasons not to try and keep things private! It is a lot easier for comments on Lemmy, for example, to be public, rather than trying to make the discussion threads private among some set of authorized participants.

    And if I am rating movies on Netflix, I really do want them to take my ratings and put them in a big machine learning pile to try and find me better movies. That's the point of rating the things.

    But there's a big difference between me actually sharing information with people so they can do good, and people trying to collect information about me without my permission so that they can make money, or, worse, try to manipulate me later.

    And even if the data is not in itself all that worthy of secrecy, and I might be willing to share it, someone else deciding for me that they get to follow me around and see what I am up to or what I like, without actually asking or without genuinely expecting that I might say no, is... not how consent works.

    Also, some of the point of this is that one cannot in fact genuinely ignore advertisements. At the very least they constitute a cognitive load, where it is harder to do or see things because the advertisements are in the way. They can also hammer brand names and desired associations into people's heads, to ensure that most people know that e.g. X Brand Soda is the "luxury" soda. And of course in aggregate they cause people to buy things. Each person might choose to buy the thing of their own apparently free will, but running the ad will cause more people to make that decision than would otherwise.

    Where they are most dangerous is when advertisements try and create problems, rather than just offering products. A sign that says "We sell Coke" is fine. Three commercials a day asking if you are guilty of "old-shoeing", the social faux pas of having old shoes, look at this man being laughed at for it, etc. are dangerous, even if they never try to sell a product.

    These kinds of marketing campaigns are that much more effective if they can be targeted at the people who are the easiest to convince that made up problems are real. And while one's general personality is not exactly a secret, we also don't want scammers like this going around making lists of the particularly gullible.

  • What does it even mean to be "against NATO"? Is it, like, saying "the NATO alliance ought to disband because the terms of the alliance are bad for my country actually"? Is it like "I hope NATO countries lose all their wars"? Or like "NATO is a dangerous thing to exist because it allows an invasion of Country X, which is likely to happen, to result in a global thermonuclear war"?

    A bunch of countries could be arming Ukraine without the sort of all-for-one, one-for-all terms of NATO specifically that make it likely to figure prominently in any explanation for why we have all died of nuclear weapons.

  • That is itself a political belief, though. You cannot in fact have any sort of community without answering political questions about how that community should work. You could say that no external political questions should be discussed in the community, but:

    1. Enforcing that could cast a bigger shadow over the community than the political arguments did.
    2. It amounts to saying that the external political situation is acceptable, or at least relatively safe to ignore.
  • I'm not sure it's feasible to try and compare the two in an objective way. It's easy to know which oppressive empire one personally prefers, but trying to actually reach consensus on which was better or worse using some kind of convincing evidence would be so complicated that it would probably amount to a waste of everyone's time.