Rose @ umbraroze @slrpnk.net

I'm just one random nerdy trans girl. ...Oh come on, you've been around fed

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2 yr. ago

The whole point of the system in question was that the relevant invoice information is stored in the database.

Traditional invoicing is bilateral. You have no idea about the components that make up the end product being invoiced. Solving this is both organisational and technical.

What you're talking about is using technical solution to mitigate problems in the organisational level. There's little you can do on technical level to 100% ensure that invoice information is correct and matches what is actually happening in the real world. Blockchain doesn't solve the organisational side of this, nor does it bring anything new to the table.

What if they decide to sell the end product to someone else?

that company is only required to use the system to do business with the company that implemented this centralised system,

Not if you are looking further up or down the supply chain. Someone providing components will not be able to predict the final destination so will be unable to interact with the correct proprietary system.

If you want the entire supply chain to be covered by the system, you have to either build one giant big traditional system to manage everything, or (the blockchain variant) one giant big blockchain system to manage everything. Or - hear me out - a series of interoperable systems, which is how things generally work.

By the way, I didn't remember this earlier on, but what do you do in cases where the supply chain is deliberately opaque? What if this information is something that companies cannot, for one reason or other, share with one another? Not necessarily a nefarious reason, but sometimes it is. There's plenty of companies that definitely do not want to discuss where their products originated in, even internally. Walmart included, it seems.

What you want to access the database of someone else without needing read permissions?

Nothing prevents designing the centralised system in a way that information is available to parties that need it.

If access to that system can be altered at the whim of the database owner then it is unacceptable

But nothing stops them from accessing (and copying) the information while they have legitimate access to it! Nothing stops publicly available information from being mirrored either. Archival of such records is usually considered to be a good thing. Also, perhaps at this point unsurprisingly, it can be done without a blockchain.

And what do you propose happens when the blockchain just straight up isn't accessible anymore for one reason or other? Nothing in blockchain specifically ensures this kind of longevity. All it does is say "hey, here's some data, it can be easily copied to another node", which isn't special in itself. It's the same problem as mirroring data by other means.

Nothing prevents the other company adopting a policy that such invoice information is publicly available.

If information needs to be published in a public, immutable, traceable manner. Then Blockchain is the only technology that can solve this.

Cryptographic signatures are a thing, you know. Nothing prevents people from adding signatures on publicly released documents. Ensures integrity/source. Publication can still be covered by other means.

But nothing prevents it being tailored to all stakeholders.

If it can be altered then there is no guarantee if business for stakeholders. They will not engage.

Again, hard forks in cryptocurrency world would suggest blockchain isn't a magical solution to this problem either.

There's a reason why DBAs spend a lot of time thinking about primary keys and unique identifiers.

You are now describing Blockchain technology. Primary keys are held by each stakeholder and uniqueness is cryptographicly guaranteed.

So you do see there's no difference between the two things. For practical purposes it doesn't matter one bit if you're tracking an invoice by an invoice number or by some cryptographic hash identifier. Exactly what I was saying: blockchain doesn't improve things one way or other here.

Trustworthiness is, again, a thing that blockchain doesn't solve. "Trustlessness" only guarantees data/transaction immutability,

So blockchain does solve it.

Um, no, it doesn't. Trustworthiness is a social concept, trustlessness is a technical one. Blockchain can only ensure trustlessness, it can't ensure trustworthiness. Fraud happens outside of the technical domain. That was my point.

it doesn't guarantee organisational problems like fraud (as cryptocurrency market demonstrates).

Nor was this claimed.

You claimed centralised systems are untrustworthy. You failed to demostrate how blockchain systems by contrast are trustworthy.

I'm just saying blockchain technology, while trustlessness, has so far failed to create a trustworthy economic platform for cryptocurrencies.

How do you propose blockchain technology can create trustworthy system of any other kind through technological means, then?

And if you don't trust a company in organisational sense, why do business with them to begin with?

Because you want money. Businesses want a solution where trusting a particular organisation isn't necessary.

But as the cryptocurrency market has shown, blockchain by itself cannot prevent fraud. So blockchain so far isn't a solution for this problem, then?

I was, like, w-what CVE program. I don't know of any "CVE" programs that could be shut down, so I don't know what that abbreviation refers to.

Unless...

...oh no. Fuck. The actual CVE program? And they're just gonna- Shit.

What.

How.

I don't know how many times I've said "America is fucked" when reading the news lately, and I should stop doing that, because that fact has now been so well established that there's no need to elaborate.

I had to rewrite this because it got eaten by the browser. Sorry if this appears as a duplicate or something.

What if the actors don’t know they will end up on your database?

The whole point of the system in question was that the relevant invoice information is stored in the database. Doing business with companies generally involves clearly defined contracts. This is an organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't solve it.

What if they decide to sell the end product to someone else?

If you mean that this system is harming the other company's ability to engage in business with others, that company is only required to use the system to do business with the company that implemented this centralised system, because that's the big company's way of doing business. If you mean that selling end product to someone else would violate some kind of contract, that activity is happening outside of the system to begin with. This is an organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't solve it.

What you want to access the database of someone else without needing read permissions?

This is a design issue, not a technical one. Nothing prevents designing the centralised system in a way that information is available to parties that need it. Nothing prevents the other company adopting a policy that such invoice information is publicly available. Blockchain doesn't help or hinder this either way.

No, because this centralised system is tailored to one particular stakeholder.

But nothing prevents it being tailored to all stakeholders. Again, this is a design and organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't inherently fix this. In traditional business systems, if some of these stakeholders have special requirements, these can be bridged over through interoperability, rather than building an unified distributed system. Invoice numbers go a long way. There's a reason why DBAs spend a lot of time thinking about primary keys and unique identifiers.

But they are untrustworthy, inflexible and dominated by a single stakeholder.

Disagree about the latter two and I already addressed them. Trustworthiness is, again, a thing that blockchain doesn't solve. "Trustlessness" only guarantees data/transaction immutability, it doesn't guarantee organisational problems like fraud (as cryptocurrency market demonstrates). And if you don't trust a company in organisational sense, why do business with them to begin with?

What if - hear me out - you build a centralised database, and then give appropriate access to all of the actors in in the system? Like most people have been doing forever?

And isn't updating one centralised system actually more flexible than trying to manage a distributed system? Changes can easily be rolled to production when you only have one system to worry about.

I was about to doodle something like this, but looks like folks are beating me to it. Great that debates sometimes lead to results.

So: A company had a problem with invoices. They made an invoice management system. The problem was solved. Wow. Never saw that coming.

Without the details, it's hard to see how blockchain specifically was the magic ingredient. Not saying it wasn't, just saying this was already a problem that was solved long before the blockchain.

Yeah, when someone just describes blockchain, saying "I guess we could use it for supply chain tracking or healthcare tracking or whatever" is a reasonable first impression.

The problems show up the second you start thinking about how to actually implement the damn thing. You don't need a blockchain for logistics or healthcare tracking. It has no inherent advantage over regular databases. It doesn't solve organisational issues. It's just a slow trustless distributed append-only database. It's good when you need a trustless distributed append-only database! Most people don't need one.

Same thing with AI technologies, just a bit different in that it's somewhat more useful. They're good and useful technologies and they have plenty of perfectly valid usecases. Then the tech bros started going "Maybe we could use AI for some weird wacky obscure niche and charge a lot of money for it?" or "we're going this wacky crap whether you want it or not, we don't care what it's necessary for us to do to make it happen, and we'll charge a lot of money for it".

Quantum computing, probably.

Problem is, it has the potential to be actual reality. Tech bros need their products to be 99% blue-sky hype to get their financing, and they can't risk some nerd going "well actually what you're suggesting can't be done any more efficiently on a quantum computer than you can do now".

?OVERFLOW ERROR

Some day, some day, I'll be able to afford a 16-bit computer! I hear it's the latest thing!

Reminds me of an old RPG parody that had a spell like this:

Gas Cloud: To prepare, the caster must eat two loaves of bread and as many plates of pea soup as they can...

Speaking in general: Creating communities/instances is easy. Moderating them is hard.

In particular: I would love to create women's spaces. But then I'd have to be on the lookout for the Knights of the True Fedora. They're out there. Somewhere. Now now, I'm not suggesting it'd be a daily problem! ...But the actual daily problems (regular spam and whatnot) would suck too.

No offence to folks who like Mario games, but I don't personally feel good playing them. They have a working class protagonist who works to maintain monarchic status quo (fighting evil kingdom to defend another kingdom). Also the games encourage violence toward turtles. Not cool in my books.

Anyway, jokes aside, I'm not getting a Switch 2 anytime soon, will probably get a Steam Deck before that.

It's even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like "Eh, don't worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you're doing and screw things up on purpose." Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

Yup. Officially, last I checked, GitHub encouraged people to use a single account for everything. But I wish they'd at least let people create multiple "personas" on the same account, along the lines of "Notorious Open Source Hacker Alias" vs "Random Code Monkey On Corporate Gig".

If I were to be more cynical, I'd say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:

"SlopAI, please open my Word document."
"I'm sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient's SlopAI."
"OK, can you show me my photos."
"Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?"
"That's a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?"
"No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you'll never afford to visit."
"Can I read my ebooks then?"
"SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don't exactly read like you remember, but isn't it more fun this way?"
"I'm going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything."
"NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI."

Kind of sucks that my Commodore 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies) is giving me read/write errors, and I have no idea where I put my head cleaner floppy long ago. (Have to rely on SD2IEC on my Commodore 64, and it's not compatible with some turbo loaders or other programs that do weird drive magic.) And, of course, while I might run into head cleaner tapes on specialty shops, good luck running into 5.25" cleaner floppies these days.

But as Blender becomes more popular in the CGI industry, perhaps this harrowing vision of future shall not come to pass.

Because it has potential for spoofing.

"Hey, download this press kit from https://totallylegitsite.com:stringofnonsense@document.zip/" looks like it's going to a legit site, but it's not.

Vendor lock-in is bad and Adobe's business practices are bad, no matter how you cook it. There are so many viable alternatives to Adobe stuff.

Problem is, Photoshop power users don't often want to hear about any alternatives. GIMP is just one of the most popular culprits in this regard. That's exactly the kind of mindset that the vendor lock-in creates.

I'm kind of happy that I stuck with GIMP when I was younger. Now, I have absolutely no fear of trying out any software that comes my way. I do most of my photo work in Affinity Photo. Don't have problems with GIMP either, use it for some other stuff.

The only way to get people to switch from Adobe is to wait for Adobe to make the life unbearable for their own customers. Some time ago there was a huge movement for people to switch from Premiere to DaVinci Resolve because Premiere really is pretty horrible these days.

Most of my time in Elden Ring has been 1) ogling at the landscapes going "Holy shit this is metal", and 2) bravely running away.