It's merely the software architectural mistake of only constructing a broadcast channel.
Security by obscurity is fundamentally weak, this use wastes bandwidth, and can be destroyed by statistical analysis where the other dogs learn German.
> Forcing software devs to use open source or local models to do anything fun.
Episode Five-Hundred-Bazillenty-Eight of Hacker News: the gang learns a valuable lesson after getting arrested at an unchaperoned Enshittification party and having to call Open Source to bail them out.
tldr; holding powerful people accountable is very hard.
Take Cheney's post-911 warrantless wiretapping program. You had Bush's own top DOJ officials threatening to resign over it in 2004, and Jim Risen with a story about it ready to publish in the NYT before the 2004 election. But not only was the White House able to stave off the resignations (IIRC through some tepid FISA oversight of the program), they got NYT editor Bill Keller to scuttle the story on vague national security grounds. (NYT reluctantly published it after the election only because Risen threatened to scoop them in his upcoming book.)
Then in 2008, Obama claimed the need to "look forward, not backward" wrt this and the Iraq War. Plus his admin renewed Bush's subpoena against Risen on another national intelligence story he'd done!
Any effort to hold Cheney or the Bush administration accountable for this would have had to battle both parties at the same time as educating the public on the issue, without the help of and backing of media institutions like the NYT.
I'd be fascinated to hear how anyone in America could seriously make the case that such an indictment could ever be achieved. Even now, decades after the fact when the base of both parties has absolutely nothing but disdain for people like Dick Cheney. But that's just one old example out of many-- current ones obviously are harder since people currently in power tend to be implicated.
I was going to write a big long comment, but honestly it boils down to this:
Whatever git's practical benefits over SVN and CVS back in the day (and I can go into the weeds as a user if someone wants that), git was the DVCS that took over from the centralized VCS's of that era.
There is nothing in jj, pijul, or Bram Cohen's thing that is anywhere near as dramatic a quality of life improvement as going from VCS to any DVCS. And dramatic improvement is what is needed to unseat git as the standard DVCS.
I mean, if you're not doing something so important[1] that it adds a letter to the acronym, it's probably not the next new thing in version control.
1: I originally wrote the word "novel" here. But it has to be big-- something like guaranteeing supply chain integrity. (No clue if a DVCS can even do that, but that's the level of capability that's needed for people to even consider switching from git to something else.)
There is some truth to that, but to give a different perspective ...
A long, long time ago, back when VCS's were novel enough to be of academic interest, I read numerous papers describing what these VCS's could be. They talked in terms of change sets, and applying them like a calculus to source code. In the meantime those of us writing code people actually used were using sccs and rcs, or if you were really unlucky Visual SourceSafe. To us in the trenches those academics were dreamers in ivory towers.
With the passage of time we got new VCS that gradually knocked the rough edges off thoase early ones. svn gave us atomic commits, hg gave us a distributed VCS, git gave us that plus speed. But none came close to realising the dreams of those early academics. It seemed like it was an impossible dream. But then along came jj ... and those dreams were realised.
> We managed to put buttons on appliances that don't make the appliance explode, but failed to do that in email links, which are just buttons.
Reminds me of the time I accidentally entered my bank PIN into my washing machine and hackers ran off with $500 of my money.
What puzzled me most was the time and energy put into the attack, all for the off chance of a successful attack. Security footage showed them removing my washing while I was at work and replacing it with one the hackers controlled. This "phishing machine"-- as I now call it-- was apparently fitted with some kind of LoraWAN device waiting for me to unwittingly enter my PIN to unlock. Something my washing machine never asked me to do before, btw, but I did it anyway (like an idiot).
I changed my bank PIN, but I still use the old PIN to run the phishing machine-- funny enough it's fully functional and in fact works better than the old one.
All said, the hackers probably lost $1000 on the deal. Police said this is a very common attack on washing machine buttons throughout the Southeast, so I'm wondering if part of our current economic stagnation is due hackers going into bankruptcy from this.
E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.
Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.
Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.
Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.
People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.
Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.
How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?
In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.
Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.
Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.
Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.
> The faith was that if they could’t pay, they’d let me know because I was actively digging their asses out of a hole they’d dug, and doing so tirelessly and professionally, without complaint.
I get what the author is saying here. But it's a bad idea to treat one's work team with deep communal devotion in this way, as if they are a kind of dysfunctional family-- or, in the author's case, apparently higher in status than real family.
Doing this without proper remuneration creates a market distortion, and that is bad for capitalism.
This is why I only train my dogs in a pure functional language.
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