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Unman's comments

Unman | 9 years ago | on: 2017 Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography

While applauding the stated mission of Open Whisper Systems to make cryptography usable by large numbers of people I think it is fair to hold Moxie & Co. to the same high standards to which they held PGP: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/

    The journalists who depend on it struggle with it
    and often mess up (“I send you the private key to
    communicate privately, right?”), the activists who
    use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing
    wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person
    is willing to use it by default. Even the projects
   that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle.
Breaking this up into constituent parts and trying to guess whether those standards are met seems to leave us somewhere in this territory:

1) Journalists communicating with WhatsApp struggle with it and mess up.

Given the confusion around under what circumstances one can communicate securely with WhatsApp ("Is it OK if I have two checkmarks? Is it OK because Facebook would never let a government have access to the RedPhone part?")

2) Activists who use WhatsApp do so relatively sparingly. I have no idea on this one. I hope they're using Signal and/or GPG with all their attendant bother, complexity and confusion though.

3) No other sane person is willing to use WhatsApp by default. Hmmm.. more confusing value judgements. Is someone that uses a communication method open to abuse by corporations and governments "sane"?

4) Dependency struggle. AFAICS no other projects can piggy-back off WhatsApp because it's proprietary and closed. So the user base can't scratch their own itches. OK, so what about Signal? Sounds like the dependency on Google Cloud Messages and Play Services can be hacked around with great difficulty.

I dunno. Fair play to Moxie and Perrin for what they've done, but so far GPG looks like a better bet for actual secure end-to-end communication, using an already existing, widespread distribution mechanism which is widespread and redundant: email.

Reports of GPG's death may have been grossly exaggerated.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

None of those quotes demonstrate anything other than the simple point that someone who has experience in riding a bicycle knows to get their weight back and low so that (per your own quote) it is _nearly impossible_ even on steep hills to endo.

It would be refreshing if you were able to demonstrate a capacity for admitting that perhaps you have something to learn. I would advise taking a mountain bike class and coupling it with something like the U.K.'s Bikeability or the U.S.A.'s League of American Bicyclists equivalent.

I fear, instead, that you will spend your time hectoring internet strangers about the dangers of bicycle riding based on your own incapacities and incapabilities.

Good luck.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

The redundancy point is true. The tandem drum brakes are less to do about heat dissipation than stopping your hands cramp up on a long descent. Often you just actuate the rear drum to provide constant drag on a descent.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

> Front brake will flip you over in an instant, I know because I've done it, even at slow speeds

That's because you simply do not know how to ride a bicycle. In such a situation you need to get your weight back behind the saddle and modulate the application of the brake.

O.P. is one hundred percent correct that you do not need a rear brake -- and I speak as someone that rode for several years in without one including in SF.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim

I guess I do not understand the manner in which you use "ad hoc" to refer to package management.

It seems as though you are now talking about cross-distribution package management. It is further confusing that you are contrasting all "Linux" to the single distribution macOS.

To me the term is "ad hoc" current w.r.t. NixOS , GNU Guix and other purely functional systems, and there the distinction is made between:

1) declarative -- in which a rebuild of the system will ensure the package is present and configured as expected; and

2) ad-hoc -- in which the user can affect all of the system with side effects and rebuilds will not result in the same state.

Why would you want to allow users to randomly and aribitrarily affect all of the system and end up in an unknown state? Isn't that exactly what curling shell scripts achieves? And what method does macOS implement in order to avoid this?

If all you're talking about is cross-distro package management then you and your users can either give up on this and standardize on one OS and just pony up the cash for RedHat (same as you do for macOS) or else start writing Flatpaks.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim

Are you claiming that macOS has better vetting of its packages than Linux? And what do you mean by "Linux" anyway? -- lumping RHEL in with ADistroIMadeInMyGarage is a bit odd.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Be careful about what you dislike

That's another good example. The original post is actually nearly an example of "How to start a flamewar."

You can even see the discussion of CETA spawning a long, subsidiary thread which distracts from the central thesis which we should be arguing about. (I am not offering an opinion on the content of that discussion.)

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Be careful about what you dislike

Hmmm... while agreeing with the sentiment I am unimpressed by the lack of evidence for one of his supporting examples. What stood out for me was this bald assertion with no reference to falsifiable specifics:

"_Not_only_was_it_already_a_much_improved_agreement_from_ the_start_,but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the one that was finally sent to national parliaments."

Either the writer of this is an expert on the topic, well-known in the field and the weight of this judgement on its own is a valuable primary source; or, the writer is referring to such an analysis conducted by other experts but has not bothered to include a citation/link; or, the writer has their own critique but instead of presenting _that_ has just stated an opinion which they know to be controversial.

All of the above possibilities contribute substantially to the noise around any discussion.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Moral Machine

Because the occupants of the cars want to get to any and all places where there are non-occupants of cars. The conflicts are inherent. Car use is fundamentally an irrational application of technology that appeals to the lazy.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Moral Machine

I disagree on that distinction. Pedestrians have not introduced the primed-handgrenade of the automobile into the situation. All dangerous consequences that flow from that introduction are the responsibility of the introducer.

Many highway codes explicitly recognize this principle: drivers are supposed to conduct their vehicle as though someone or something may run out in front of them at any stage.

It is true that in practice this implicit morality which reflects the widespread outrage which greeted the introduction of the motor car is now ignored, but that is at the base of many the codes.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Moral Machine

I simplified it.... always kill those in the car as they are the ones introducing the danger into the situation for their own perceived convenience.

Unman | 9 years ago | on: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

The way your (brief) sentence is written it sounds as though the government is given a good deal of credit for imposing the moratorium, whereas there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that they consistenly mis-managed it. It looks as though a combination of poor ecological models, concentration on simple resource production statistics, consulting only with large capital holders instead of small, local stakeholders led to this avoidable collapse.

Over-fishing in the maritimes was mostly as a result of "free-trade" liberalisation including transferable/sellable fishing licenses which led to a decrease in small, family operations and an increase in massive, mortgaged industrial fishing operations.

The small family business typically engaged in long-lining (single lines with multiple hooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longline_fishing ) which did not require great capitalization/debt. These business became non-viable as larger operations flooded the market with fish caught by dragging -- a method which leads to the destruction of the seabed ecosystems which in turn decreases the catchable population.

This is one of the good references on the topic, pretty readable (Dean Bavington, _Managed Annihilation_, 2010 UBC Press): http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/2010/ManagedAnnihi...

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