There are many changes that are possible which do not harm the integrity of applications.
>the user can’t do what they want with their own device
In the same way the user can't
make their device have the Microsoft Word app send them $1 million from Microsoft's bank account. Once other people are in the picture you can't always have your way.
> Attestation isn't against being able to do whatever you want with your own device.
“Prison isn’t against being able to go wherever you want.”
> There are many changes that are possible which do not harm the integrity of applications.
“Well there’s a lot of places you can go in prison, you just can’t leave.”
Uh-huh.
> In the same way the user can't make their device have the Microsoft Word app send them $1 million from Microsoft's bank account.
This is completely incoherent. You and I both know that a bank refusing to give away someone else’s money has nothing to do with being able to run whatever code and operating systems we want to on our own devices.
Obviously the decision happens on some remote server which would require a username and password to authorize. It doesn’t matter one bit what piece of code sent it over.
>“Prison isn’t against being able to go wherever you want.”
This isn't a good analogy since the user really able to do whatever they want with their computer. A better analogy is that. "You can go wherever you want, but if you are trespassing on other people's property they can report you to the police." Just because you have the freedom to go anywhere does not mean you are not accountable for your actions or that people should not be able to tell that you are trespassing.
>has nothing to do with being able to run whatever code and operating systems we want to on our own devices.
My point is that one's freedom of how they want one's computer to work does not mean they can force other people's server to run code they want. Microsoft is in control of what there servers do.
Distinguish between trespassing-style "you can go there but there might be consequences" and prison-style "you are physically unable to go there"
Currently it's trespassing-style. If you modify your Google client, Google reserves the right to ban you.
With attestation it's prison-style: you can't modify your Google client. If you try, the modified client just won't work. Trying to walk out of the prison wall does not actually put you outside - you just bang into the wall and then you are still inside.
Then you’re just replacing one DRM cartel with another.
What would even be the criteria for approval? Pinky promise to not let the end user have full control of their own device? That’s all “integrity” really means in practice. Don’t be fooled by appeals to security.
If a “category of claims” has shared causal structure, then the category’s track record absolutely does tell you something about the next claim in it.
It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
Every person on Earth could agree that Earth is flat and it wouldn't affect the reality of whether or not extraterrestrials visit earth even a little bit.
The shared causal structure is the absence of facts and denial of science. Nearly every religion on earth also suffers from that in their gospel, where many fictitious and supernatural phenomena are bundled together and sold for truth.
I'd prefer to speak about "evidence in support of/against" rather than "facts", which often conceals a presuming-the-consequent kind of fallacy.
> denial of science
Whether "science" is believed or denied by any particular person has no effect on whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence has or is visiting earth.
Demanding that "science" be believed is un-scientific. I am not drawing an equivalence between science and religion here, but pointing out that your argument is a super hand-wavey appeal to an inviolable "gospel". I'm old enough to remember when a theory like intra-galactic panspermia was regarded like canals-on-Mars.
In my view, ETI theories are lacking any credible evidence and this makes me sad.
There is nothing anti-science about the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. In fact its apparent absence is has a name -- it's called the Fermi Paradox.
And the facts are just ... released. It's the interpretation of the observations that are disputed. And unless you think they are all fake, the explanations that do not involve alien tech are non-trivial to say the least.
I'm not sure why you'd think there is any shared causal structure with flat earthers at all.
Extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the universe, and extraterrestrial life visiting Earth are two distinct things, and the former is vastly more probable than the latter.
Yes, and to bring it back to GP's point, if someone comes telling you they just saw a flying saucer rise on a big chem trail above the flat earth's horizon, then you perhaps don't take their next claim all too serious.
You are assuming that the people who are arguing about "transients", or people like Avi Loeb, are also people who believe in flat earth or flying saucers.
True, but if you don't have sufficient knowledge of IR to assess the claim that a particular photo cannot be a bird, the tendency of the people making and believing that claim are usually equally confident that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams and that vaccines contain microchips is a compelling argument against it.
Similarly the absence of a conspiracy of freemasons running something does not inhibit the existence of a conspiracy of Taylor Swift fans running it in any possible way. But I think any objective assessment of whether the Swiftie conspiracy is likely to be real or not should probably take into account the possibility people positing Swiftie conspiracies have been influenced more by well established tropes about freemasons and Jews, and if the alternate hypothesis that a common human failure mode involves positing the idea groups they distrust secretly conspire to achieve unrelated outcome they dislike is well supported and the claim of an actual Swiftie conspiracy isn't...
The only thing that cuts against this is that if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.
> if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.
I've read claims that the Cold War-era US Gov employed exactly this strategy on the people camping out along the fence at sites like Area 51, taking pictures of advanced aircraft under development. I.e., they actually took some people down into the basement and showed them "alien bodies" to confuse the Soviets.
That's an example of ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by a professor who decided that there's more money in UFO BS than in his previous career (or sincerely lost his grip on reality, who knows).
It was an interesting thoery, but IMO his habit of making similar claims every time an interstellar object is discovered cast doubt on that original theory.
I note that article seems quite biased against Loeb. For example, they cite USA Today strongly criticizing him, which is not a reputable source in this debate. Wikipedia also doesn't mention that many other astrophysicists think that his 'Oumuamua theory is unlikely but not crazy. They only cite very negative criticism, but not the many more neutral responses. They also don't mention that he is far from the only one believing that 'Oumuamua appears to have a highly unusual shape. Wikipedia tries to paint him in the worst light possible.
I've got no horse in this race, but the great thing about Wikipedia is that you can edit the article[0] to fix anything that you feel is incorrect and/or not adhering to the encyclopedia's policies. You could also bring up your concerns on the talk page[1].
My edit would be reverted, and my talk page complaints would take a large amount of effort that likely ultimately goes nowhere when it's up against established editors. Instead I was telling you here that Wikipedia is not automatically unbiased just because it could theoretically be edited by anyone.
It may feel like you’re designing a bridge, but in reality you’re just asking a worker to do that too, and rubber stamping it when the drawings look reasonable.
One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.
Low-level doesn’t mean more information, it means more explicit.
In Zig, that means being able to use the language itself to express type level computations. Instead of Rust’s an angle brackets and trait constraints and derive syntax. Or C++ templates.
Sure, it won’t beat a language with sugar for the exact thing you’re doing, but the whole point is that you’re a layer below the sugar and can do more.
Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
I don't think there is a standardized meaning of 'low-level'. I think a useful definition is that a low-level language controls more/is explicit about more properties of execution.
So zig/c/c++/rust all have ways to specify when and where should allocations happen, as well as memory layout of objects.
Expressivity is a completely different axis on which these low-level languages separate. C has ultra-low expressivity, you can barely create any meaningful abstraction there. Zig is much better at the price of remarkably small amount of extra language complexity. And c++ and rust have a huge amount of extra language complexity for the high expressivity they provide (given that they have to be expressive even on the low-level details makes e.g. rust more complex as a language than a similar, GC-d language would be, but this is a necessity).
As for this particular case, I don't really see a level difference here, both languages can express the same memory layout here.
> Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
I don't see how any of that becomes easier in the Zig case. It's just extra syntactic ceremony. The Rust version conveys the exact same information.
It’s precisely not syntactic ceremony. It’s normal Zig running at compile time in which you can program types as values. In Rust (and most other languages) all you get is a highly abstract DSL:
Foo<T> where for<‘a> T: Bar<‘a, baz(): Send>
Information dense, but every new feature needs language design work. Zig lets you express arbitrary logic, loops, conditionals, etc. It’s lower level of abstraction than a type constraints DSL.
For example, adding “the method in this trait is Send” to Rust’s DSL took a whole RFC and new syntax. The Zig equivalent could be implemented with an if statement on a type at comptime.
Or how about the transformation of an async function into a state machine. Years of work, deep compiler integration, no way to write such transforms yourself. Same with generators, which still aren’t stable. I’d really like to be able to write these things like any other program.
If you don’t want or need to express things at this lower level of abstraction, fair, same reason most people stick to scripting languages and don’t think about memory layout. But “extra ceremony” is really underselling it.
But there's literally none of that in the example we're talking about. It's just an inert datatype declaration. And if anything the Zig version is more abstract - for the Rust version I have to understand <T>, whereas for the Zig version I have to understand comptime, Self, and @.
> I stand by every word I said in that thread