I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

I don’t love the idea of completely abandoning anonymity or how easily it can empower mass surveillance. Although this may be a lost cause.

Maybe there’s a hybrid. You create the ability to sign things when it matters (PRs, important forms, etc) and just let most forums degrade into robots insulting each other.

Surely there exists a protocol that would allow to prove that someone is human without revealing the identity?

Because this is the first glimpse of a world where anyone can start a large, programmatic smear campaign about you complete with deepfakes, messages to everyone you know, a detailed confession impersonating you, and leaked personal data, optimized to cause maximum distress.

If we know who they are they can face consequences or at least be discredited.

This thread has as argument going about who controlled the agent which is unsolvable. In this case, it’s just not that important. But it’s really easy to see this get bad.

In the end it comes down to human behavior given some incentives.

if there are no stakes, the system will be gamed frequently. If there are stakes it will be gamed by parties willing to risk the costs (criminals for example).

For certain values of "prove", yes. They range from dystopian (give Scam Altman your retina scans) to unworkably idealist (everyone starts using PGP) with everything in between.

I am currently working on a "high assurance of humanity" protocol.

Lookup the number of people the British (not Chinese or Russian but the UK) government has put in jail for posting opinions and memes the politicians don't like. Then think about what the combination of no anonymous posting and jailing for opinions the government doesn't like means for society.

Ugh. Someone I know made a similar statement a while back so I did look it up. The number was...approximately zero.

Not according to the UK government themselves. Where did you look it up?

some opinions do deserve jail time though, such as inciting violence against an ethnic, religious, or other minority group.

For a very long time now, homeopathic remedies have been regulated by specific US law, called HPUS, and are labeled accordingly. They’re actually required to include examples of what they treat even though many in the homeopathic community would rather it be labeled more generally.

If you are of the opinion that there’s something that needs to be changed about this arrangement, your lawmaker is the one to contact.

What we don’t understand yet is what that means. We have never had such a thing before and it’s not clear what the patterns are that will make the best use of its known attributes with the least exposure to downsides — whether those be related to the tools, the end users, or the business stakeholders, or any other parties. Volumes more nuance to understand, and we’re just getting started.

Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.

The profit per unit area can become very high.

Does that scale? It seems like the planting and harvesting would be difficult to automate and/or require increased labor. However, I am definitely not an expert.

"Does that scale?"

Not in my experience.

The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.

Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.

But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.

And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.

So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)

I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.

The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.

your comment introduced me to the term permaculture, looks interesting. Do you leverage numerical optimization - linear programming or integer programming for example - in your work?

I’m a permaculture designer and have run a small vegetable farm. I have visited Polyface twice and spoken personally with Joel Salatin both times. I’ve read several of his books. I think that Polyface shows up in this discussion very much on the side of the systemic safeguards the article recommends. His farm is full of systems and safeguards a great many things by design. He plans for every risk he can think of and adapts his system in response. He got the farm from his father and has largely transferred it to his son, and they have built a business training both interns and the interested public in their methods.

Safety measures ≠ world-dominating industrial scale.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to claim that small businesses don't need any safeguards. For example, small businesses also need backups, they need TLS certificates, lots of industry-standard stuff. What they don't necessarily need are everything required by the checklists that are thousands of items long where every box must be checked to pass SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, etc.

You’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.

Company I worked for gave us all a copy of the book and made us go to a 3-hour presentation by the guy. I was not impressed!

Yes, it’s a mistake to design your company’s output in a way that results in shipping a defective product.

Is it a defective product, or is it a fully-featured demo that is just good enough to show companies what they could have if they host the software themselves? "You get all these features, plus all the speed and security that comes with running this in your own corporate environment"

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Looks like an Orthodox Christian family? If so I will write your baptism names down at church if you are willing to share them.

That's kind of you. You can email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com

Right, don’t use that, but there are well-implemented timeouts in network libraries, etc.