I'm writing my first custom policy for MS's B2C identity provider, and it's a painful process.
Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.
This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly.
There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure.
Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard.
That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it.
I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.
People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong.
I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place.
Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.
I was on the Cypherpunks list, mostly as a lurker. The technical discussions were amazing. I was really into it at the time, but now I find some of the political ideas to be embarrassing.
Other people had a lot to do with the spread of strong crypto as well. Many people realized that encryption was necessary if we wanted to do business online. Matt Blaze (who was on the Cypherpunks list, but never said anything crazy), helped blow up the government's compromise solution, mandatory key escrow, by demonstrating flaws in their Clipper chip technology. The MIT Press published PGP's source code in book form, using an OCR font, because books couldn't be blocked as munitions. I think Hal Abelson, who wasn't on the list, was the person behind that.
The basic political idea behind the list was that you could effect change by writing code. Instead of going to the government, with your cap in your hand, and saying, Please, sir, can we have strong encryption?, you write code and give it away, thus making the law impossible to enforce. This sounds really cool when you're young, especially if you write code, but it's an anti-democratic idea.
The political positions of some of the leaders was kind of an extreme, anarchist spin on libertarianism. Bitcoin is a currency designed to solve a specific problem -- it's kind of the ultimate solution to the old goldbug fear that governments will print money and dilute the currency. That's impossible under Bitcoin.
The original crypto currency the Cypherpunks were really into was David Chaum's Digicash, which was designed to solve a completely different problem, the same one Monero is aimed at today. It was supposed to be untraceable. Instead of asking governments to lower taxes, the idea was that programmers could create a way to transfer funds anonymously. In theory, taxes would become impossible to collect, and national borders would collapse.
Eventually this led to things like discussions of anonymous murder contracts. There was a proposed protocol that was supposed to allow you to put out a hit on someone with complete safety. You could pay the killer anonymously with digital currency. I think the payment would go into some sort of escrow, so the killer would know they'd get paid. I don't remember how the system was able to know that the hit had taken place.
Those murder contracts were one of the things that made me pull back from the list. But it really was terrific to read, even though I think it would be a mistake to lionize it too much. Arguably, they were struggling to make the whole world run on 8chan's rules.
I -think- the anti-democratic thing is making it impossible to enforce the laws of a democratic society. If a democracy decides that strong encryption should be banned, going against that is going against the will of the people.
Of course, we all (technical people) agree that it was the right thing, but ask yourself: If there was a vote on the issue, do you think the majority of people would vote for keeping strong encryption, or do you think they'd ban it? Especially back then.
I personally think they'd ban it. I bet the majority would just go "encryption is for terrorists and bad people, we don't need it", and we'd lose the vote.
Now for an alternative thought exercise consider the situation in which a democracy votes to end itself and initiate a dictatorship. Is it democratic or anti-democratic to try to stop it?
Although the end of the Weimar Republic was essentially an electoral choice, significant chunks of the electorate by then had been skewed, divided, disenfranchised, or even displaced it wouldn't be accurate to call the elections fully representative. And yes, similar efforts are underway in the US too.
Through the good advertising it's now usually understood as 'we vote => we are in control => values', except democracy is clearly has nothing with social and humanitarian values.
Democracy is a system where political disagreements are resolved through a set of agreed-upon rules (AKA "rule of law") instead of violence. The alternative to Democracy is mass murder. There is still plenty of violence in a Democracy -- witness the prison system in the USA, but it isn't neighbors just casually murdering each other (as also happened in the USA in an organized way in the Jim Crow era). Interesting to note -- both counter-examples were / are founded on denying parties participation in the democratic process...
The Rwandan and Bosnian civil wars are both examples of "tyranny of the masses" where there's no mechanism for resolving disputes between groups, besides killing your neighbor.
It's what John Gilmore said and claimed to believe (emphatically, unambiguously, repeatedly) to me in person that I object to, and the intellectually dishonest and factually incorrect way he argued in support of it, but not anything he's written publically, nor who he listens to.
He's been claiming to me and other people that I got mad that he listened to somebody I disagree with, but he's gaslighting about the point I clearly explained to him: I listened to what Scott Adams said too, so I know what he said, and what he's said in the past, and I don't agree with him, and I explained clearly why he was lying and wrong. But John made it extremely clear that he does believe Scott Adams' lies, and other White Supremacist propaganda, and he also spouts ridiculous climate change conspiracy theories.
It's not just because John Gilmore strongly AGREES with Scott Adams, but also that he intellectually dishonestly and emphatically argues in support of White Supremacist propaganda like "Black people are a hate group", and that "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" and "It's OK to be White", and believes he (a successful straight white multimillionaire) suffers from systemic reverse discrimination.
All that in spite of all my arguments and the evidence that I gave him, which he refused to listen to or look at. I'm sure he knows very well what the evidence says, because he's not as ignorant as he's pretending to be, and I certainly tried very hard to explain it to him, he just would not listen to me, and refuses to accept it.
John pretended not to know about Scott Adam's long sordid history, but when he mentioned his girlfriend was coming over, I offered to read some Scott Adams quotes to her so we could hear her opinion, and he got mad and slammed a door in my face and refused to talk with me for the rest of the night. Not the behavior of somebody on the winning side of an argument, or a mature adult arguing in good faith.
“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.” -Scott Adams
Does anyone have any idea how a person could go about trying to understand the basics of what's going on here, even in just a hand wavey way? This is so far above my head it seems like magic.
There are chemical processes, most notably photochemical processes like photosynthesis, that funnel molecular states into new configurations so rapidly, that observation of the details of the reaction is impossible. This research simulated one class of such reactions (conical intersection reactions) by modeling the wave function that governs the time evolution of the reaction using a quantum computer, allowing them to run the reaction 100B times slower than occurs in nature, and to measure the quantum state evolution. They are thus able to get a clear picture of how the reaction proceeds, as measured by several different observables, from the simulation.
It's a direct demonstration of the utility of quantum computation in molecular modeling. The meta-relevance, to me at least, is that it demonstrates real progress in one of the areas where quantum computation is most likely to have an important impact.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to disqualify someone, but I agree with the basic point you're making.
What you've described happens with religious people of a certain type as well. Sometimes they can adopt a legalistic approach to right and wrong that allows them to do things that are very much against the spirit of a teaching, by claiming they meet the letter of the law (or rule). Other times religious people take the position that the end justifies the means -- that their moral mission is so important that it's OK if they cut corners, sometimes very serious ones, along the way.
I've never known what to make of SBF's parents, especially his mom, a scholar who has championed the idea of effective altruism. I don't know how much his parents knew about what was going on at FTX, but they seemed to benefit from the wealth the company threw off while FTX was at its peak.
On one hand, it seems reasonable to me for parents to support their child, even or perhaps even especially when the child is being prosecuted. I don't know the truth of anything that happened. But it seems that SBF's defense is probably made up of lies. If that's the case, is it OK for his parents to sit on the sidelines and support SBF while he continues to lie?
I think they still introduce small problems for people who run software they don't like. For example, if you run Linux on your desktop, and want to use a Windows VM for work, you can't run WSL2 or Hyper-V in the KVM/Qemu guest, even if nested virtualization is enabled and working with other operating systems. It used to work, but now it doesn't, and no know knows exactly why.
These situations are murky. I don't know that they broke it deliberately. Maybe it broke on its own and the problem affects so few people that they just don't care about it.
And you can't really demand that they spend their developer resources on things that they think won't help them. But on one hand, they wrote their own Wayland server for Windows 11, but on the other hand, they say, we can't make Teams work on Wayland.
They do lots of odd stuff. It's pretty easy, and pleasant, to run a headless linux server on Hyper-V, but setting up a proper desktop system on your own is hard. They don't actually create a wall you can't get around, but they create obstacles that make it easier to do the things they want you to do.
It's not fair or reasonable to get mad at them about this stuff. It's more that we should be clear about where they're coming from.
A while back, my Ubuntu LTS system kept badgering me to upgrade to a new Ubuntu. I finally relented, and installed the latest. It installed without any errors, but the display was all messed up.
After much fiddling and googling about, I deduced that apparently didn't support the graphics card anymore. It never said "don't install me, cuz it won't work with the card I used to work with." It just died on it. I wound up reinstalling the older Ubuntu.
I don't believe there was any conspiracy by the Ubuntu developers. No conspiracy is necessary - it's really hard to not break things. I knew some people who worked in appcompat at MS, and they had a lot of stories to tell about how hard they had to work to not break things. A lot of software misused Windows APIs making it hard for MS to improve things.
> I think they still introduce small problems for people who run software they don't like.
Linux, FreeBSD and Apple OSX operating systems routinely break without warning older software. I've had the fewest breakages with Windows operating systems.
Just in the last few months, I had to buy a new iphone because Waze, Twitter, and my banking app simply ceased working on it. No warning, no nothing. Those apps upgraded themselves, and just stopped. No check for compatibility with an older iphone.
Bought a new iphone, transferred the apps over, and they magically started working again.
Sorry I thought we were talking about deliberate and illegal anticompetitive business practices, not how well MS treats compliant consumers that spend money on it and help further its network effects by using Windows.
Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.