3 ms·

Just replying to the OP that nobody has a found a use case. In our case, we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate

Just replying to the OP that nobody has a found a use case. In our case, we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots.

lovegoblin 5y ago
> we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. What does this even mean? Are you Disrupting™ the Text Editing Industry? In what substantial way is it different - and better - than existing version control?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Don't worry, your document's editing history is safe from hackers... Or something
  - socialist_coder 5y ago
    Unless the hackers control 50%+ of the mining?
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Indeed! Our use of blockchain doesn't involve tokens or mining. Just a literal chain of hashes. Each hash is the hash of one edit or change made with the MSL language. If the chain is incorrect, your version of the document has elements in it which were not in the original and the exact point where they deviate can be determined. You can perform this work without having any access to the documents or the text itself.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    That's a good one! We're proposing it as an outside, second verification source that people can run independently, not as a big blockchain that we control. I know the whole area is tenuous!
- mimixco 5y ago
  That's an awesome question. At the root, we are trying to provide fact-checking and fact-correction, and this goes down to remembering the "values" of individual words and phrases that make up the document, then tracking those changes over time. Instead of a list of unrelated edits, we make it easy to do things like find all of the changes to a certain term and update all of them without changing anything else in a document. That's just one kind of transform that's possible. The blockchain aspect serves as an outside, second source of edit history that can be used to just keep hash values, not documents themselves. The hash values can be checked against the hash of any version that anyone has to see which version they have. These are just a few of the aspects of the language and the tools we've built to implement it. If anyone is interested in this stuff, there's a ton at our website! http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io And I'm always open for questions and feedback.
brabel 5y ago
> This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots. I believe you're wrong, git commits are diffs, not snapshots.
- mimixco 5y ago
  Yes, diffs of entire documents. Our system works differently.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-diffs/ https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-dif... (I don't necessarily agree with the article's messaging around "Haha you were only confused by git because you thought commits are diffs now that you know they're actually snapshots you have no more confusion", because, as the article itself admits, most of the commands like cherry-pick do work on dynamically-computed diffs anyway.)
  - brabel 5y ago
    Interesting... a git commit is almost always represented as a diff... example: https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdda246e0178b9c58b06770b90.patch https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdd... Whether it's represeented as a diff internally seems completely irrelevant to me, even to understand the examples in the article. I would like to be able to "de-serialize" a real commit's data to see exactly what's stored, but this article doesn't seem to show how to do that... do you have a suggestion on how to do that?
nomel 5y ago
I think "use case" generally implies "good use case" rather than "technically possible use case", which would be better classified as "misuse case". My favorite misuse case is using a knife to turn a screw.

lovegoblin 5y ago

> we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. What does this even mean? Are you Disrupting™ the Text Editing Industry? In what substantial way is it different - and better - than existing version control?

netizen-936824 5y ago
Don't worry, your document's editing history is safe from hackers... Or something
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  Unless the hackers control 50%+ of the mining?
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Indeed! Our use of blockchain doesn't involve tokens or mining. Just a literal chain of hashes. Each hash is the hash of one edit or change made with the MSL language. If the chain is incorrect, your version of the document has elements in it which were not in the original and the exact point where they deviate can be determined. You can perform this work without having any access to the documents or the text itself.
- mimixco 5y ago
  That's a good one! We're proposing it as an outside, second verification source that people can run independently, not as a big blockchain that we control. I know the whole area is tenuous!
mimixco 5y ago
That's an awesome question. At the root, we are trying to provide fact-checking and fact-correction, and this goes down to remembering the "values" of individual words and phrases that make up the document, then tracking those changes over time. Instead of a list of unrelated edits, we make it easy to do things like find all of the changes to a certain term and update all of them without changing anything else in a document. That's just one kind of transform that's possible. The blockchain aspect serves as an outside, second source of edit history that can be used to just keep hash values, not documents themselves. The hash values can be checked against the hash of any version that anyone has to see which version they have. These are just a few of the aspects of the language and the tools we've built to implement it. If anyone is interested in this stuff, there's a ton at our website! http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io And I'm always open for questions and feedback.

brabel 5y ago

> This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots. I believe you're wrong, git commits are diffs, not snapshots.

mimixco 5y ago
Yes, diffs of entire documents. Our system works differently.
Arnavion 5y ago
https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-diffs/ https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-dif... (I don't necessarily agree with the article's messaging around "Haha you were only confused by git because you thought commits are diffs now that you know they're actually snapshots you have no more confusion", because, as the article itself admits, most of the commands like cherry-pick do work on dynamically-computed diffs anyway.)
- brabel 5y ago
  Interesting... a git commit is almost always represented as a diff... example: https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdda246e0178b9c58b06770b90.patch https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdd... Whether it's represeented as a diff internally seems completely irrelevant to me, even to understand the examples in the article. I would like to be able to "de-serialize" a real commit's data to see exactly what's stored, but this article doesn't seem to show how to do that... do you have a suggestion on how to do that?

nomel 5y ago

I think "use case" generally implies "good use case" rather than "technically possible use case", which would be better classified as "misuse case". My favorite misuse case is using a knife to turn a screw.