6 ms·

In my opinion decentralization and protocols is really the final frontier in software. Sure, we've got AI, but from what I've seen so far it does not alter the

by vvpan 8mo ago

In my opinion decentralization and protocols is really the final frontier in software. Sure, we've got AI, but from what I've seen so far it does not alter the scales of power towards individuals. Protocols do. Everything else feels like noise or thinly veiled monopolization. Edit: actually thinking about it - at the bottom of much of it is identity. We need new identity solutions for the protocols.

andai 8mo ago
What prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?
- kgwxd 8mo ago
  Nothing, and that's fine.
  - shafoshaf 8mo ago
    If you are trying to stop monopolization, then having a large organization/government swarm the protocol gives them an effective monopoly. Being able to put a drop of clean water into an ocean of corruption is not really a working system.
    - kgwxd 8mo ago
      If it doesn't have an attention-seeking-for-profit game built into it, there's no motive to flood it. If no one directly follows the bots, or anyone echoing the bots messages, and there's no algorithmically generated feed, there's no problem. IRC is pretty good, and it survived the Freenode takeover by simply letting everyone know things are moving over to Libera. Bluesky is awesome if you just ignore the "Discover" tab, I wish they'd just get rid of it. Librem One did something similar with Mastodon, it was peaceful. After the initial excitement of finding decentralized platforms like that, I personally realized I don't care much for that type of interaction with people, so I don't use any of them very often. Same way I don't use my phone much, but it's there when I want it. Like a utility should be.
      - shafoshaf 8mo ago
        The motivation to advertise, track, remarket, and exploit is always there. If I started getting all my news via Bluesky, I would have to allow various businesses to reach out to me. Sure, I can have a separate account for that, but that just segments my comms. Mind you, we are talking about using these protocols for the general public, not savvy hacker news readers.
- css_apologist 8mo ago
  cost, and we can create policy (shocker) also what specifically are you worried about these 100 billion chatgpts doing?
  - coldtea 8mo ago
    Cost is irrelevant if they get more out of doing it than the processing costs.
    - bigbuppo 8mo ago
      Do they get more out of it than it costs, or are they still in the "people are just giving us money in the hopes that one day it turns a profit even though we're not charging nearly enough to make a profit" phase?
      - coldtea 8mo ago
        You're describing the AI companies and their business model. I'm answering to that cost being a problem regarding "what prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?" - the context I have in mind for the above being scammers, political manipulators, spam, and people like that using ChatGPT/LLMs to take advantage of various protocols for profit (and the 100 billion figure being a figure of speech meaning "very many").
  - andai 8mo ago
    The comment I was responding to said that protocols would solve the problems with AI. I immediately imagined telling my $10/month unlimited AI to hook itself up to whatever protocol is being discussed here. They mentioned identity being important here. I'm not sure what that means in this context (some kind of cryptographic verification, maybe?), but the part that seems relevant to me has to do with trust. Either a person is trusted by people I trust, or at least an organization I trust makes some claim about this person (e.g. they're actually human, this is actually their real name etc.) I think we'll be seeing something like that in the mainstream in the not too distant future, for obvious reasons.
iamnothere 8mo ago
Nostr provides both identity and protocol.
- treyd 8mo ago
  It provides a very fragile identity system and a very unreliable and inefficient message delivery protocol.
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    Care to explain what you mean by “fragile”? It is cryptographically sound. I agree that the delivery protocol could be more efficient, but use of JSON is a tradeoff that provides good extensibility and easier parsing (many well seasoned libraries exist in almost every language).
    - treyd 8mo ago
      Not a cryptography / data format thing. Although CBOR is just as widely supported as JSON and that would have been a better choice there, but that's not really the issue, but the whole approach to identity. Identities are global and shared across devices. Naturally, if your keys are lost/compromised your identity is lost/compromised. So the solution they have to this is that your real root identity delegates signing to other identities (generated local to a device) by publishing a note indicating a list of keys allowed to sign on its behalf, and presumably you keep your root identity on a trusted device (like maybe a crypto hardware wallet or a threshold multisig). But this just reduces the problem and worsens the UX. Your identity still gets lost/compromised if the root is. There's also an issue with how identity updates themselves work. Since these delegates are really signing for the single root, they need to be synchronized to work properly. There was a common bug (which might still happen) where if you set up your identity on a new device, the app might broadcast an identity update with an incomplete view of your identity and it resets your follows and post history. Since your identity data might be influenced based on every note you've ever sent, and message delivery is unreliable, it's hard to properly sync and reconstruct sent note history. This comes out of a fundamental design issue, where you have multiple "writers" writing to the same state. CRDTs could have helped with this, but it's too late to do that. This sucks! It forces users to think about key management and has catastrophic failure modes. It's really hard to re-establishment trust after key compromise because there's no notion of identity that lives longer than any one key. Matrix is not a comparable kind of protocol, but its identity management story is a lot better. Each device has a local key that never leaves the device, and when you add a new device you cross-sign it from another device you have. Homeservers maintain a list of identities tied to a user, and other people can decide to trust the device cross-signing or manually verify each of them. This can be built in a fully decentralized context (which Nostr is not, for what it's worth).
pbreit 8mo ago
I always thought SMTP would make a good webhook delivery protocol.
- sethammons 8mo ago
  why?

by vvpan 8mo ago

andai 8mo ago

What prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?

kgwxd 8mo ago
Nothing, and that's fine.
- shafoshaf 8mo ago
  If you are trying to stop monopolization, then having a large organization/government swarm the protocol gives them an effective monopoly. Being able to put a drop of clean water into an ocean of corruption is not really a working system.
  - kgwxd 8mo ago
    If it doesn't have an attention-seeking-for-profit game built into it, there's no motive to flood it. If no one directly follows the bots, or anyone echoing the bots messages, and there's no algorithmically generated feed, there's no problem. IRC is pretty good, and it survived the Freenode takeover by simply letting everyone know things are moving over to Libera. Bluesky is awesome if you just ignore the "Discover" tab, I wish they'd just get rid of it. Librem One did something similar with Mastodon, it was peaceful. After the initial excitement of finding decentralized platforms like that, I personally realized I don't care much for that type of interaction with people, so I don't use any of them very often. Same way I don't use my phone much, but it's there when I want it. Like a utility should be.
    - shafoshaf 8mo ago
      The motivation to advertise, track, remarket, and exploit is always there. If I started getting all my news via Bluesky, I would have to allow various businesses to reach out to me. Sure, I can have a separate account for that, but that just segments my comms. Mind you, we are talking about using these protocols for the general public, not savvy hacker news readers.
css_apologist 8mo ago
cost, and we can create policy (shocker) also what specifically are you worried about these 100 billion chatgpts doing?
- coldtea 8mo ago
  Cost is irrelevant if they get more out of doing it than the processing costs.
  - bigbuppo 8mo ago
    Do they get more out of it than it costs, or are they still in the "people are just giving us money in the hopes that one day it turns a profit even though we're not charging nearly enough to make a profit" phase?
    - coldtea 8mo ago
      You're describing the AI companies and their business model. I'm answering to that cost being a problem regarding "what prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?" - the context I have in mind for the above being scammers, political manipulators, spam, and people like that using ChatGPT/LLMs to take advantage of various protocols for profit (and the 100 billion figure being a figure of speech meaning "very many").
- andai 8mo ago
  The comment I was responding to said that protocols would solve the problems with AI. I immediately imagined telling my $10/month unlimited AI to hook itself up to whatever protocol is being discussed here. They mentioned identity being important here. I'm not sure what that means in this context (some kind of cryptographic verification, maybe?), but the part that seems relevant to me has to do with trust. Either a person is trusted by people I trust, or at least an organization I trust makes some claim about this person (e.g. they're actually human, this is actually their real name etc.) I think we'll be seeing something like that in the mainstream in the not too distant future, for obvious reasons.

iamnothere 8mo ago

Nostr provides both identity and protocol.

treyd 8mo ago
It provides a very fragile identity system and a very unreliable and inefficient message delivery protocol.
- iamnothere 8mo ago
  Care to explain what you mean by “fragile”? It is cryptographically sound. I agree that the delivery protocol could be more efficient, but use of JSON is a tradeoff that provides good extensibility and easier parsing (many well seasoned libraries exist in almost every language).
  - treyd 8mo ago
    Not a cryptography / data format thing. Although CBOR is just as widely supported as JSON and that would have been a better choice there, but that's not really the issue, but the whole approach to identity. Identities are global and shared across devices. Naturally, if your keys are lost/compromised your identity is lost/compromised. So the solution they have to this is that your real root identity delegates signing to other identities (generated local to a device) by publishing a note indicating a list of keys allowed to sign on its behalf, and presumably you keep your root identity on a trusted device (like maybe a crypto hardware wallet or a threshold multisig). But this just reduces the problem and worsens the UX. Your identity still gets lost/compromised if the root is. There's also an issue with how identity updates themselves work. Since these delegates are really signing for the single root, they need to be synchronized to work properly. There was a common bug (which might still happen) where if you set up your identity on a new device, the app might broadcast an identity update with an incomplete view of your identity and it resets your follows and post history. Since your identity data might be influenced based on every note you've ever sent, and message delivery is unreliable, it's hard to properly sync and reconstruct sent note history. This comes out of a fundamental design issue, where you have multiple "writers" writing to the same state. CRDTs could have helped with this, but it's too late to do that. This sucks! It forces users to think about key management and has catastrophic failure modes. It's really hard to re-establishment trust after key compromise because there's no notion of identity that lives longer than any one key. Matrix is not a comparable kind of protocol, but its identity management story is a lot better. Each device has a local key that never leaves the device, and when you add a new device you cross-sign it from another device you have. Homeservers maintain a list of identities tied to a user, and other people can decide to trust the device cross-signing or manually verify each of them. This can be built in a fully decentralized context (which Nostr is not, for what it's worth).

pbreit 8mo ago

I always thought SMTP would make a good webhook delivery protocol.

sethammons 8mo ago
why?