hendrik

Huh. Seems like a bug… If I refresh the page a lot of times, sometimes the button works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve attached a screenshot of the browser’s developer console. Let’s see if that image loads. It says “image button not found”.

Maybe some race condition between the separate parts of the JavaScript?

Ah, thx! Now I see.

What’s 5 stripes on the shoulder? I thought they don’t do more than 4 unless it’s some kind of joke.

Maybe don’t learn all of it at the same time, or you’re bound to get confused and mix up whether some concept was from Dart, Python or one of the several frameworks.

Lmao. So basically, if someone starts to wrap a long cable around you, you should be worried?! Or you’re in the meeting room and there’s this inconspicious 500m roll of of optic fiber cable on the table which is attached to the wall?

Yes. And even a few years ago, we had some Star Trek shows which got some weird criticism. But also a lot of valid criticism for being overly emotional in a very American way. Like they never do anything without someone delivering a 10 minute speech, filled with an absurd amount of emotionalism. And then they all swear in on some team spirit… While I miss the good old times when the characters would just show how they’re the good guys, and not talk about it a lot.

I watched it anyway, wasn’t a bad show after all. But they really should have cut some of the monologues to make it more enjoyable for people who don’t need all that emotionalism and holding hands with ideology.

Although unpleasant for me personally this growth is a good problem for PieFed to have.

Take care. You’ve been doing a phenomenal job. Full stop. Guess your own wellbeing is first and foremost important to yourself… But I guess we all also like to see you prevail, not become burnt-out, so you can continue to deliver lots of nice features to us in the future. Bit selfish, I guess, but that’s my perspective. And I tend to agree with your leadership decisions. It’s probably never easy in large® groups of people. But I think you’ve lead the project into all sorts of right directions. And I’d love to see us continue that way. If we somehow can manage to pull it off. It’s been the right way from early on.

(Plus: We can listen to haters and adapt… But we can never let the hate itself win.)

Well, the internet has to come to your home in some way, right? And someone needs to dig long trenches and lay cables to connect you to the next internet node/hub. Usually that’s done by big companies. Because it costs a lot of money to lay these cables, power all the amplifiers and switches… Maybe you have a smaller local provider available in your region. But other than that, you’d need someone to provide the infrastructure to you.

I feel you didn’t read the article? Packet switching was the central idea behind ARPANET? There’s no question whether it could be used?! I mean you’re looking at the first large-scale network of that kind…

Verrückte Menschen. Ich stehe ja eher auf Firmen, die ihre Auftragsbücher voll haben und eine langfristige Strategie verfolgen. Aber das kann man wahrscheinlich so oder so halten. Ergibt Sinn, dass beim Spekulieren andere Dinge zählen. Danke.

Warum kacken gerade eigentlich die Rheinmetall Aktien so ab? Hatte ich nicht mal gelesen, dass unsere Rüstungsindustrie in nächster Zeit noch 40% Wachstum erwartet? Wegen voraussichtlich mehr Kriegstreiberei? Oder war die Erwartungshaltung einfach nur zu überzogen? Ich meine die hatten sich ja schon verdreifacht seit Trump an der Macht ist…

And, what’s your take on it?

Yeah, thanks. Guess OP asked if they want to do it / are trying. But i answered another question, whether I think they’re successful in actually doing it…

Thh, I can’t even tell. What Trump does is a lot of caprice. Goals and rules change on a weekly basis. Probably so we all learn to submit to whatever is sent our way, as proper peasants should. That would be learned helplessness for one part of the people. And gladly accepting the role as sheeple for the people who just want someone to tell them whom to hate.

But I really question whether there’s more geopolitical strategy behind it. Doesn’t look like it to me. And Venezuela was kind of the only successful thing Trump did. Iran… not so much.

Interesting question. I mean it probably depends a bit on how long we think the current political course of the USA lasts. Seems to me the current wannabe king lost quite some backing with the electorate. And all of the unsteadiness, extra cost for the economy, … might not be very sustainable in the long run. So this situation might swing to the other direction sometime soonish?!

I think the USA overall might still have quite some of the original idea deep inside. It’s just the current administration and whatever crazy things some individuals come up with. But it doesn’t look to me like they’re doing a lot of successful geopolitical strategy. I mean they do have ideas. But then they just do random things. One week they’re big into conspiracy narratives against the jews, the next day they side with Israel and start a war. Which is another thing they promised to do less, a few months before that. They start some trade war against China, and they lose it. Then they do declare themselves the winner. I think only real strategy here is some Orwellian: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength… And their flood the zone strategy. But that mostly deals with the domestic population. A good amount of them is stupid and they cheer for Trump for deporting people. But at some point even they will realize the current rate at which Trump is doing it will leave you with immigrants for another 30-60 years. So he can’t even meet the expectations of the xenophobes. In reality, that is. They can lie about it, and they do. But I guess at some point there will be a reality check. Plus there’s also lots of clever and sane people in the USA.

So I don’t see any proper attempt suitable to beat China or Europe. And I think the MAGA days are already numbered. So I just don’t think we might be looking at a strategy like that in the near future.

And it takes two to tango. Putin has been following a long term strategy for decades already. And up to now, all his negotiations with the US and phone calls have turned out his way. Seems to me that kind of direction comes Putin’s way. But idk. He’s kinda weak? He misjudged the situation in Ukraine and he’s now busy with that. He can’t beat them. And he lost over a million men, wasted his weapon stockpile. His economy isn’t doing good at all. I don’t think he can afford another war, right now. Plus he already has a strategy against us and he’ll probably stick with it for a little bit longer. He’s doing this hybrid warfare to destabilize us. Fill our social media with misinformation, sow distrust, give suitcases filled with money to our most fascist and corrupt politicians. Sabotage our infrastructure… I think that’s more like Putin. I don’t expect any pact with the USA from him. At least not any pact that makes him promise anything to the USA.

Ultimately, I don’t think Russia and the USA are even aligned. There’s some overlap with the oligarchy and corruption going on. But it’s not really like they follow the same goals. And the USA as a democratic country are supposed to do what the population wants, anyway. Not let some politicians do whatever, mostly for personal gain.

Aren’t they doing a super shitty job at it?

I mean computer tech and movies and TV series are a good point. That’s entirely dominated by the USA. So are the internet platforms. And I think that is a big issue. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have the stupid culture war and as many radicalized or passively doomscrolling people, if it wasn’t for their effective algorithms.

Other than that, idk. Most our consumer goods come from China. Our infrastructure is made here or at other places. Trains, a good chunk of airplanes. It’s a tiny amount of the population who buys American cars, because they’re just not as good as any German or South Asian one… If I look at my apartment, furniture, appliances, pans and pots, power drill… None of that has anything to do with the US, nor does it have any American brand name on it.

We have a lot of culture, books, podcasts, music… It’s more or less just the TV and cinema that come with predominantly US content. My bookshelf is >90% non-US authors. Lots of Germans, quite some Brits, something about a Witcher made by a Polish dude… And I’ve been socialised that way. I think it’s only Americans who grow up consuming only their own culture.

Energy… Well if it wasn’t for stupid politicians, we’d do the renewable ones. And seems with recent events, quite some people learned we want electric vehicles and heat pumps, and renewable electricity. So if we manage to convince our politicians to invest, we’re free from the shackles of the oil and natural gas industry a bit sooner. We need to do it anyway, because it’s cheaper and there’s a finite amount of resources. So selling the outdated energy isn’t even a good long-term strategy in colonializing anyone.

And US military “protection”… Against whom? We didn’t have any proper attempt at invading us with a military, since WW2. And now that Putin tries waging war, we can see the US isn’t even reliable anymore.

Just read the robots.txt and obey the rules. Also set your user agent string properly. We’ve had crawlers forever on the internet and that’s the long accepted way to give consent or revoke consent, for website owners. Either you match a disallow directive and need to stop. Or you’re completely fine to scrape it.

Thanks for the link! But I’m afraid it doesn’t tell me much. a) FreeBSD isn’t even on the list, so I don’t know the numbers to compare it to. and b) there’s things like survivorship bias. Looking at numbers like this is literally the textbook example of how to do it the wrong way. You have to do statistics the proper way around. For all we know by those numbers, Linux could be the best battle-tested OS in the world. I mean they fixed 3 times as many vulnerabilities as Microsoft did for any of their products?!

Sometimes I wish people would back up their factual claims with numbers and studies.

Also: FreeBSD phone, when??

PieFed has you covered. Just go to feddit.online with your browser?!?? 🤔🤔🤔

Thanks. Sadly I can’t even get the latest version to work. It does find the other peer and loads the chat interface, but doesn’t open a data channel, so it’ll say “not connected” and do an error popup everytime I try to send a message. And I’ve spend enough time debugging it for now.

Just some general words of my wisdom: I think software projects are first and foremost about focus. I don’t really know what you’re trying to do here. If that’s writing a cryptography library, I think focus is about right. You first need to lay down the design properly. Make sure you factor in advanced tech like formal proofs from the start. After that you need to write the actual code. And then also make sure it aligns with your testing. I mean it’s fairly common to make mistakes while writing computer code, or have bugs… And any of those could render your more formal methods useless. For example like that one time when some Debian package always sent the same random number as a seed… That meant the algorithms were 100% correct. Just used in a wrong way so most of the encryption was futile. Things like that require an equal amount of focus. If not more, since we already know how Double ratchet works, the important part is to implement it correctly and use it correctly. That deserves a massive amount of focus (and effort). It’s also the major part of a security audit of a software project as a whole.

We also have things like sidechannel-attacks, which aren’t covered. But I think that’s a minor thing with what we’re looking at.

And if you’re trying to develop a chat app, Your focus probably needs to be somewhere aimed to make it work, first. Make it connect reliably and across a multitude of devices. Cryptography is pretty much dispensable at that step. Then focus on the UX. Make sure it’s not vulnerable to just bypass any subsequent encryption because for example you don’t have script nonces and everyone in the chat can inject JavaScript and just bypass your entire encryption.
Think about metadata and if your software product wants to address that. You could be doing encrypted messages but all kinds of third parties know who is talking to whom… Make sure you do what your users expect!

And I think that’s also the reason for some of the downvotes here. You have a narrow focus on the formal proof of your encryption algorithm. While your audience probably expects a working Chat app. For all they care it could be entirely unencrypted in the alpha version, and encryption comes in a later version. We as users need something that works in the first place. We want to know what happens to our metadata. If there’s security vulnerabilities in the software. And once all of that is in place, then we start to worry about the specifics of the end-to-end-encryption.

Probably also related to the AI-slop argument. I don’t really know what shaped your focus. But it must look to your audience like you’re deep in some singular rabbit hole, because you write about formal proofs a lot. But then there’s this huge disparity with what your audience assumes you’re doing, or what you have to show off. Just my opinion. But it’s kinda like that for me. You write about how great AI assisted coding is, and where it led you. But then I try to use your software. And it doesn’t even connect. And that really shapes my first impression of it all, in a very negative way. I mean… If we hadn’t talked, I would have just assumed your cryptography is on the same level as your code to do the peer connections. And that wasn’t a good first impression.