sbazerque
Joined 16 years ago
Karma
107
Submissions
70
Member since
Mar 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Did you read the remark at the end of my comment? In the practical cases I was exploring, that combinatorial explosion does not happen. It's relaxed in the sense that it is coordination-free.
Comment · 2 years ago
> A program P is monotonic if for any input sets S,T where S ⊆ T, P(S) ⊆ P(T).
> A program is monotonic if, when you run it on a subset of its inputs, you get a subset of its outputs. As you run it on more data, the set of true things may grow, but it never shrinks.
Yeah, this framework seems powerful.
Something I find interesting is that you can get monotonic (and therefore coordination-free) relaxations of arbitrary problems. In extremis, you can derive a relaxed version P' thus
P'(S) = {<s, P(s)> | s ⊆ S}
and now
P'(S) ⊆ P'(T) if S ⊆ T for _any_ (well defined) P
This seems tautological but in some cases a relaxed version is good enough: it gives you convergence and eventual consistency in a coordination-free setting, at the cost of maybe having to roll back some results. And when it doesn't, it gives you a coherent model of what to make of the situation until coordination yields a definitive answer.
I wrote about this idea here: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org/report.html#conflict-resolut...
But that was like last week, haven't really put this in practice yet.
In those examples what is being processed are partially-ordered operational logs, but it's essentially the same (just that whenever S ⊆ T there, what you're seeing is an extension of an op log, which is a bit more intuitive).
Comment · 3 years ago
Rilke is a must!!! I loved his Duino Elegies.
Comment · 3 years ago
The case I found more worrisome is you follow someone, they then start using a new domain, and now it seems you're following a different handle (IDK if handles are immutable in Twitter, maybe they are not?).
Maybe BlueSky could offer a registrar that would do steps 1 & 2 for you transparently upon domain purchase.
Comment · 3 years ago
So the domain is just a shortcut for the DID, in practice?
That's interesting!
And you're actually following the DID. I wonder how you present this to folks so it's understandable.
Comment · 3 years ago
This sounds a bit like those stories about Kodak having a digital camera before anybody else did, and they just fearfully watched the thing from a distance doing nuthing until someone else brought it to market and ended the party for them.
May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...
Comment · 3 years ago
Yeah, markets can be irrational, and markets know it, and play crazy games over themselves.
Comment · 3 years ago
Maybe comm protocols?
Comment · 4 years ago
I think this is the schema system you're asking for: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org/
(specifically, the data representation part)
Comment · 4 years ago
In the 2000s we spoke about distributed operating systems (Inferno, etc.). That's where systems research seemed to be headed, yet that never really took off. But maybe we're revisiting the concept now, just coming down from the layer above (e.g. application data types) instead of trying to rethink the OS.
I work on this [1], it kinda looks like systems software, and it doesn't feel stagnant. But then, nobody uses it (yet - I hope).
And there's a plethora of similar ideas (DAT, OrbitDB, etc.).
Comment · 4 years ago
Arithmetic is usually formalized using first order logic (that's what Godel did in his incompleteness paper, for example).
That means that one can write formulas quantifying only over numbers (that's what's done for the axioms defining addition and multiplication), but in order to get recursion, one needs to use infinite many axioms, one for each predicate P, saying:
if P(0) and (∀n)P(n) => P(n+1) then (∀n) P(n)
Intuitively, this gets us that all the numbers that can be reached starting from zero by using the "+1" operation will follow the rules of arithmetic.
But it does not guarantee that all numbers _can_ be reached this way. In the standard model, the one we have in mind, that is the case, but it turns out that there are constructions like this
0, 1, 2, ... -2', -1', 0', 1', 2' ...
having numbers that came after the ones in the standard model, but that cannot be reached by applying "+1" a finite number of times, where all the axioms of arithmetic are also true, and are therefore also models of arithmetic.
Some formulas are going to be true in one and false in the other, but all those are independent of the axioms of arithmetic. The study of formal methods in mathematics and their limitations is truly fascinating.
Comment · 4 years ago
The Internet became mainstream because folks could use modems and phone landlines (circuit switching technology, that the new TCP/IP end-to-end packet switching stack would eventually replace) to get online.
The path for mass adoption of the new, p2p and interoperable technologies is the same: make them work on web browsers (using the browser as a full peer, not a client). It is the ubiquitous VM: JavaScript, WASM, IndexedDB, WebRTC+WebSockets, all the pieces are there.
The building blocks for a representation / data model are all in the air as well: CRDTs, Merkle-ized structures, content-based addressing, etc.
I'm a believer.
Comment · 4 years ago
Not all CRDT libraries focus on text editing. For example, I'm working on a Byzantine fault tolerant general-purpose data sync library loosely based on CRDTs: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org
I'm finding it painfully difficult but it is evolving steadily.
Comment · 4 years ago
Not all decentralization projects are based on scarcity, but those that do tend to get the most publicity - regrettably.
Comment · 4 years ago
Making the network information aware is the next Internet infra problem.