I have a hard time trying to poke holes in this. Seems objectively good and like it, or some very similar version of it, will work long term.
Vouch
31–40 of 507 posts
Re: Vouch
#32Reminds me of the reputation system that the ITA in Anathem by Neal Stephenson seem to have. One character (Sammann) needs access to essentially a private BBS and has to get validated. “After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little whi…
Man, I'm a huge fan of Anathem (and Stephenson in general) but this short excerpt really reminded me of https://xkcd.com/483/
Re: Vouch
#33The return of the Web of Trust, I suppose. Interesting that if you look at the way Linux is developed (people have trees that they try to get into the inner circle maintainers who then submit their stuff to Linus's tree) vs. this, it's sort of like path compression in a union-find data structure. Rather than validating a specific piece of code, you validate the person themselves.
Another thing that is amusing is that Sam Altman invented this whole human validation device (Worldcoin) but it can't actually serve a useful purpose here because it's not enough to say you are who you are. You need someone to say you're a worthwhile person to listen to.
Re: Vouch
#34IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce". This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vo…
Think Epstein but in code. Everyone would vouch for him as he’s hyper connected. So he’d get a free pass all the way. Until all blows in our faces and all that vouched for him now gets flagged. The main issue is that can take 10-20 years for it to blow up.
Then you have introverts that can be good but have no connections and won’t be able to get in.
So you’re kind of selecting for connected and good people.
Re: Vouch
#35IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce". This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vo…
> Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway. Good reason to be careful. Maybe there's a bit of an upside to: if you vouch for someone who does good work, then you get a little boost too. It's how personal relationships work anyway. ---------- I'm pretty skeptical of all things cryptocurrency, but I've wondered if something like this would be an actually good us…
Ethos is already building something similar, but starting with a focus on reputation within the crypto ecosystem (which I think most can agree is an understandable place to begin)
Re: Vouch
#36Why isn't the link directly to the github repository[1]?
Re: Vouch
#37Are we seeing forum moderations (e.g., Discourse trust levels^[1]) coming to source code repositories?
[1]: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...
Re: Vouch
#38I could see this becoming useful to denounce contributors. "This user is malicious, a troll, contributes LLM slop, etc." It could become a distributed block list, discourage some bad behavior I've been seeing on GitHub, assuming the denounce entries are reviewed rather than automatically accepted.
But using this to vouch for others as a way to indicate trust is going to be dangerous. Accounts can be compromised, people make mistakes, and different people have different levels of trust.
I'd like to see more attention placed in verifying released content. That verification should be a combination of code scans for vulnerabilities, detection of a change in capabilities, are reproducible builds of the generated artifacts. That would not only detect bad contributions, but also bad maintainers.
Re: Vouch
#39So you're screwed if you don't have any connections. In that way it's just like meat space.
Re: Vouch
#40Reminds me of the reputation system that the ITA in Anathem by Neal Stephenson seem to have. One character (Sammann) needs access to essentially a private BBS and has to get validated. “After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little whi…
Man, I'm a huge fan of Anathem (and Stephenson in general) but this short excerpt really reminded me of https://xkcd.com/483/
Spoilers for Anathem and His Dark Materials below
Xkcd 483 is directly referencing Anathem so that should be unsurprising but I think in both His Dark Materials (e.g. anbaric power) and in Anathem it is in-universe explained. The isomorphism between that world and our world is explicitly relevant to the plot. It’s the obvious foreshadowing for what’s about to happen.
The worlds are similar with different names because they’re parallel universes about to collide.