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Vouch

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51–60 of 507 posts

Re: Vouch

#51
post #42

Isn't it extremely difficult problem? It's very easy to game, vouch 1 entity that will invite lots of bad actors

Indeed, it's relatively impossible without ties to real world identity.

> Indeed, it's relatively impossible without ties to real world identity.

I don't think that's true? The goal of vouch isn't to say "@linus_torvalds is Linus Torvalds" it's to say "@linus_torvalds is a legitimate contributor an not an AI slopper/spammer". It's not vouching for their real world identity, or that they're a good person, or that they'll never add malware to their repositories. It's just vouching for the most basic level of "when this person puts out a PR it's not AI slop".

Re: Vouch

#52
post #42

Isn't it extremely difficult problem? It's very easy to game, vouch 1 entity that will invite lots of bad actors

The usual way of solving this is to make the voucher responsible as well if any bad actor is banned. That adds a layer of stake in the game.

Re: Vouch

#53

> Who and how someone is vouched or denounced is left entirely up to the project integrating the system. Feels like making a messaging app but "how messages are delivered and to whom is left to the user to implement". I think "who and how someone is vouched" is like 99.99% of the problem and they haven't tried to solve it so it's hard to see how much value there is here. (And tbh I doubt you really can solve this pro…

Yeah… this code is entirely just a parser for a file format the author invented. Exact same thing could be done as a csv. Sacrificing confugrability for standardization and all that, but… I don’t see the there, there.

Probably the idea is to eventually have these as some sort of public repo where you can merge files from arbitrary projects together? Or inherit from some well known project’s config?

Re: Vouch

#54
post #42

Isn't it extremely difficult problem? It's very easy to game, vouch 1 entity that will invite lots of bad actors

At a technical level it's straightforward. Repo maintainers maintain their own vouch/denouncelists. Your maintainers are assumed to be good actors who can vouch for new contributors. If your maintainers aren't good actors, that's a whole other problem. From reading the docs, you can delegate vouching to newly vouched users, as well, but this isn't a requirement.

The problem is at the social level. People will not want to maintain their own vouch/denounce lists because they're lazy. Which means if this takes off, there will be centrally maintained vouchlists. Which, if you've been on the internet for any amount of time, you can instantly imagine will lead to the formation of cliques and vouchlist drama.

Re: Vouch

#57
Fortunately, as long as software is open sourced, forking will remain a viable way to escape overzealous gatekeeping.

Re: Vouch

#58
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becaus…

I wonder how effective that might be as a language-learning tool. Imagine a popular novel in the US market, maybe 80000-100000 words long but whose vocabulary consists of only a few thousand unique words. The first few pages are in English, but as you progress through the book, more and more of the words appear in Chinese or German or whatever the target language is. By the end of the book you are reading the second language, having absorbed it more or less through osmosis.

Someone who reads A Clockwork Orange will unavoidably pick up a few words of vaguely-Russian extraction by the end of it, so maybe it's possible to take advantage of that. The main problem I can see is that the new language's sentence grammar will also have to be blended in, and that won't go as smoothly.

Re: Vouch

#59
Doesn't this just shift the same hard problem from code to people? It may seem easier to assess the "quality" of a person, but I think there are all sorts of complex social dynamics at play, plus far more change over time. Leave it to us nerds to try and solve a human problem with a technical solution...

Re: Vouch

#60
Initially I liked the idea, but the more I think about it the more this feels like it just boils down to: only allow contributions from a list of trusted people.
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