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Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

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Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#61

Post by taeric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #60
taeric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is nothing obvious about this? For one, this is speech that can only be done using otherwise regulated means. You couldn't claim "free speech" and build a radio tower that transmits long distances, as an easy example. For that matter, you can't claim free speech to allow concerts at your house. You similarly could not claim free speech to rent or loan out rooms of your house for storage. As has been pointed…

> For one, this is speech that can only be done using otherwise regulated means. This is the fraud every would-be censor perpetrates to establish their chokepoint. First, invent allegedly "neutral" rules that only large entities can comply with, causing only large entities to remain. Then lean on the large entities to censor whatever you want in exchange for political favors or lack of enforcement of other laws. > Yo…

Apologies, but this just reads as incoherent wish casting. Good luck.

Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#62

Post by AnthonyMouse »

taeric wrote: post #61
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one, this is speech that can only be done using otherwise regulated means. This is the fraud every would-be censor perpetrates to establish their chokepoint. First, invent allegedly "neutral" rules that only large entities can comply with, causing only large entities to remain. Then lean on the large entities to censor whatever you want in exchange for political favors or lack of enforcement of other laws. > Yo…

Apologies, but this just reads as incoherent wish casting. Good luck.

People have this tendency to want to do reasoning by analogy, but then if you look at the things they're analogizing to, a) they're often distinguishable in significant ways and b) they even more often don't actually address the criticism, they're just an example of the bad thing we should be trying to prevent already happening somewhere.

What am I supposed to do other than point that out?

Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#63

Post by xorcist »

julianlam wrote: post #58
mentalgear wrote: post #52

This explains it best: > When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many use…

Doctorow recently spoke (remotely) at FediMTL in Montreal. He laid out the stakes as usual, but added that in Canada, we are legally not allowed to reverse engineer competitor APIs, and we gave up this right as part of some free trade negotiation.

"Free trade" is one of those euphemisms that seldom is free and only sometimes concerns trade.

It's mostly about leverage to create a stronger position for negotiations.

Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#64

Post by xorcist »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #6

I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech? I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and ea…

You don't. We lost the war already. [1]

You may not store your personal data with the surveillance companies computers, but your friends will store your data there. Your mail, your chats, your contact information. Without even asking you, because our society has during the past two decades completely normalized this. Your local hospital and your police force does this too, at least to some extent, even where legislation disallows it.

The largest companies on our planet is now aligned with the largest governments. I am not sure those alive today will own our data again in our lifetimes.

In a perhaps desperate hope for ironic turnaround, I now put my hope with laws such as Chat Control and Age Verification. It is a hard sell with techies and Internet aligned people these days, so I tend to stay low about it. But my feeling is that legislative overreach may be one of very few things that can normalize self hosting again. Because in practice, these laws are only enforcable for companies. If I chat with my friend by way of my our own computers only, nobody complains and everyone is happy. I will not fight for these laws but I will be honestly happy when they pass.

In fact, having given it a bit of thought, I do not feel it is entirely unreasonable for the surveillance companies to take responsibility for things like CSAM and encouragement to genocide. They do own our data, after all, and they already police it to influence elections and shape consumer trends, to take two well-documented examples, so why should they not also police it in legal ways?

Those were my soapbox minutes for today. I will not take questions about how legislative overreach will create moats and economic incentives for centralization, benefit Facebook and hurt Tik Tok, because that already happened and is too late to change now. The outcome of that particular race between competing evils changes nothing.

[1] Gonggrijp, 2005. https://media.ccc.de/v/22C3-920-en-we_lost_the_war

Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#65

Post by zoogeny »

good-idea wrote: post #57
zoogeny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this can last, because whatever advantage structured text files in a file tree provides over an API will be maximized by some format that is better than a file system. That might mean leaning into SQLite or some other open format. My own thought is that a graph-like structure of documents will be ultimately more valuable than either a tree-like structure or a database-like structure. But if a proprietar…

Two advantages I see to files in folders are the ability to browse and the ability to easily read - by both LLMs and humans. But I also agree that this has limitations. If I were to challenge you and say that Obsidian solves this, or gets close to solving it, what gaps would you say were left unfulfilled? I am because I'm working on something in this space and your comment touches on my three main ingredients: text f…

Very good point and question. I am not intimately familiar with Obsidian because I haven't used it. My understanding is that it indexes directories of .md files to provide a graph-like interface over them, using the contents of the files themselves to store meta-data (e.g. in the form of links and YAML frontmatter).

Let's imagine a .zip file format that combines:

- A directory of .md and/or .xml files (there is more to structured text than markdown)

- A sqlite db in the root for some metadata

- A graph representation (RDF, triples, whatever) of the files

That is directionally what I am talking about, but with a standard spec so that someone receiving a project bundle knows how to parse it all.

You can still have all of the Obsidian stuff over the contents of the directory. But you can also store much more interesting meta-data in the db that may not be appropriate to put in any individual file (or in some kind of pure data .md file). It is something that can be sent over the network a bit more conveniently than a directory. And if you standardize the db schema and the graph you can have immediate interoperability between systems.

In fact, given advanced enough LLMs, you could just have an README.md or something in the root that sketches out the directory structure and files, the db schema for the metadata, and then just expect that the agent, knowing how to load and query a SQLite db, will be able to work with it. But I think there is value in having some loose standards around the db schema, some YAML frontmatter conventions, some well known graph representation, etc.

Re: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

#66

Post by taeric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62
taeric wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but this just reads as incoherent wish casting. Good luck.

People have this tendency to want to do reasoning by analogy, but then if you look at the things they're analogizing to, a) they're often distinguishable in significant ways and b) they even more often don't actually address the criticism, they're just an example of the bad thing we should be trying to prevent already happening somewhere. What am I supposed to do other than point that out?

I don't understand you, here. If anything, you seem to just be describing your own argument.

You ask why we couldn't have a single frequency for long-distance radio communication. Which is either willfully ignoring all of the frequencies that we can use for directional communication. Or shockingly ignorant over how many people could use a "single frequency" for anything long distance. (Indeed, this was the wishcasting that I found off putting.)

You then reduce to absurd the idea that you could have a concert between two other people. Which, I feel fairly confident saying nobody cares if you are running small two person concerts at your house. Unless you are violating noise concerns of your direct neighbors.

And then, your entire "they are doing this in their home" argument ignores that the problem here is open solicitation across the internet. If you are setting up a LAN equivalent where only direct friends ever gain access, this is just not relevant here.

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