My understanding that attempts to defeat fingerprinting are often useless because they can tend to make you more, rather than less, unique.

So instead I wonder if we could build an open database of “identities” that our browsers could clone.

That is your browser deliberately reports the whatever is currently the most popular of a set of general identities.

This sounds good bit miss one thing and you are extremely unique again

After implementing a behaviour tree library and realising the power of select & sequence I found myself wondering why they aren’t used more widely.

I’ve never done anything in crypto but watched in horror as people created immutable contracts with essentially Javascript programs. Surely it would be much easier to reason about/verify scripts written as a behaviour tree with a library of queries and actions. Even being able to limit the scope of modifications would be a win.

Seeing as it was your inspiration, here is a summary of a discussion with Claude on this topic. (not the crypto part.)

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/2b23f156-c9b5-42df-9a83-f...

Modulo I haven’t tried it yet it’s been an irritant that SIP broke tracing so this is a welcome development, thank you.

dtruss(1m) RIP

I'm not in the US so I've no dog in this race only curiousity.

I can understand allowing a governor to change the text of a bill. But I cannot understand allowing them to sign those changes into law. It seems like that would mean they could creatively reverse the meaning of any bill.

It seems like a governor should be able to approve the text as written, or change it and send it back.

What am I missing?

The original intention was to allow for what is called a "line-item veto." Let's say you had a bill (and this is not uncommon) with a lot of basically unrelated provisions. It creates programs A, B and C. This would allow the governor to approve A and C but not B, and would prevent the sort of "horse-trading" that legislators like to do ("I'll support your pet idea if you support mine").

That was the idea. But Wisconsin has twisted into something else entirely. Arguably, the idea was not a good one to begin with, anyway.

Okay that makes a kind of sense in the case stated but even there seems open to creative abuse in cases where those lines are not wholly independent. Thanks for the information.

I'd forgotten all about it but SubEthaEdit was such an amazing tech when we were using to collaborate internationally back in about '04. It went off my radar but I am glad to see its still available as a free app.

I'd argue that privatising telecomms has been a win. I think because it's quite open to competition (even if there has been a good deal of consolidation).

The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.

I don't think that's what he's saying precisely.

I think what he is saying that native platform apps get delegated to different teams and coordinating among those teams becomes an additional cost. You don't want each team going off and doing their own thing.

Your 'answer' is "use a cross-platform GUI toolkit" but that has its own challenges. Not least that you typically build a native app because it delivers a native experience that users expect.

In general (and I accept there may be counter-examples) cross-platform tools fail to do this.

Is that worse than the usual mobile/web frontend/web backend split? The thing is that there should be more whiteboarding done to design the features. Instead you mostly have product designer trying to impose whatever regardless of the technical challenge/practicality.

I don’t have a dog in this race but I was also around at that time and one reason is there was far less choice in 1995 about where you would go from C. C++ was also a vastly simpler language back then (no templates, no exceptions, barely a few hundred command line options). So I am not sure what its adoption then can teach us about language adoption now.

I don't think it's true there was far less choice in 1995. Around that time (a few years later) I was working on a project that was half Ada half C++, and there were a few more exotic choices around. Aside from those, and C, there were still projects in the company back then written in Fortran and even in Jovial. At university, I learnt Esterel for formally-verified embedded software. And that's not even touching on the higher level space, where VB, Delphi, some Smalltalk, and a large selection of other "RAD tools" were being used (my first summer job was on what today would be called an ERP system written in a language called Business Basic). At university, the language I was taught at intro to compsi was Scheme (that was also the embedded-scrpting language we used at work). We were also taught ML and a bit of Haskell.

It's true that not many languages that seemed a reasonable choice at the time survived to this day as reasonable choices.

and (and as much as I do love Alan Rickman) more properly Stephen Moore.

I thought Alan Rickman voiced Marvin

Stephen Moore was the original Marvin, which he voiced for both the British radio and TV versions of Hitchhikers.

Ah.

I only saw/heard parts of these.

You’re right. That aspect of how Brexit was carried through was not acting in bad faith. The anti-European faction has been fighting since we joined to reverse it. Many other aspects of the process were in bad faith but people must be allowed to change their minds, disagree, pursue their faith.