siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 103

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
1 (1.0%)

20-29
5 (4.9%)

30-39
15 (14.7%)

40-49
27 (26.5%)

50-59
35 (34.3%)

60-69
13 (12.7%)

70-79
6 (5.9%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

jducoeur: (Default)
[personal profile] jducoeur

Table of Contents

  • Part 0: Introduction (you're reading it)
  • Lots more to come!

Introduction

I started outlining this series months ago, while I was on sabbatical, but never got around to starting the actual words. I've got a new job now (at OnePass, a refreshingly sensible company providing actually-useful services, which is sadly not the norm at the moment) -- work is extremely busy, but I do need to think about things other than that and politics sometimes, so let's get this going!

All year, I've been mulling the problem of Trust Architectures: how do we share information about "trust" online. As I'll discuss under Use Cases (next time), I think it's getting to be Steam Engine Time to take it seriously. Between the AI Slopocalypse spewing nonsense all over the Web, and the social networks succumbing to Advanced Enshittification, it's getting ever-harder to understand who to trust.

This isn't even remotely a new problem, mind -- it was a pretty old topic when we explored adding this sort of thing to Trenza way back in 2001. But it's rarely been taken really seriously, and most of the better attempts have wound up buried inside proprietary walled gardens that don't necessarily have the human user's best interests at heart.

There appears to be a lot of relatively recent literature on the topic, some of it possibly even good (I'm cautiously intrigued by the OpenRank project). But much of it is obsessively focused on Blockchain, which I'm rather skeptical about (I still consider it to be 90% a solution in search of problems), and most appears to have a lot of assumptions baked in.

So let's step back, and tease this apart. I'm going to intentionally go in a bit naively, so as not to be too biased by everyone else's assumptions, and explore the topic from first principles, winding up with a very high-level sketch of how things might work. Once I have straight what I think are the interesting use cases, requirements, and architectural parameters, we can take a properly critical look at what's already out there.

I expect this to take at least 6-7 installments, likely more like 10 before I'm done -- it's a big, chewy problem with a lot of facets. As I add parts, I'll add them to the Table of Contents at the top of the Dreamwidth version of this post. I'll likely edit some of these posts as we go and folks point out additional nuances; I'll try to be good about crediting folks who point stuff out, so call me on it if you feel like you haven't been acknowledged properly.

This is not fully-baked yet: I'm going to be thinking out loud. That's why this is "towards" -- I'm seeking to make progress here, and we'll see where it winds up. It's possible that we'll find that the One True Trust Architecture already exists, and we should be lobbying for everyone to adopt it. It's also entirely possible that we'll conclude that the problem is insoluble in principle, and give up. (Hopefully not.) The goal is to come to a better shared understanding of the topic, and ideally some actionable ideas about how to deal with the problem.

I hope you'll join in. While I'm going to do a lot of talking over the next couple of months, it's going to be a lot more productive if you chime in with your thoughts and ideas to add to that.

I'm intentionally posting this on Dreamwidth because despite (or maybe because of) its antiquity and old-fashioned UX, it's still the best place for posting and discussing complex, long-form topics, free from the AIs and enshittification consuming most other places.

So I'm planning to post primarily to Dreamwidth, mirror to Medium and LinkedIn since some of the technical crowd mainly knows me there, and link from Mastodon and Bluesky. (But not Facebook, which I've mostly given up on, or Xitter, which I've entirely abandoned.) On platforms that have tagging, I'll be using #TrustArch as the tag for this series.

Comments are welcome at all of those places -- I'm curious to see where I get good conversations -- but the authoritative copy of these posts will be Dreamwidth, and that's the copy that will get edited and updated as this evolves.

That said, a couple of ground rules. I don't want to see comments saying that if it's not 100% perfect, it's not worth trying. (I'm reasonably certain that it's impossible to make this perfect, but I'm moderately confident we could create something helpful.) And I'll be downright scornful of naive claims that we should just leave this for AI to deal with -- while I think it's likely to get quite powerful over the next decade, I'm not at all sanguine that it's going to be trustworthy to that degree any time in the foreseeable future.

But aside from that sort of thing, I'd love to get some serious conversation going. So come along, share your thoughts, and let's tease apart this important problem!

Two Q [writing, DW]

Sep. 26th, 2025 07:17 pm
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
1)

Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?

I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.

2)

I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.

I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.

How not to be efficient

Sep. 21st, 2025 10:09 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Eat a snack consisting of pretzels and water from a water bottle. Neglect to finish chewing and swallowing before sucking down some water. Have your cheek pulled in between your teeth as you continue chewing the remaining pretzel and masticate your cheek.

Ouch.

Action #14, plus blort

Sep. 17th, 2025 09:46 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
I went to stand on the street corner in front of the UU church in town, along with 16 other souls, holding signs. This is a weekly thing, from 5-6 on Wednesdays. Usually I have square dancing at a time that would make this inconvenient, so when it was canceled this week, and Ken was away, Valerie and I decided to go. It seemed like there was a smaller percentage of cars with positive honking than at previous events. I didn't see any middle fingers, though. Maybe the drivers are getting tired of us.

In other non-news, summer seems to be at a close. There was a ton of waterskiing in August. It's nice that we didn't have a big cyanobacteria bloom. In June the lake management committee had alum poured along the lake bottom to hopefully keep it at bay, and it appears to of work. There was a big flap about it, because people were like "we will all die of aluminum poisoning" even though the amount that you get is really small, and that's if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do and sit on the lake bottom and keep organic material from feeding the algae.

I did ski last weekend, but weekday skiing might be done with, mostly due to lack of personnel, because the neighbor, who is a schoolteacher, is back at work, and random guests are gone, and it's starting to get dark early enough that "after dinner ski" doesn't make any sense. Plus Ken's knee is bugging him so he's not really skiing.

The boat starter has been behaving better, perhaps Ken taking it apart and putting it back together was helpful. Sometimes it still craps out, but not often enough to be able to take it to the shop and say "fix it" because they will not be able to reproduce the problem.

This week I've had a weird health issue, which is that on Monday and Tuesday evening I had a mild fever, but I felt really fine in the morning. Maybe the ibuprofen was still in effect. Today it was a lot later in the day before I started to feel bad, and I'm just feeling vaguely mediocre as opposed to actually bad. I run low normally, so 98.6 is a fever for me, but even I'm hard-pressed to say that 98.1 is a fever, which was tonight's reading. I'm coughing a little bit. I took a nucleic Covid test Monday and it was negative.
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