Is a magic command without magic still a command? And if a feature was a bug, can a new bug be a feature?

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A few thoughts after reading The History of a Security Hole about a series of bugs in the OpenBSD kernel. It’s a good explanation of an instance of a problem I’ll call hard state soft state confusion, which can lead to some serious bugs, occurs with some regularity, but doesn’t seem to be often discussed.

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I was at Deconstruct, a little conference. It has no sponsors, a single track, no lunch, no public schedule, and no particular focus except computering. It was quite nice. Some notes from the talks.

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When comparing two things, it’s easy to make a claim relating them. This one is longer. This one is stronger. This one is older. This one is bolder. (This one sounds like Dr. Seuss.)

But are we correct? Do people believe us? Would you believe me if I told you William Shatner is older than John McCain? Maybe that’s just a thing I heard. What happens if you ask me how old they are? If I don’t know, that’s a bad sign. If I know that Shatner was born in 1931 and McCain in 1936, that’s a good sign.

If a claim can be quantified, it should be. It’s very easy to do. If it’s not easy, consider why.

The first thing one can do is to ask how much when reading. Any unquantified comparisons stand out as starting points for fact checking.

The second thing one can do is to ask how much when writing. I try to fact check most claims before clicking the big red send it to the internet button, but it can be difficult to know exactly what needs checking. I don’t need to check the things I’m sure about. Alas, my certainty is also sometimes mistaken.

Which is bigger, Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco? No spoilers, but I’ve heard both answers stated confidently. However, if I followup by asking how many acres is this park and how many acres is that park, confidence drops precipitously. Somehow these high level derived facts become lodged in our heads long after we’ve forgotten the underlying facts, if we ever knew them. We don’t realize this happens until somebody asks what’s underneath.

Unfortunately these high level facts don’t have a lot of error correction builtin. It’s only a single bit, and if it flops, you’ll never know. A numeric fact is more likely (how much more likely?) to degrade to uncertainty than some other value. A builtin parity check of sorts.

Everybody loves numbers. Include them when you write something. Your readers might learn something. You might learn something, too.

I have some go code that I’d like to be a little more flexible at runtime. Like a config file, but maybe with some conditional logic based on string matching. If this sounds like a proxy deciding which filtering functions to apply based on URL, that’s a good guess.

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Memories are nothing but chemicals. At that level, there’s no difference between a real and a fake memory, so if we have the appropriate nanotech, we can write some code to create memories, virtual experiences indistinguishable from those taking place in reality. Such is the concept of OtherLife. The movie’s titular company plans to sell vacation memories, allowing users to experience a day’s worth of snowboarding in less than a minute of real time. Why not take a vacation every day before going to work, arriving fresh and relaxed?

So far we’re in Total Recall territory, but the twist here isn’t secret double agents on Mars. Just a tech startup that needs funding. One founder, our heroine, created the company to further develop the tech and perhaps revive her brother from a coma. The other founder, in order to secure some necessary bridge funding days before launch, is in some shady talks with the prison bureau to develop a line of virtual imprisonment. Very near term, contemporary science fiction. It’s actually set in 2017. Just some stealth mode startup you haven’t heard about yet.

From here we explore the nature and ethics of memories. Is subjecting someone to a year of virtual solitary confinement that elapses in one real minute more or less ethical than taking away a year of their actual life? How do we know what’s real? Shades of Inception here, but with much less boom boom gusto. Very Black Mirror, with a bit of a twist, but a touch less pessimism. We’ve seen this concept before, but this might be the most grounded, without trying too hard to impress.

Finally.

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Saving some good stuff for the almost end.

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Imagine, if you can, a smaller version of the web. A web without dickbars, or scroll jacking, or chum boxes, or popup video, but still a web filled with informative articles about the 27 blockchains you need to be using right now. The good news is this web exists, but unfortunately your browser doesn’t connect to it by default. For that, you need the miniwebproxy.

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Some old, some new.

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