A1kmm

@A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So Much for ‘Learn to Code’ - In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Programming is the most automated career in history. Punch cards, Assembler, Compilers, Linkers, Keyboards, Garbage Collection, Type Checkers, Subroutines and Functions, Classes, Macros, Libraries (of increasingly higher-level abstractions), Build Scripts, CI/CD - those are all automation concepts that do things that theoretically a programmer could have done manually. To build all the software we build now would theoretically be possible without any automation - but it would probably require far more programmers than there are people on earth. However, because better tech leads to people doing more with the same, in practice the number of programmers has grown with time as we’ve just built more complex software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TLS Notary is in alpha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Having to have a trustworthy notary interactively as part of the protocol during the TLS request seems like it shuts out a lot of applications.

  I wonder if it could be done with zk-STARKs, with the session transcript and ephemeral keys as secret inputs, and a CA certificate as a public input, to produce a proof of the property without the need for the notary. That would then mean the only roles are TLS server, prover, and verifier, with no interactive dependency between the prover and verifier (i.e. the prover could generate the proof first, that can non-interactively verified at any time later by any number of verifiers).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On trial for protesting against Woodside⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If the article (and other sources online) are to be believed, the law she is accused of breaking is failing to provide passwords to her devices following a raid on February 24th.

  She was convicted, sentenced to pay a fine, and paid a fine for the vandalism of the plexiglass on February 10. So that matter was settled before any of this went down.

  The question then is, what is the justification for this raid by ‘counter-terrorist’ police - and subsequent orders such as not to talk about Woodside? There is no publicly disclosed evidence she (or her group) have ever done anything violent - so the optics of this are certainly that it is attempting to suppress them for their activism (and it is very reasonable to ask the government to prove otherwise).

  Charging someone with something that arises from law enforcement actions without justifying the original action is a classic smokescreen. It’s similar to charging someone with resisting arrest without explaining what they were under arrest for in the first place. Now it is possible they had a legitimate reason for the search warrant in the first place (after all, it would have needed judicial approval) - in which case, it is time for that to be provided. That said, I don’t think powers requiring handing over information like passwords that are held in the mind, to be used against the person handing the password over, should exist. At the very least, if the ciphertext can be safely backed up, the law should allow both parties to get legal advice and argue in court about whether the credential needs to be given up before it becomes a legal requirement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Energy $prices DOWN! Who's looking forward to the massive drop in the cost of their next electricity bill?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  My retailer does at least charge the variable charges at cost based on the half-hourly rates (they make all their profit off a monthly fee), so I do see some of the benefit of it immediately (although we do have to make sure we don’t use much power during price spikes).