Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though. If one's goal is to live a quiet life and do what makes them happy, what's wrong with living in a cabin in the woods?
That would only be a fundamental problem if everyone owes something to society. That's a much different conversation though, whether everyone is born into a debt that must be paid back to society.
Even once these basics are sorted, you will only live happily outside society as long as you are lucky enough to stay healthy.
The second sounds like a separate goal unto itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that goal, or with having multiple goals, but if you start by saying doing X makes you happy then it doesn't really make sense to say doing X won't actually make you happy because you aren't doing Y.
Presumably if one is actually living alone in the woods they wouldn't be dependent on the larger societal systems like money, security, manufactured goods, etc. How would the get the money to start with without having a job that interacts with the outside world?
But you can't do that if your passion is making music, or mathematics, or computer programming, or electrical tinkering, etc. There just isn't an option to follow the vast majority of pursuits except if you also engage in society.
Thank you. That was my initial thought too. Why is progress the goal? Not everything has to "progress" at all times. What progress needs to be made anyway? And towards what end? Who decides that?
There's an inherent good to stopping progress and spending some time in a cabin in the woods.
If we never stop and enjoy now, then why bother with tomorrow?
The idea seems to be that starting with what we have today and taking another step forward is always the right move. Never go backwards, and its okay if we don't define our goals beforehand as long as we keep moving our feet.
In the common sense where progress is little more than moving our feet, there's no end unless civilization collapses.
If one goes at it from the angle of the goal bring "enough", the end really is just getting to a point of maintaining what we already have. Wanting to secure the basics like shelter and reliable access to food and water is met with much less than what we have today. Surely there's some level of convenience and enjoyment that make sense beyond just the basics, but are we not there yet? And if we are, would progress best be focused on the goal of maintaining what we have that gives the most people an enjoyable life while minimizing our impact on the rest of the environment and everything that allowed humans to be here in the first place?
That's actually where it gets really interesting though. Progress isn't absolute, it's relational and requires first defining the goal. If one's goal is to live a quiet life where they minimize their dependence on others, living in a cabin in the woods and finding their solution for food and water is progress. That obviously doesn't fit for a larger society where the goal is generally increasing dependence and trust on the larger society, but neither is right or wrong.
This has to be negotiated with the people who would want to take your cabin in the woods and throw you out.
Responsibility is a fundamental requirement of freedom though, there's no way around that.
That's the government actually doing its job for once, but you can't check at home for data safeguarding.
Look at the graph here on the wallet study, should give you an idea. China is a good example.
Though, for Israel that is changing for the worse - less trust in the government and each other.
Meaning you believe Biden leans towards the extreme left?
string from Wiki: "Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr."
but the point is: maybe going off-grid can be relevant? changes also can also occur in "small bubbles of reality" and their impact can be extensive or narrow, still, they are a change..?
Then you go use linux and everyone copy-pastes commands other people wrote straight into the terminal.
This is exactly the same bias in action. When I started using Linux nobody was doing that, and even if somebody gave you a script, its actions were verifiable by reading the relevant man pages.
I still don't run install.sh files I didn't read or at least skimmed, for example.
Since all the repositories are signed there must be a big breach to compromise these packages since the infrastructure is generally distributed. Different servers, keys, etc.
> What makes the shell script so special that it must be audited with care...
Because I need to know what changes I'm incorporating into my system(s), and plan accordingly, or prevent any change which is not in line with my system administration principles.
> ...but the binaries are fine?
They are not fine, but they are signed at multiple levels and checksummed, so they are a lower risk.
It’s trust all the way down and always has been. You just have a different idea of how you formally signal and convey trust than someone else.
I paste commands into the terminal because I can read exactly what they do and they are delivered over a connection where my user agent has verified the TLS certificate of the server. In fact I’m electing to trust directly rather than transitively the source of the software.
The only thing signed files prevents is modification in transit (and at rest on macOS/iOS and Windows, Linux doesn’t do that). Linux is ripe with time of check vs time of use race conditions.
For example, a well maintained APT repository contains multiple levels of signatures, and these signatures are stored in a keyring. You import the keyring, and it contains public key of every package maintainer, plus the repository manager. So, package maintainers sign their packages, and repository maintainer signs the repository, plus the packages via their checksums. Packages' own signatures and own checksums provides consistency and authenticity checks, and repository maintainer's signature makes sure that nothing in the repository moves after the repository is signed and published.
So, you have to compromise at least two private keys (or two people) to compromise a repository. If you're working with a critical repository, you can use "m of n" scheme for the repository signing keys, so you need to compromise m+1 people to do something nefarious.
> So if I send you a signed script that checksums itself before running will you run that without audit?
Hard no. You don't have a verifiable chain behind that script. Even if you do, scripts are always read and examined. Period.
> I can read exactly what they do and they are delivered over a connection where my user agent has verified the TLS certificate of the server.
Yes, a TLS certificate guarantees that MITM is impossible for now. But it doesn't guarantee that server has not been compromised and the file changed at rest. We have seen that happened in the past.
> The only thing signed files prevents is modification in transit ...
No. Both RPM and APT repositories' signature chains ensure that files are not modified at rest or at transit, plus the files are put into the repositories with an approval of a real human being.
These signatures are tip of a "web of trust" iceberg, and not mere automated signatures.
Moreover, if a software doesn't inspire confidence and doesn't pass the smell test, it doesn't get installed on my system anyway, regardless of its form.
If I have to install it, I install it to an isolated VM, and destroy the VM as soon as my work is done with it.
Sounds like a very small internet.
I know a lot of people that use Linux and not many of them operate this way. Most care about their software sources. "Everyone" is certainly not the case.
A github author just has to put up a repo and hope that their fanbase aren't too versed in the language
Anyone who's like "well I don't copy/paste shell code into my terminal" is just virtue signaling. I'm willing to bet their editor Vim/Emacs/VSCode is overflowing with plug-ins and code written by just some guy on Github. I bet they've ran containers that are written by just some guy too.
It's a really cool feature that you can just download a random binary off Github, run it, and not really have to worry about it.
It is such a shame. It is a shame that phones are intrusive, smart tvs are intrusive, commercial home automation systems ... etc
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to."
What you describe is a feature of a high-trust society, where you don't have to double-check every single transaction or interaction you enter into, but can take most statements on trust. This allows people to get on with the fundamental task at hand, rather than dealing with the overhead of checking their food in the chemistry lab, or whatever the equivalent is for the specific transaction.
I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies. If this was the case, we are in for a bumpy ride, as we seem to be rapidly changing from a high-trust to a low-trust society.