__MatrixMan__
The only reason there's a connection between the richness of the content, and the likelihood of it being an ad, is because advertisers attract attention by making things shiny. But if we short circuit that upstream, by not running untrusted js to begin with , then there's no reason that we can't have shiny content downstream of where the trust was verified.
It is astounding, but I don't think it's well set up for anything besides faster approaches to existing limits.
The question is: are these actually alternatives? Likely it comes down to how well supported they are. I get being angry after a layoff, but it takes a more dedicated kind of anger to stick with an open source project for long enough that it's actually a threat to the incumbent.
For any of this to work we have to already be gossiping metadata about each other's content. "I think this key was compromised on Nov 1, 2026" is exactly that kind of metadata. That sort of thing rarely happened in PGP because key revocation was necessarily a side channel that you were often ignoring. But if the only way to avoid being inundated by slop is to assemble the page from the gossip of trusted peers, then the untrusted nature of the recently compromised key is gonna show up right next to its dubiously trustworthy signatures, and your browser can then interpret it without you having to do any sleuthing on your own.
How hard are you really gonna work to compromise a key that you can only use for a few days? I mean, the going rate for placing an ad on a page is like, fractions of a cent per view. Maybe it'll be more valuable in a post-ad world, but I have a hard time imagining that getting your content in front of some eyeballs for a day or two will ever be valuable enough to be worth hitting somebody with a wrench over. What you have to gain by doing so just isn't valuable enough to be worth the risk.
The most famous attempt at a web of trust was PGP, but it just attempted to bind a public key to a name. That's too generic. Only privacy nerds are actually going to have a key signing party if that's all they get out of it.
I think that it'll go better if the we're attesting about common interests. Like, go to the event because you're enthusiastic about games, end up with some public keys as a side effect.
It'll be hard if you're the only person you know with a particular interest and it's impractical to travel to wherever people with that interest gather. Then you'll have to take a gamble on some internet handle you've never met. But really that's just falling back to the dubiously trustworthy web we currently have.
The architects of the original web gave up on the trustworthiness problem pretty early. All we got is : "is this server lying about its name?". We're going to have to pick that problem back up and bake solutions to it into our browsers. Except instead of attestations about server names, I'll be about the content. Was it made by somebody who is known to be sloppy with AI? Or maybe they're the sort that would put out content that doesn't disclose that its secretly an ad.
People have been gossiping this sort of stuff about each other for a very long time. If were gonna have a useful web again, we'll need to find a way to scale that capability.
> don't seed this, both of your neighbors already have it, instead seee this which is rare in your region
That same metadata system can handle:
> don't share this with people who you don't trust in domain foo
Where foo indicates a group of people that won't participate in censorship.
It would get switched according to the same logic that ensures that people do end up with data nearby that is relevant to their interests.
Like, if there's only one university in the world that studies a certain kind of bacteria, info about it should travel in that direction and stay nearby (but not too nearby, we don't want a single node failure to wipe out the data). So "keep this away from Putin's goons" could be a routing predicate subject to the same rules, though people would need to exercise some trust hygiene for that, but combined with a bit of steganography I think it's solvable.
- The publisher finds a way to pay you for it.
- You get free fries if prior gossip indicates that you've been seeding the restaurant's menu and open hours data.
- You just seed data that you care about keeping available for your community, like if you expect the mechanic to be able to fix your car you should seed the service manual.
- It's a tit-for-tat thing, peers remember who seed and seed themselves in return.
We just gotta rethink the application layer to make it easier to reference by hash instead of by name, and a few other tweaks.
I'm not sure about your linkage of memory to consciousness either, buy even if we grant it, the world is a very stateful place, there are plenty of systems lying around that might be supporting memory faculties which we fail to recognize as such because we're too different from it. Is the movement of electrical energy in the brain really so different than the ping pongging of neutrons in a stellar core? I mean obviously it is but, when it comes to the ability to store, transmit, and process information, maybe not.
I'm not trying to convince anyone that the sun has thoughts. My point is just that it's knowably unknowable. People are free to chose to believe whatever they want to believe about consciousness and they'll never be proven wrong. If we want to have useful conversations about AI, we need to develop ways of talking about the consequences of our actions which do not require us to first agree on the nature of consciousness.
I just pointed it out because I wanted to dodge the same old AI debates. They're very narrow. Like, people have been arguing about whether general intelligence exists for decades, and now that some VC wants to use AGI as a buzzword, we ignore that GI is not a settled issue. And consciousness... golly that's like THE intractable philosophical problem. It's a bottomless pit. Ain't nobody knows what they're talking about when it comes to consciousness.
I'm sympathetic to the reflex: this guy has beliefs that he doesn't realize are dangerous. Let's help him. I'm usually on the opposite side of this one. I just think we need to find ways to address the potential harms without actually winning a debate about consciousness. Beliefs about it are too varied and too tightly held. People don't win debates about consciousness. If they work super hard maybe they get a tenured position as a philosopher so they can continue the debate, but they never win.
But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).
It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.
But if I were to practice indifference, I think that would have a negative effect immediately.
On the other hand I try to be nice to the AI's. They may or may not feel it, but I feel it.
Its not hard to find specific examples. 5 minutes of searching will find piles and piles of them.
If you must have a name, Stewart Parnell was convicted of knowingly distributing salmonella contaminated peanuts in 2015. 9 People died. He got 28 years in prison.
You don't have to trust the news either. Just ask around. I know a teacher who has lost two students to surprise fentanyl. I'm sure there are similarly affected people in your community. Unregulated markets are a slippery slope towards deaths by poison. It happens all over the world (but more in places without an FDA equivalent).
I figure the tools of the successful revolutionary become the tools of the new government, so whatever it is it's gotta be useful for a small minority that wants to coordinate in the face of a sophisticated adversary, and then once it grows up it's gotta be useful for carrying out the bureaucratic business of a government. Unless it survives that transition with its trustworthiness intact, it won't be seen by the masses as trustworthy enough for the job. People just aren't that keen on trusting computers on the say-so of nerds like us, they need to see it succeed under stress.
So for starters I imagine an ocean of Sybil identities controlled by an enemy. Some of these will be trying to get info about your intentions so they can interfere (polling of one kind). Also you'll need to coordinate with comrades without making your entire trust graph known to all parties (polling of the other kind).
It'll never get to the point where coalitions are large if it doesn't function well when they're small, and at that phase you gotta be choosy about who you share info with because you're not yet a government but rather a threat to the existing one.
If you're worried that you'll be targeted as an individual by somebody who cannot coerce a CA but can tamper with the channel you're using to get the public key, use https.
If you're worried that you'll be targeted along with many others by somebody who can coerce a CA, use ssh and ensure that some folks are comparing key fingerprints such that at least one is close to the source.
And there's a lack of motivated attackers for a reason, the attack scales poorly. Maybe you can bamboozle a target or two, but if you go for hundreds, somebody's gonna start wondering what's up with the keys. If you're trying to take over the world, or sell to somebody who is, you're better off focusing on compromising a root of trust or tampering with name resolution, because attacks like that are sustainable at scale.