In the very same conference they announced WoW Forever. So whatever it is, it's not necessarily systemic, because they seemed to have nailed that audience.
Spending almost all of my time working on DNTLS (https://dntls.net/). Yesterday I was able to create secure mTLS tunnels over IPv6 for direct P2P to my co-founder's desktop in SE Asia (I'm in the US). He was able to load a website I was hosting locally on my machine. I also tested coordinating through a relay to avoid publishing my public IP and sending all traffic through the relay to hide my IP entirely. We more or less recreated the "old" internet in a way except everything is mTLS and E2E encrypted.
Why does that have to be the only reason? I personally think it has nothing to do with "Hacker" news, but I understand that sentiment has been in the fringe lately with HN becoming increasingly political.
There's a far cry between someone showing off some weird contraption they hacked together versus posting about the Houthi's military campaign. If you can't see that, then I'm not sure what else to say.
Totally, but I didn't say political means everything I said everything is political, which means anything a human does to any extent, tacitly or otherwise, is embedded in a power structure.
Use to be a huge Blizzard fan back in the day. Can't get behind basically anything they are doing today. Time will tell if something like this just reinforces whatever is broken or results in real improvement. I'm cynical on the matter.
I remember when Warcraft 3 came out and a news outlet mentioned something on the lines of "gamers' trust in Blizzard borders on religious faith" and it sounded true.
It's unbelievable how far from that trust and love they have fallen.
I’m not even sure that’s a useful question. It almost points at “what’s the other end of the continuum so we can discuss points on the axis”, which _is_ useful, but I’m not even convinced that “merely” treating those without income as deserving pain is at an end of a continuum itself. It’s a point upon it; things could be worse yet.
Instead let’s break away from opposites and into pieces. What would be _different_ in a society that doesn’t judge harshly the less fortunate?
I’d suggest that would include ensuring that nobody starves or sleeps on the street for want of work.
Richard Rorty describes liberalism as the idea that cruelty is the worst thing that exists. Cruelty, of course, has just as many forms as suffering.
Universal income protects only basic needs and it does so in part. Even if you have income, you need to have housing, clean water, food that isn't poisened and some form of healthy environment to live a good life: income doesn't guarantee it.
On the other end of the income spectrum is the unlimited amassing of wealth. After some point, wealth turns into power. For example, Musk is able to buy twitter influencing public opinion, and Starlink can make or break the battlefield.
If we are talking only about income, I think we would need both a minimum (universal) income and a maximum (a cap on wealth). If we do not, then we will eventually lose democracy.
>It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty.
In the Europe, like several rich western countries, we mostly replaced the extended family with the government welfare state, for better but mostly for worse.
So current young workers are contributing to a failing state ponzi pension system that will leave them in poverty by the time they retire in several decades, and they will also lack the care of the extended family unit that was the norm decades ago thanks to collapsed birth rates. Double whammy.
Unfortunately this does not work at nation scale. We are not insects. Tribes fail at levels over a few hundred and that scale only works because of blood ties. Communism has failed to produce good outcomes every time it's been tried. Even coops aren't competitive with traditional corporations.
What if health and liberty to someone looks like them not providing any net positive to society? What compels someone to work 12 hours a day to share those resources with such a person?
You’re making a point about loafers but non-wage earners are always going to outnumber wage earners, and able bodied loafers are a minute fraction of who we must provide for (the young, the elderly, students, the disabled, etc)
It mostly just feels like basic maths, not really a world model. Productivity is a finite resource. If there's a deficit in productivity, people will necessarily suffer and, in the worst case, die. The problem is world views that suggest giving everyone a free choice that enough people will choose productivity while everyone else chooses leisure. I'd be more apt to believe it if we had evidence of it being a natural outcome.
It doesn't have to be so extreme though. Basic scenario: 20% of everyone's income is taxed and then distributed equally to everyone (no matter what, and without setting any fixed dollar amount), another 10% pays for administrative functions and government stuff except welfare, and the remaining 70% is theirs to do with as they please. What would happen? Would everyone quit their job? I don't think so, because 70% is a lot. Some people with jobs that pay so poorly their 70% is less than everyone's average 20% would quit, but that's good, because those were zombie jobs.
I'd be fine with this so long as people who didn't contribute any taxes couldn't vote. Otherwise you're just signing up for those who choose to work to get exploited by the leisurely.
Are there historical examples of this ever happening in any significant numbers? This idea that people en masse just won't work and live off of the state where opportunities for work are reasonably available seems more like a boogeyman than a real thing. (obviously, if work is not really available, I can see this happening, but I wouldn't describe the people unable to find work as "leisurely" in that case)
How do I know this won't just eat through my token budget? It's hard to understand from the website how "done" is derived in the loop. If it's not deterministic then it seems like it would be prone to over-engineering.
Great question but the goal is not to handle tokens economy management, this is cupeled to the agent, I want to stay agent agnostic, you tell the agent what you want it to run in the routine, for example i have a routine that split a codebase to max 50 lines a file, I told it in the routine, when finish the refactor, change the routine to run every week and check for regression and if there is take it back to run every 30 minutes and work file after file.
I don’t think this is where it’s should land, I believe that is not the “single responsibility” of this project but I would love to hear more, because it’s seems like a pain point for several people, what is your suggestion?
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
I think the problem is that decentralization is almost by definition antithetical to the ability to capitalize on something. As you indicated, decentralization means diffusion of control and power, which are essential to capitalize on that thing. Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.
Well said. To be fair, there is a proposed healthy income stream to the company proper, and the investors are buying equity in the company (at relatively low scale, >$20M ARR). But that's sort of an "old school" play and it seems most VCs want more than just equity. Or if they do take equity, it comes with some insane pump and dump plan that would destroy the very thing we're building.
But I think the broader point I'm making is that what _is_ making all of the money nowadays is increasingly unethical and counter-productive to society. For example, see Kalshi and co. That, in our experience, is what the VCs are in all of the rage for right now, and as I said it's completely antithetical to our vision.
"Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?"
Why did Andrew Carnegie invest in building public libraries? Surely it wasn't because he was expecting a capital return.
The oligarchs (at least some of them) used to feel some responsibility to the betterment of man. It really seems like today's billionaires really only care about money and power and nothing else.
In case of Andrew Carnegie, it was probably desire at end of his life to been rembered as not only a ruthless businessmen and monopolist.
"Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects."
As an olive branch, I came in connection with a group (mostly out of Asia) that seems to be more connected by the day (meaning I keep making more mutual connections). They have a very specific vision for capital aimed at funding generational companies whose vision aligns with bettering humanity rather than exploiting it.
They are out there, but unfortunately very much on the fringe because it's difficult to raise money with that ethos.
It hasn't occurred to you that your idea might not stand on its own? If your product was amazing, serious and highly ethical investors would throw themselves over each other to invest with you. There are many such investors, but they have strict requirements on what they invest in as well.
You don't have any God given right to other people's money for high risk ventures. Neither does anybody else. But it's easy to blame "the system" when things don't go our way.
Yeah, you need to look away from private equity investment. Mutuals, co-ops, LLPs, there's lots of other models, but VC and PE money is not where you want to be.
Not sure how practical for your startup, but how much of the next 18 months can you fund in ways that don't create equity (or implied equity) overlords? Can design-partners prepay? Can you get paid pilots, deposits, a grant?
This is why I am building DNTLS. These organizations no longer deserve our trust and they have inadvertently gained too much power over the last two decades of massive internet expansion. Names need to be fully owned by individuals and a shared, decentralized trust system must be in place for resolution. The more I see actions like this, the more convinced I am that a solution is long overdue.
Yeah, the website is a holdover from when we were pitching AI VCs a few months ago. We quickly determined that the whole system is now "Cancer Capital" (see the other front page HN thread) and have pivoted to just bootstrapping from a close syndicate of like minded individuals. We plan to update the website this month, sorry it's a bit behind.
In short, AI identities were just a happy accident that comes with the system/architecture. It's not tied to AI at all.
But if anyone is interested in talking about what we're doing more, happy to connect at hn@sepositus.com.
Alice registers `alice.dntls` and Bob registers `bob.dntls` on the DNTLS network. During the registration process, they generate PQ key pairs that are registered along with the name. Alice's and Bob's name are hashed before being stored on the network. Bob knows Alice's name, so he can perform the necessary hash computation to look up Alice's public key material on the network. Likewise, Alice can do the same for Bob.
Bob wants to send a file to Alice. Bob takes his name key and signs the document with it and sends it to Alice. Alice looks up Bob's public key material on the network and verifies the signature.
Bob now stands up a new website, but he only wants Alice to access it. He sets up a standard HTTP server but slightly modifies it to be "DNTLS native." He does this by requiring mTLS on incoming TLS connections. The connecting party must identify themselves with a signed certificate. Each name has what we call a "name record" that allows publishing arbitrary metadata signed by the name key. Bob publishes a standard "HTTP" record in his own name record that points to the IP address. Alice now goes to connect to Bob's website. She opens her "special" browser and types in bob's name. The special browser looks up Bob's name record, finds the published IP address, and attempts an mTLS connection. Bob's server is configured to _only_ allow connections from Alice. Since Alice signed her TLS connection with her own name, the connection is allowed, while every other is rejected.
Alice now wants to communicate with Bob's agent. Bob publishes a subname called `agent.bob.dntls`. In that subname's record he publishes an A2A packet that contains the information for connecting to his agent. But, like the website, the agent is listening on a TLS connection that rejects anyone except Alice. She uses an A2A tool to initiate a connection using her name key and is allowed to make a mutually secured connection to Bob's agent.
Bob wants to connect to a VM he purchased that runs the website. He configures SSH with his name key as one of the recognized users. His SSH connection simply leverages the name key to authenticate him to the machine. But he shares the machine with another person and wants to share a secret with them. So he creates a SOPS encrypted file with his name and this other person's names as the only recipients. They both securely access the secret using their respective name keys.
I'll leave it there, but hopefully that's descriptive enough.
The technical implementation aside, "what" prevents this from going down the exact same path as ICANN? E.g. how do we know next year the registration fees won't be 5x or certain registrations denied?
A good question. Unfortunately, all I can say is we have a solution that involves specific European countries, laws, and regulations. As I said in a previous comment, happy to share more outside of this venue, but not all details are 100% public at this point.
We're simply choosing to build in a small group of closely aligned individuals and organizations right now. Many will become the first participants in helping run the public network across the globe. The network will launch completely in the open, including open sourcing the code. People can choose to wait until then to make their decisions or if they are particularly interested they can reach out to me about joining earlier.
A solution built in isolation by a group who just publicly tried to ride the AI wave with it is not a promising set of signs, but I have no problem leaving it at that until all is public and hoping it regains trust then!
Your solution seems tangential to the problem brought evident here, with how ICANN and VeriSign are able between themselves, to turn 22,000 or so tangible name registrations into dust, without any retribution or refund. The funny thing is that DNS -- where these names actually reside -- is distributed, but it's not as federated as to prevent the kind of takeover. Worst case, a rogue state can declare their own root name servers with their own fork of all name records including 3LDs for `.name`, show the middle finger to the U.S. and call it a win -- except that real people in the U.S. or otherwise using DNS servers that don't hold the forked data -- will fail to connect to the services expected at those names as specified by the rogue state, and will instead connect somewhere else. Basically like two realities of links pointing different places in each universe. A multiverse of name resolution. Not great at all, except what if the rogue state is larger and thus more power-dominant than the U.S.? The U.S. can pretend they don't care, but they become ostracised through DNS, and that's not going to win favours with the users. In other words if 4 out of 5 people prefer x.y.z. points to my actually useful website except some scammy ad-ridden page, then whoever doesn't point x.y.z. to my website is going to lose users -- unless those behind the scammy x.y.z. alternative pledge to monetarily compensate for every disgruntled user.
Anyway, name resolution needs to be federated because ICANN is apparently compromised as far as doing the right thing goes. A single root model may not work anymore. Maybe blockchain can finally do some good...
Names are not able to be traded, so it's first come first serve. It's impossible to completely defeat name squatting, but you can make it less enticing. In the above case, Alice can "sell" her name to Bob on some aftermarket but the only way to do so is by transferring the cryptographic material. This is fraught with issues, especially considering once Bob has the keys he has no obligation to pay.
Names are valid for one year and range from $10/yr up like current domain names. Letting a name expire opens it back up to being registered again.
We have quite a few other "tools" in play behind the scenes that make name trading/squatting extremely impractical, but I won't go into those details here :)
Like I said, it's impossible to "defeat" it outright because the concept doesn't really lend itself to this sort of structure. If I buy a plaque with my name on it , therefore owning it, the only thing that could really keep me from selling it would be some centralized authority. Even then, black markets have existed for drugs for centuries.
The adoption has basically been non-existent. I have a lot of theories on where they've gone wrong. Being so heavily tied to a blockchain (Ethereum being the worst due to its state bloat) is probably the biggest mistake I think they made.
I'm not convinced the reason is technical. Yes, the total Ethereum chain state is not tiny (a few TB I think). But if you're only interesting in ENS domains, you don't need to store all of Ethereum, you can just receive new blocks, filter the relevant domain change events and only index that.
I suspect the lack adoption might rather be because of:
- DNS being "good enough". Rug pulls as described in this article are sadly possible, but not frequent enough to motivate enough actors to work on the switch
- The stigma attached to crypto. Which is understandable given the number of bad actors trying to make easy bucks with false promises. But it's also a shame, given that this actually seems a perfect use case: the code is simple enough, and as far as I know, only a blockchain can guarantee a specific code will be executed without relying on a third party being and staying honest (in others words, true self-custody of a domain name).
also until such a time that pkarr is widely adopted, you are better off using .onion domains anyway. it becomes a question of requiring custom DNS client vs. Tor browser.
Just a friendly reminder that Fortune has been owned since 2018 by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the Chearavanont family that controls the CP Group conglomerate. CP Group created Siam Land Flying in 1991 as its in-house flight department for executives. It later added charter (Executive Wings) and air-ambulance services and still operates King Air 350 and Hawker jets.
These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
>These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
Would you rather than they kill stories relating to climate change and pretend everything's fine instead? If not, what's the actual point of bringing that factoid up? Sure, rich people flying in private jets might be bad, but I'm not sure why it deserves extra condemnation just because they happen to own a publication that's reporting on the effects of climate change.
I simply found it comical that they probably make quite a bit of money rolling these articles out while the owners fly around in their private jet fleet. Most people probably don't know that unless someone told them - which is exactly what I just did. Clearly it touched some nerves.
I’m sorry but the gotcha here is that.. the owner is in a family that also owns an air charter business with all of four small private jets and an air-ambulance business?
Give me a break, what does this have anything to do with the content of the article.
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