planish

joined 2 years ago
[–] planish 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Friends at the Table is the best podcast.

It's an actual play podcast run in game systems designed mostly for story generation, operated by people who who know there's no such thing as a monster, and I'd never seen anything like it.

They ran some seasons in a post-fantasy-apocalypse world, some in a Star-Wars-meets-Gundam science fantasy world, and one recently in a Western sort-of-horror setting. I started at the beginning, with Autumn in Heiron, featuring orc archivists who work magic using extremely specific shopping lists, undead pastry chef boyfriends, and an "evil" alignment of "destroy something rather than trying to understand it".

But for the impatient you can start with Marielda. Marielda is a series of heists by a crew of illegal knowledge dealers, in a fantasy city that sounds like New Orleans, patrolled by living statues and ruled by a god who forged the sun, whom our players proceed to fight.

The sci-fi side, which is running its fourth season now, starts with COUNTER/Weight, a game set in the aftermath of a mecha movie never made. It features a character who is "what if Han Solo used to be Beyoncé", psychic hackers, and mechs who might be gods.

Also there's no sponsors because the GM is too punk for that.

[–] planish 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How come Yogthos is all over my Hot page with months-old posts though? Is tankie-ism the secret to blazing hot posts months in the future?

[–] planish 1 points 1 year ago

This is great!

[–] planish 6 points 1 year ago

You take a PeerTube channel name and treat it as if it were a community name on Lemmy (https://peertube.instance/c/channelname) and search it up in your instance and make it federate over.

[–] planish 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, the document from the county administration would be much better, than some “magic” contract from the internet that may or may not be enforced by the county.

If the magic contract from the Internet is not actually likely to be enforced by the county, then the county is not actually using the magic Internet contract system. If the system were adopted by the county, then the official records from the system would be known to be enforceable.

I sound like I am for and against blockchain because I am. I don't think you can stand up any existing blockchain system and start slapping government functions onto it and get a good result. People won't understand it well enough or have sufficient resources to be true peers in the system, and if they did it wouldn't scale very well.

But I do think that governmental systems can be improved by taking inspiration form blockchain technology and drawing on its underlying philosophical principles of accountability and consensus.

[–] planish 1 points 1 year ago

But one would like to be able to still play Half Life 2 today, even if Valve weren't helpfully around to update it. One would like to be able to read an old Word document or display an old blog post along with its scripts. So either you support the old standards and, for active content, the old APIs, or you lose access to anything that doesn't emit enough cash to pay a person to keep it current.

[–] planish -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Tying keys to natural people is indeed an unsolved problem.

The system can be designed to recognize more people than just the current owner as authorized to do a transfer. You could do the whole tax record tracking in the same system, to ensure that property can be seized for back taxes exactly when back taxes are owed.

[–] planish 1 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think the requirement for constant progress, and the expectation that all software be able to change arbitrarily with a year or so of notice, is in fact a problem with software development.

I do software development all the time, and I find this to be an impediment to my work. I also make the kind of breaking changes that cause this problem.

[–] planish 1 points 1 year ago

If you don't have a system of law that even its designated enforcers are obliged to follow, you don't have a legitimate government, you have a mafia.

The easier it is to make cases where a law is broken common knowledge, the easier it is to gather the political will to enforce the law. That mechanism is what obliges the enforcers to actually follow the law, and it can work more or less well depending on the structure of the society, the relative power of different groups of people, and the communication technologies in use. If the President guns someone down in broad daylight, they get thrown out more often if you have a reputable newspaper than if you don't. An election is a convenient substitute for everyone trying to kill each other until we find out who is left.

Blockchains are one technology for establishing common knowledge among a group of participants. They're not magic, they don't even usually work particularly well. But they do offer techniques for binding the administrators of systems of rules to actually follow those rules, which have the potential to be applied more broadly.

[–] planish 10 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Something has gone wrong in software development where software can never be finished.

If you release an app on Google Play and never touch it again, eventually Google will pull it from the store and customers will complain that it no longer runs on new devices. Android 16 will require that all applications now do something, and refuse to run any that do not.

This is the real structural source of the constant subscription demands. Nobody is willing to commit to supporting a stable API for 10 or 20 years, and nobody will keep coming in to bump dependency versions and rewrite systems to Google or Apple's new whims every year unless they get paid for this apparently useless work.

[–] planish -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If the county isn't actually using the system you try to present evidence from, of course it will not work.

If you have a list of who owned the land and when, and you have evidence to support each transfer, then you have a log-structured or relatively blockchain-like database.

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