Still thinking about this post from @tess. (See the threaded follow-up for explanation!)

Sophie Schmieg

@argv_minus_one @inthehands it turns out, compilers are complicated. Compiler folks have tried, but piping an annotation like that through the entire LLVM stack is nontrivial, and there are only very few people trying to write cryptographic code, and very many people trying to write code that is as fast as possible, so the effort that was put into it by compiler folks had a bit of an upper bound. So in the end, godbolt.org is the cryptography engineer's best friend.

argv minus one

@sophieschmieg

Maybe, but that sounds like a *giant* footgun for timing-attack vulnerabilities. Merely changing the compiler version could create one, nevermind compiling for a new ISA.

I didn't say it's easy to implement such a thing, but it is absolutely necessary.

@inthehands

Paul Cantrell

@zachnfine
Richard Cook phrased this as “Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity:” https://how.complexsystems.fail

If you think that insight means there’s no difference between what the average human does and what the best LLM does, I have some discounted swampland to sell you.

Paul Cantrell

@phaedral
As quoted upthread!

Robert Link

@inthehands Sorry I missed it!

Paul Cantrell

@argv_minus_one @sophieschmieg
It does sound like a worthwhile effort, and it does sound just perniciously difficult! There’s a half a dozen graduate theses here waiting to be written, probably.

Paul Cantrell

@Tak
I’m old enough to still think DAO means “data access object.”

Paul Cantrell

@phaedral
Great minds think alike! (Other kinds too, but I’m it’s greatness at work here, for sure)

Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom 🕯️

@inthehands But that's what they do. The interpreters of the law are not the humans I would trust with that task. Judges are a self-selected set of people who think that law is just, particularly the way they interpret it. They often also think the way power is distributed now is just.

These people are the last ones that should be allowed to do that life debugging of the law. They are even worse than the politicians that make the law in the first place (and that's awful enough).

Paul Cantrell

@forthy42
This is a bit too facile for me to agree. There’s a wide range of judges out there, and that range includes the best and the worst of people.

I think it’s healthier to see the legislative and judicial system as participants in whole-society negotiations over who we are and what kind of society we want. Anything haggled out in court would be haggled out by other means elsewhere, often by the same people — and not necessarily in a better way.

Simon Tatham

@inthehands conversely, there's a case where people expect code to behave like law. Namely, the people who want encryption systems to have backdoors accessible via govt paperwork like a court order.

The point they (perhaps deliberately) never understand is: you can't make the _cryptosystem_ verify a court order is legit. A human has to check that. And then they do something to the code. Which the code would obey whether or not the human had checked the court order, or even had one to check.

Resuna

@inthehands

Twas always thus.

"Part of the appeal of COBOL, I think, is that it makes a tantalizing false promise of allowing humans to give instructions to computers in something like human language, expecting the same kind of common-sense interpretation we expect of humans."

My first job was in COBOL, I was still in high school, an intern, I knew nothing about business, and I didn't understand what the code meant. They basically had to undo everything I had done.

Paul Cantrell

@resuna
I can’t even count the iterations of “make programming accessible to everyone by changing the syntax” that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Epiphanic Synchronicity

@inthehands This whole thread is brilliant, Paul.

Paul Cantrell

@EpiphanicSynchronicity
I’m glad you found it worthwhile!