InterIlluminati version 0.001 alpha - The founding document

8/22/2018 02:23 AM - Sometimes you get an idea in your brain, and you don't want to lose it, because you think it's a good one, and might possibly change the world. This is one of those ideas, and it's happening in the middle of the night. You dear reader, are seeing it because my dear bride made me go to bed early enough that, unlike normally, I am not so exhausted I'm dreading the 5:00AM alarm that marks the end of sleep, and thus have a little bit of flexibility....   early to bed.... early to rise.... lets you make notes at 2:30AM... 8-)

I've developed many bad habits over my life, and have gotten into a rut.  I used to be a person ready to experiment and try things at the drop of a hat... now I'm too damned tired because of these habits.  This changes today! 

I'm going to attempt to discover these habits, or their symptoms, and correct them, with your support.

I believe we've all (on the internet, and society as a whole) have gotten into many bad habits, and hope that if we can collectively discover them, we can change them intentionally, and chose a new future.

A group of people of any size, can commit to a shared set of goals, an a shared identity.  We all have many such identities throughout our daily lives....  Child, friend, sibling, student, teacher, parent, partner, editor, writer, etc.   We have religious identities, the standard  "Religion":  Judiasim, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the like...   the other religions: emacs, vi, Word, Wordperfect, Notepad++, etc...    Linux, windows, Mac, etc...    American, Canadian, Russian....   the point here is that we each have many identities.... and so it's very unlikely that any 2 people share all of them.... I'd go so far as to say with the possible exception of a few identical twins with very boring lives, no two people share all of their identities.

The revolutions in communication thoughout history, spoken language, oral histories, the written word, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and now the internet, have in each step made it possible for the ideas of one person to be shared, and challenged by a wider community of peers.  Each step made it possible for ideas to persist across time with finer sets of detail, and nuance.

The rise of civilization over history has decreased the portion of time everyone has to work, in order to survive.  It now seems possible that with automation, it is possible that if fairly distributed, 20 hour work weeks might be a thing, or there will be many unemployed.... that choice has yet to be made.    (Let's not forget though, that civilizations do collapse, and we're not special.  There were factories making gears more than 2000 years ago, folks, about 1500 years before clockmakers started bring them back into production.)

So, we currently find ourselves, and even I, with all my bad habits, find myself in the situation where if we think about it, we have free time to devote to any task of our chosing.

I have free time on my commute to work, during which I can passively listen to Podcasts...  I used to have free time commuting on a train which allowed me to experiment with photography quite a bit.  I have free time after taking care of my family and friends, most of which I've been spending consuming Youtube and other social media. 

I've not spend all that "free" time wisely.  I hope to change that.  I hope to get other people who share some of my idenities to do the same, and push some projects forward.  I'm sure there are MANY good ones out there that could benefit just from my attention, as a passive listener or viewer, with occaisional (sp?) feedback.

*todo: Install Spell check in Wikipad
*todo: Clean up old todo flags out of this wiki

A little bit of forward planning and persistence can be surprisingly effective.... the further forward you think, the less actual work is required.

Let us choose a future we like, and push in that direction... spending less time watching mindless videos and chasing likes and venting our emotions (mostly dispair and frustration) to the world.

I wrote this on my Wikidpad, a wiki on my laptop, and will soon send it out to the world.... hopefully I've saved enough so I can sleep now.  Good night, fellow InterIlluminati  (Those of use who share the ideas first roughly outlined in this ver 0.001 alpha)

Mike Warot - 8/22/2018 03:07 AM

CapabilityPipes v0.001 - A very rough draft of an incredibly powerful idea

This is a raw dump of an idea that came to me at 4AM... I hope it's coherent enough to catch on... I will of course keep refining it.

This is v0.001 of the idea

++ Capability Pipes  

Unix/Linux is a set of tools which work together to allow you to pipe output from one program into another, and the resulting plumbing lets you do very powerful things. We need a similar set of tools for the capability security model. This would allow you to have complete and total control over your applications, your network useage, and everything your computer does on your behalf, in a rational and expandable manner.

Instead of trusting applications to do everything, why not use the pipe/api model to limit their connections to the world, so that you can tightly restrict the side effects of everything, as needed?

Give the user a traditional view of the world, just like the linux they have now, but instead of trusting applications blindly, force them all to use capability pipes (like file handles) to do all their I/O.

Of course, you could always default things to the current look/feel of a typical linux desktop, to make transitioning easy for users.

It is impossible to overstate the amount of power this would put back into the hands of users.
 
Examples, use cases:

  A mute filter to allow control over the audio output of a web browser.
  Filtering of which URLs a web browser is allowed to access
  A batch file which could do more than chroot ever could, with all the limits hard enforced by the operating system
  All file pipes would be chosen / supplied from outside the application.

iptables allows a linux system administrator to do very powerful things with the network stack of a machine... this would be a much more fine grained approach as you could control I/O of everything down to the bit level, or not... as you see fit, in the unix way.

You could count the bytes a web browser sends or recieves on each and every page. You could log things.

Digital Rights Management would be killed stone dead as a nice side effect.

Ad blocking could be scripts that users could tweak themselves.

More on why Google sucks

Google forces you to try to figure out keywords unique to the subjects you are looking for. This doesn't always work, and is especially hard to use for conversations that are non-technical and thus have the least amount of topic-specific jargon to latch on to. 

The next great leap will be to figure out the subjects of text, so that you can match on multiple areas of interest, and explore the intersections.

Why google sucks

Ideas are like Reese's peanut butter cups... they are all the synthesis of other concepts in new combinations. Creative energy is the exploration of new combinations to yield new and interesting combinations, some of which turn out to have value. Ideas are all a synthesis of *more than one* pre-existing concept. Thus any catalog of ideas necessarily will have all of the component ideas cataloged so that you can search for combinations of ideas...   a single heirarchy will fail miserably at this task. Tags with a folksonomy have a much, MUCH better chance of yielding positive results, and being a better tool.

Empowering IT

It is the IT departments mission to provide a stable and consistent set of tools for our users... empowering them should also be the focus here... providing the best tools and skillsets possible to maximize the reach of the users is our goal.

Empowering Virginia

We are limited by our language, vocabulary, and skill set in using them. I believe the "classical" education was designed to give the largest possible set of tools to the pupil, which is in stark contrast to the currently accepted system which provides a lowest common denominator.

It is a parents responsibility to provide their children with the best possible set of tools, to empower them as much as possible. It is THIS that should be the focus, not the idea of giving them a head start in a race. The head start can rapidly be overcome by someone who has better skills negotiating with others, and can communicate more efficiently.

It is with this realization that I'm going to refocus my energies as a Father to Virginia.

Tools - it's all about tools

Better tools... it's all about better tools. A good tool reliably allows you to extend your reach, and do things more efficiently, with more control.

The internet is still relatively young... the web is now 20 years old, and we're still figuring out the tools that can be built. Mashups are cool, but being able to program enough to put together something that can be optimized by others is a very good thing.

The complexity of putting a simple "Hello World" example in place using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP/Python) precludes a lot of us from using it as a tool. Perhaps we need something a bit easier?