The cat and mouse between console makers and hackers is one of the more honest stories in tech. Both sides kept making each other better.

True!

Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.

Email definitely has its issues, but given that every other form of digital communication is getting worse and more locked down, I have no confidence that a replacement would be better. While increasingly difficult to get self-hosted email to be accepted by the big providers like Google and Microsoft, it is still great to at least have the option of hosting a universally accepted form of communication yourself.

RCS is incredibly centralized. More than half of the phone carriers decided it was too complicated to run their own RCS servers and so just sub-contract them to a Google subsidiary (Jibe).

To be fair that seems to be the path email is going down. Most businesses don't want run their own email and just use one of two big providers.

There’s nothing to fall through, email fits it’s exact purpose. Email is supposed to have 0 sending/receiving friction. So one idea to fix it is to only accept email from addresses you’ve allowed. No one wants to constantly update their address book though, they just want the email (forgetting to remove the marketing email allowance after you receive the account verification link). So then there’s nothing to fix.

The abuse is by design.

There have been many fixes over the decades, but it's hard to change the fundamentals of something widely-used.

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix email?

From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that a flat out prohibited from participating.

Email is designed to be a distributed system. That means new standards can not really be added without breaking most of the systems. We still don't have mandatory transport encryption. So I don't see how to fix anything but to improve spam filtering and accept that it will be imperfect.

No one is complaining about the email system itself, but how it is abused, and it being abused is simply a byproduct of how simple and efficient the whole concept is. There’s nothing to fix.

Email is fixed by avoiding the usage. I only check my email for password resets and bank notifications. I never send email. Every other channel of communication with anyone outside of work is a text message.

Software that ran on 4KB of memory and got humans to the moon still has undiscovered bugs in it. That says something about the complexity hiding in even the smallest codebases.

My guess is that in such low memory regimes, program length is very loosely correlated with bug rate.

If anything, if you try to cram a ton of complexity into a few kb of memory, the likelihood of introducing bugs becomes very high.

Yet here we are compounding the issues by adding more and more layers to these systems... The higher the level it becomes the more security risks we take.

Well you don't have room for a lot of "defensive" code. You write the program to function on expected inputs, and hope that all the "shouldn't happen" scenarios actually don't happen.

Also contrast with the busy beaver problem and how much can be done with a small handful of instructions.

This is the post that should be required reading before anyone spins up a Kubernetes cluster for their side project.

Rigor is the whole point of math. The moment you start asking if there is too much of it you are solving a different problem.

Rigor is not the whole point of math. Understanding is. Rigor is a tool for producing understanding. For a further articulation of this point, see

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236

This conflates rigor with proof. Proof is the solve to the argument you are making. Rigor is how carefully and correctly the argument is made. You can understand something without rigor but you cannot prove it.

> You can understand something without rigor but you cannot prove it.

I think I disagree. There are formal proofs and informal proofs, there are rigorous proofs and less rigorous proofs. Of course, a rigorous proof requires rigor, but that’s close to tautological. What makes a proof is that it convinces other people that the consequent is true. Rigor isn’t a necessary condition for that.

Rigor is one solution to mutual understanding Bourbaki came up with that in turn led to making math inaccessible to most humans as it now takes regular mathematicians over 40 years to get to the bleeding edge, often surpassing their brain's capacity to come up with revolutionary insights. It's like math was forced to run on assembly language despite there were more high-level languages available and more apt for the job.

> It's like math was forced to run on assembly language despite there were more high-level languages available and more apt for the job.

I'm not a mathematician but that doesn't sound right to me. Most math I did in school is comprised concepts many many layers of abstraction away from its foundations. What did you mean by this?

My math classes were theorem, lemma, proof all day long, no conceptualization, no explanation; low-level formulas down to axioms. Sink or swim, figure it out on your own or fail.

If rigor is the whole point why are we so focused on classical math (eg classical logic) not the wider plurality?

How does that relate at all? Classical logic is not any less rigorous than other kinds of logic.

Because if rigor is all we cared about I’d think we’d spend more time on non-classical math.

It seems you have never tried to prove anything using a proof assistant program. It will demand proofs for things like x<y && y<z => x<z and while it should have that built in for natural numbers, woe fall upon thee who defines a new data type.