Actually, formal verification could help massively with four of those problems — all but the first (UI/UX) and fifth (requirements will always be hard).
A change in the API of a dependency should be detected immediately and handled silently.
Reliance on unspecified behavior shouldn't happen in the first place; the client's verification would fail.
Detecting breakage caused by library changes should be where verification really shines; when you get the update, you try to re-run your verification, and if that fails, it tells you what the problem is.
As for interconnected systems, again, that's pretty much the whole point. Obviously, achieving this dream will require formalizing pretty much everything, which is well beyond our capabilities now. But eventually, with advances in AI, I think it will be possible. It will take something fundamentally better than today's LLMs, though.
The thing to understand about the LVT is that we are pretty much all already paying it; not to the city in which we live, but to the previous owners of the land we live on. When we buy a house, we have to pay the previous owner a certain amount for the land. That amount is the present value of the expected income stream that could, hypothetically, be realized by renting out the land. Divide by the number of months in our mortgage term and multiply by the interest rate, and the result is our effective monthly LVT.
All George is saying is that that money should be going to the city (or other controlling locality) instead of the previous owner, because it's the city that created the value in the first place.
Do you really think Putin would hesitate to arrest him if he did that?
Snowden knows he is being watched closely. I suppose that is itself a reason to take what he says with a grain of salt, but I certainly don't take his silence on the Ukraine war as evidence of assent.
It's just not like Snowden of the past to endorse apps with bad privacy defaults and non encrypted group chats like Telegram. I'd have understood if he had said the same if the CEO of Signal was arrested, but I can't understand it for Telegram, an app that's mostly not used in an e2e encrypted way.
Telegram is also an app that is widely used by Russian troops to organize and also for dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It's just not characteristic of Snowden to endorse apps that could potentially be honeypots/backdoored, and to equate such apps as important to free speech.
I've read somewhere that Seymour Cray used to write his entire operating system in absolute octal. ("Absolute" means no relocation; all memory accesses and jumps must be hand-targeted to the correct address, as they would have to be with no assembler involved.)
A change in the API of a dependency should be detected immediately and handled silently.
Reliance on unspecified behavior shouldn't happen in the first place; the client's verification would fail.
Detecting breakage caused by library changes should be where verification really shines; when you get the update, you try to re-run your verification, and if that fails, it tells you what the problem is.
As for interconnected systems, again, that's pretty much the whole point. Obviously, achieving this dream will require formalizing pretty much everything, which is well beyond our capabilities now. But eventually, with advances in AI, I think it will be possible. It will take something fundamentally better than today's LLMs, though.
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