Re: [friam] Delegation is the Cornerstone of Civilization: Sharing in Sandstorm.io

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:08 AM, 'Ben Laurie' via friam <
friam-/[email protected]> wrote:

> On 8 May 2015 at 15:46, 'Mark S. Miller' via friam
> <friam-/[email protected]> wrote:
> > Speaking only for myself:
> >
> > I am not aware of any user testing of this issue. User testing is of
> course
> > great if someone foots the bill. But we should also remember that we all
> > make zillions of decisions based on intuition and guesses not backed by
> > studies. We cannot afford to do anything else. So lack of user study
> should
> > indeed raise our uncertainty, but it should not mean "we have no idea
> until
> > a study is done". Rather, we do what we do with a zillion decisions we
> make
> > all the time without being able to afford a study -- we argue and
> criticize
> > and build systems and see how people like them.
>
> The reason I ask is because to date we have done a terrible job of
> usability in this space, so I don't buy that our intuitions are worth
> much. I've been doing some work with a UX researcher recently on
> end-to-end crypto, another area in which we have traditionally done a
> terrible job, and the gap between what I think users think and what
> they actually think is astonishing.
>

Also looking forward to a write up! Any specific results you can tell us
about in the meantime?




>
> > Regarding the auto-joining, I strongly share this intuition about humans
> vs
> > machines. Much of the difference between the Pet Name Markup Language
> > <http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/pnml.html> vs Lambda Calculus is
> > based on this same intuition.
>
> Since you mention it, a couple of comments:
>
> a) <pn>Bob<s/>Mom</pn> seems to me to be doing violence to XML or HTML
> or whatever markup it is you think you're using.
>

XML. Do you see anything about it that doesn't conform to XML?

(Not that I care about XML anymore; but that's another matter)




>
> b) The idea of looking up "Mom" in "Bob"'s namespace seems to violate
> the intent of petnames - i.e. I don't care who Bob thinks his Mom is,
> I care who _I_ think it is.
>

Interesting and valid point. Never occurred to me. Smalltalk '72 (yes,
1972) used 's (apostrophe ess) for what modern languages use infix dot for.
Your observation points out an important semantic difference: "Bob.Mom"
would be more readily understood by programmers are who Bob's Mom is
according to Bob, rather than who I think his mom is. But only by
programmers unfortunately.


>
> c) You want to be able to express more complex relationships, I
> would've thought, e.g. Bob's Mom's cleaner.
>

<pn>Bob<s/>Mom<s/>cleaner</pn>

This is subject to the same issue of course -- is this Bob's Mom's cleaner
according to Bob? Bob's Mom? or according to the person that is Bob's Mom
according to Bob? pnml says the last, which as you point out differs from
natural language. But that's already your issue #b. I don't see how #c
raises any additional issues.





>
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:05 AM, 'Ben Laurie' via friam
> > <friam-/[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 5 May 2015 at 17:58, Kenton Varda <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> > Hi Cap-talk and Friam,
> >> >
> >> > Thought you'd find this interesting. We announced the first iteration
> of
> >> > Sandstorm's new sharing model today, borrowing a quote from Marc. :)
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-05-05-delegation-is-the-cornerstone-of-civilization.html
> >> >
> >> > Note that we're talking about sharing between humans here, which is
> why
> >> > we
> >> > allow capabilities from multiple sources to be auto-joined from the
> >> > user's
> >> > point of view. Humans get confused if they have multiple caps for the
> >> > same
> >> > document with different rights.
> >>
> >> I am curious: have you done any usability testing of this model? If
> >> so, have you published the results? If not, why not? Would you like
> >> to?
> >>
> >> > But for sharing between computers
> >> > (capability passing between apps) we will do no such thing.
> >> >
> >> > -Kenton
> >> >
> >> > --
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >     Cheers,
> >     --MarkM
> >
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-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

  Cheers,
  --MarkM

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