@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems @dgerard@awful.systems To add a note on computer verifiable proofs, a story from my own PhD (Cryptography).

It was the night before either the submission-deadline or the deadline for the rebuttal for PQ-Wireguard. Andy and Peter had already retired for the night, basically announcing that they would do the final touches in the morning, with Kai-Chun and me instead working late to finish some TODOs and in exchange being done the following day.

I pretty much got most of the stuff I had been working on done and moved to the Tamarin proofs for some editorial work there and noticed that a statement, for which we had a Tamarin verified proof didn't seem to make sense. As in: I could give a counter-example in the form of an instantiation of PQ-WG, where that property would be trivially not there! (I believe it was anonymity and that trivially doesn't hold for any KEMs where the ciphertext reveals the public key, which is not something that is at all incompatible with standard KEM-notions.)

Turns out: Tamarin works in an idealized model and what the proof actually meant was more akin to “There is nothing fundamental in your model that prevents PQ-WG from having that property if you instantiation doesn't add problems there”.

Which is a very different statement of course!

The end of the story was basically that we called out supervisors late at night, when their work-days really were meant to be over and they wanted to spend time with their partners, that the house was on fire and what we should do.

IIRC the final version of the paper mostly states something along the lines of “it holds if the KEMs don't leak it”, but the important thing here is that this was computer-verified, just in a model that turned out to be insufficient.

And no, I don't think anyone here did anything wrong. When I approached Cas Cremers with the issue later his response was also kinda “yeah, symbolic models really struggle in that area”.

And furthermore: I am the last person to deny the need for computer-verifiable proofs, textual proofs have turned out to be disasters, but we really need to be aware of what can go wrong and what they mean.

@DagwoodIII@piefed.social I can’t help to severely doubt that piece: Maintaining the pure lawn is just not that labor intensive in Europe; maintaining the hedges and flowers-beds and things like that is what takes much more work, but those are not what we are talking about here, yet they are the things we actually tend to find as prestige part of those palaces.

Like, look at the following picture: This was nowhere near anything that could in any way be considered prestigious for anything but the nature there, and it clearly doesn’t get much maintenance, yet it is basically regular lawn without much human interference.

And if that is how nature looks like, how would it impress anyone if you had that around a manor? It just doesn’t check out as a prestige thing. The only loud complaints I hear about these kinds of lawns are from the US, where the climate is not really suitable for them and people waste tons of water to maintain them.

When I listen to specialists on medieval stuff talking (and to be fair, I am far less interested in the post-medival times and I know that that is when a lot of things really started turning to shit) and what was used back then for prestige, we are talking about the size of the Donjon in a castle, about festivities and things like that. Nobody ever mentioned the size of a grass lawn.

@prettybunnys@piefed.social I'm primarily taking issue with the notion of “everything bad was invented by the evil medieval aristocracy to be the largest possible assholes against everyone else”, when the culture at the time was extremely reliant on mutual respect to the point where something like that was not commonly going to fly.

But I will also say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a grass-lawn, I like to be able to do things like this, as I have done in my parents backyard when I was still living there and as I still do from time to time when I visit.

And yes, nowadays there are extreme summers where they sometimes have a rough time, but the universally awful problems of the US are not really applicable here in central Europe (or at least not yet).

@DagwoodIII@piefed.social @NickEast_IndieWriter@mastodon.art [citation needed]

Seriously, we need to stop portraing socoeties that were in quite a few ways less dysfunctional than ours as these backwards places based on vibes informed by bullshit historical fiction.

The history is more complicated and in many climates lawns aren't hard to maintain at all (read: rain does the job of watering) and it is nice to lay on the grass or walk on it, which you can't do in an overgrown field. Both have their place!

(That it was used to attack black people in the US via HOAs, is a specifuc story, specifuc to one shitty country!)