This looks excellent - I outlined wanting something like a cross between Lua and Bash back in 2016, and at first glance, it would seem that this project by and large fits the bill: https://github.com/stuartpb/lash
I tried to prototype my own implementation of `vidir` in Node.JS a while back (not realizing that it existed under this name in moreutils), and I ended up getting derailed after realizing how incomplete Node.JS's support was for getting the group / username corresponding to a G/UID: https://github.com/stuartpb/whomst
> Other than DNA sequences I can't think of a good person key.
In theory, one could use 3D geoposition at time of birth, time of birth, and sibling order (for twins / triplets / etc delivered surgically), where said order is dictated by the parent(s) or ob/gyn present. Of course, the main problem with this in practice is that not everybody has this information.
I would have said you could do something via retinal imagery, but not everybody has eyes. If we had non-invasive neural imagery, would it maybe be possible to derive a key from a simplification of a person's physical brain topology?
> But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.
Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.
While I first wrote an article about the absurdities of information security [in 2011][1], this specific extension is an idea I've had since [June 2015][2] - due to the absurd nature of the idea, I wanted to launch it on April Fools' Day, but that ended up causing it to be [dismissed as a joke out of hand altogether][3], so I figured I'd wait a day before posting it to Hacker News.
While the premise of the extension sounds like a joke, it's legitimately a good idea, and [one others have had independent of this][4]. I explain some of the thoughts and motivations behind NilPass's design here: https://nilpass.com/seriously/
Holy crap, really? I've been drawing up [profiles for the user account systems of a bunch of websites for the past few years][1], and I think I've only seen that once before (on a Washington State website, no less).
Precisely - calling it an "encoding" here is more of a tongue-in-cheek nod to how simple the steganographic rule is than an intention to imply that it be used as a straightforward representation.
Also, "steganography" tends to imply that the intent is to hide the underlying message, and that's not necessarily the case here, such as when employing alphabi for mnemonic purposes ("Baywatch hologram lemonade asteroid" being easier to remember than "52.84.24.108").
Furthermore, the purpose of the "encoding" being so flexible (and, consequently, low-density) is that it can be used, then, as a medium of expression - it's not that the "message" is hidden, it's that, well, [the medium is the message][], and per Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights linked there (emphasis mine):
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
So, this is an idea I had a while back, inspired by how ideas like [illegal primes][] are fundamentally irrepressible as free speech, due to the intrinsically fluid nature of abstract data.
It's not just useful on a free-speech axis, though: in terms of just bare usability, it opens the door for a simple way to represent arbitrary numbers (like IP addresses) mnemonically, without having to lug around huge arbitrary dictionaries that might have proprietary restrictions to them, like the one what3words uses to encode geo coordinates.
I'm interested in hearing what uses Hacker News readers could come up with for this, and other thoughts around these kinds of concepts.
Yeah, I posted an edit within an hour after posting the original article - I hadn't read the further takes mentioning that the lookups were A records. I'd only read the comments in a Reddit thread, where people were saying they couldn't understand what the article was describing.
EDIT: I've withdrawn the article. When it comes to the facts presented therein, to borrow a phrase, what was good wasn't new, and what was new wasn't good.