Jesse Gibson @PsychoLlama@fosstodon.org

@Mehrad Bitwarden has a dead man's switch, but it doesn't require a quorum. A single emergency contact can initiate and take control of your account if you don't respond in time. I think Lastpass works the same way.

In other words, you can leverage the security of digital and physical systems *without* giving up your security in return.

Further, you can combine this with different security models. Generate a key majority for personal use and store them in a safety deposit box. The bank doesn't have enough to unseal the crypt, but neither do your trustees until the bank sees a death certificate.

But even granting this level of access, you still retain perfect control. You can revoke keys at any time by regenerating the secret. You can foil mutiny attempts by responding to the alerts. Nothing is released until you're dead or comatose.

This is interesting because if you die or go into a coma, your spouse/trusted administrator doesn't have to guess where you kept all the accounts, can publish your GH repos, see your encrypted files, etc...

If you don't respond before the waiting period expires, the service opens the final phase: Enter all the keys and the master password is revealed.

To unlock the crypt, they visit this service and start the decryption process which begins a waiting period, blasting out an alert to every device you own. If you respond, decryption is halted and the alert is reset.

The service takes your vault's master password and encrypts it with a shamir seal, producing a configurable number of keys over a configurable threshold. The result is saved somewhere safe.

Distribute these keys to people you trust.

App idea: master password escrow service, backed by a shamir seal and dead man's switch.

Is this a pipe dream? Absolutely. Am I completely decoupled from reality? Maybe. Is this just an elaborate advertisement for Factorio? You decide.

Factories start to resemble instruction sets in a CPU. "Compute fabric with parameters 'X' and store result in register 1". Factories may grow from a single instruction set (analogous to t-shirt designs today) to 100s of supported instructions.

What if these production lines were integrated with one another, where your file described a sequence of manufacturing steps, like outputting a towel from factory A and sending it to an embroidery line at factory B?

As production lines are automated, will we see more services like this? Maybe a fabric file that produces a t-shirt, or a recipe markup language that results in simple food products.

> what if manufacturing was immutable?

This idea is stuck in my head. Does 3D printing count? What about CNC machining or laser cutting? Once you create a build description (.stl file) production should result in the same artifact now and 10 years from now. I can print it locally or have a 3rd party ship it to me.

@rridley markdown files. Simple, malleable, easy to sync, plenty of tooling. I have a "journal" file that lists goals under yyyy-mm-dd headers. Any important tasks that didn't get completed yesterday get copied to the new day.

It's not a pretty system, but it always works.

@cespinoza

> If you observe nature, there's nothing immutable about it

We can fix that!

> We need to feel safe [...]

True. And it's definitely a lot easier to build tools/houses/systems in a consistent environment. Maybe immutability is a natural human defense against entropy.

I honestly can't tell if this is reductionist or an epiphany.

What if everything was immutable?

- what if app state was immutable?
- what if file systems were immutable?
- what if infrastructure was immutable?
- what if networks were immutable?
- what if social media was immutable?
- what if manufacturing was immutable?
- what if government policies were immutable?