Enjoy: https://youtu.be/Zh4ze5bWLcI

Also most more recent videos by this guy: https://youtube.com/@foldingideas

That just gives me a nice sense of pride and accomplishment

Why not just write your YAML files in JSON syntax?

JSON is a valid subset of YAML

Ubuntu works just fine. But Canonical has an iffy track record.

Some years ago they bundled an Amazon app with the plain install. For a while it also integrated with the system search by default. So if you searched for a file on your machine, then your search query would also be sent directly to Amazon. You could opt-out but it was enabled by default. Later it was changed to be an opt-in, and I believe it’s entirely removed today.

Besides that they often push technologies that isn’t really fostering the community. When Wayland was slowly gaining traction, Canonical suddenly announced and aggressively pushed Mir, instead of collaborating on Wayland, the preferred making their own alternative.

These days they are pushing their Snaps pretty hard. So back in the day if you apt-get install firefoxyou would get a regular native Firefox install. Today if you do the same it will instead install a Snap of Firefox. Snaps are also a bit funny… Flatpak was gaining traction, and suddenly Canonical decides to build their own alternative instead of contributing to Flatpak.

So all in all, Canonical is making some dodgy business partnerships. The add a good bit of bloat in their regular install, and they constantly build their own (inferior) alternatives to all sorts of stuff.

I’m all for having alternatives and choices, but in Canonical’s case, they generally don’t give you much choice, they just force you to use their alternative. This of course leads to fragmentation, which is unfortunate.

The idea is that you could have your data stored encrypted, such that the entity that is storing your data can’t read any of your data, but can still make calculations or updates to your data without ever learning anything about your data.

The use cases seems rather narrow to me, but there are probably many that I just can’t think of at the moment.

One idea could be something like a VPN service that wants to store as little data about the customer as possible. They could keep the account balance in an encrypted format. When you then add money to the balance, they can increment your balance by however much you paid, without knowing what your old balance was or what the new balance is. And they could then have another homomorphic function that can check whether your balance is positive. If your balance is positive you are allowed onto the service, if it’s not positive you don’t get access. And the company wouldn’t be able to know whether you had $5 in your account or $5000, just that your balance is currently positive.

So yeah fundamentally it’s just being able to store and update some data, while the data is fully encrypted, never decrypting the data, to ensure some form of privacy or confidentiality