Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm seems to imply that low cost, ubiquitous transactions would lead to a reduction in the size of corporations generally, which might do something to redress the imbalance of power between individuals and corporations as well.
I was being somewhat pedantic in my previous reply, I realise they mean tracking cookies and the likes
As for putting session IDs in URLs I would not advise that in any way, that's one unsanitized href away from Google being logged in as and indexing your user's private account data if done badly and a nasty bout of session fixation if done less badly. More information here: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/14094
>Hypothetically some type systems could partially cover some of the things you've labelled as "no", but I'll aggressively beat you to the punch that such things are very hypothetical, except I'll be saying it with sadness and through grinding teeth, because I find it frustrating how thoroughly our environments ignore some issues like that. But that's a rant for a century I don't expect to live to see.
I'd agree with you, except that just this morning I was reading a paper about the NARCISSUS framework that can automatically generate encoders and decoders that provably conform to a given specification, and can be extended by a user without rewriting or modifying the framework itself. The authors even patched a networking stack (in MirageOS) with the not-especially-optimized ML extracted from their generated code and showed a performance hit that could be considered acceptable for real-life use cases.
With advances like this in program synthesis and formal verification, plus real progress in machine learning, it feels like we're living in the start of the age that was _supposed_ to happen during the golden age of AI.
(Excuse the gushing hyperbole. My coffee must have been stronger than usual this morning.)
Well, she certainly proved that there's at least one problem whose solution she can sometimes produce faster unaided than at least one high school student with a calculator.
