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OK, so bet. Someone sends you footage of the moon landing. You want to know if it's real. Turns out you're actually asking three different questions — and two of them are now solvable. 🧵 (1/5)

Has it been edited? Did it actually come from NASA — or someone pretending? Did the moon landing actually happen? We mash all three into "real" and argue forever. The first two now have mechanical answers. The third never will. That's not a hole — that's the whole point. (2/5)

Three results, live, against rmichaelthomas.com: ✅ real clip → ATTESTED & RECOGNIZED ❌ one byte changed → REJECTED ❌ signed by an impostor → ORIGIN UNCONFIRMED Each attack caught by a different check. Built on a couple of languages I made that compute what a file can do before it runs. (3/5)

A tool that claimed to prove truth would be worse than no tool at all — the checkmark would launder the fakes it was meant to catch. This clears away the answerable questions so the only one left is the honest one: do you trust the source? That was always the real question. (4/5)

No platform, no account, no authority in the middle. A person with a domain and a key can attest their own video and anyone can check it. (5/5) The longer write-up; thank you for rocking with me! rmichaelthomas.com/rmichaelthom...

i am long provenance lol

i have been working on some stuff too for representing common transformation functions over byte segments so they're more robust, so you sign hash(f(blob)) instead of signing hash(blob)

Ah, ok, I see. OK I'll send you this doc for sure. I've been playing with polyglots and that's where some of this work came from and was inspired by.

gonna read the thing; very slow today (did not sleep much lol)