They were smart, those oiled fish-eating goatfuckers. So maybe yes, that - and also sortition and ostracism.

Exactly, it’s a tool to whitewash decisions. A machine that seemingly does not exactly what it should do. A way to shake off responsibility.

And that it won’t ever work right is its best trait for this purpose. They’ll be able to blame every transgression or wrong where they are caught on an error in the system, and get away with the rest.

At least unless it’s legally equated to using Tarot cards for making decisions affecting lives. That should disqualify the fiend further as a completely inadequate human being, not absolve them of responsibility.

Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.

In this particular case - I don’t think it’s more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.

It’s an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there’s a need to compensate. Both are wrong.

I can imagine one - maintaining adversarial interop with proprietary systems. Like a self-adjusting connector for Facebook for some multi-protocol chat client. Or if there’s going to be a Usenet-like system with global identities of users and posts, a mapping of Facebook to that. Siloed services don’t expose identifiers and are not indexed, but that’s with our current possibilities. People do use them and do know with whom they are interacting, so it’s possible to make an AI-assisted scraper that would expose Facebook like a newsgroup to that.

Ah. Profitable. I dunno.

Keep them informed, of course they care about your opinion, especially seeing how anyplace else in the world where such things were introduced there were successful revolutions and people doing that ended up in jail. Oops.

Frugal tech idea and degrowth are more capitalist than a handful of monopolies owning you in every orifice and billing you for it.

If by “capitalism” we don’t mean paleo-industrialism of XIX-century aristocrats with monocles and child labor. If we do mean the “free market with protections for property, rights, safety and anti-monopoly regulations yadda-yadda” moderate-normal-classical model.

“Rich people” should be replaced with “authority”, which is more general. Otherwise yes.

I also think that if George Lucas violates some law during operation of his museum, he will get all the problems intended by the law. He’s not involved in building a digital concentration camp, he’s also not an Epstein island visitor, and he’s actually a rare example of a famous person who honestly should be richer than they are. At the same time there are different dimensions of “rich”. The fact that his museum actually happens makes me feel <erased, too personal>.

OK, I can’t be impartial about Lucas, of the people big in various parts of humanity he’s among the few who haven’t betrayed their picture in my childhood one bit. Star Wars is the most anti-fascist, anti-evil, anti-mediocrity, anti-surrender, living thing that I know (other than the living things like earth, wind, water, plants, animals and humans, but you get the idea).

It’s the general modus of today, exposing corruption is illegal and extremism, fixing intentional sabotage is illegal and against IP law, catching pedophiles is illegal and a stalking attack on respected people like Sourgay Brin and Mark Suckerberg. Bypassing censorship is illegal and making tools for criminals. Bypassing propaganda is illegal and inciting to violence. Laughing at unsubstantiated demands is illegal and a challenge to elected or other authority.

It’s slowly drifting to the point where “illegal” is trying to make sense in what’s allowed and what’s not, and “legal” is having approval from power.

A mafia world.

This and many other things is why I always thought that even from the viewpoint of “common good” reverse engineering, copying and disassembly and whatever else of everything digitally stored should be absolutely immune to the law. Otherwise it’s illegal to know if the other side is breaking the law to sue it.

That’s not how I meant it when 10 years ago talking about regulations being a bad thing.

I meant starting with copyright =\

“AI tool”.

I live in Russia and I’m pissed that they are making its gang in power look almost competent in comparison.

Honestly even in the late 90s it was going down. I don’t think DEC or Amiga or something else cool you can remember have anything to do with the Silicon Valley.

After the original Intel and other hardware things fame, it’s a place that mostly collected parasites living off the dotcom bubble and then profanation and oligopolization of tech. The least important part - the companies making suddenly popular user applications and websites. Their main effect was negative - they reduced diversity, competition and redundancy in that.

In any case … “AI startups”.

I’m so morally prepared to dance when that bubble finally bursts. A lot of today’s rattling of sabers depends on the promise of AI workers, AI drones, AI everything so that a crime would involve only a few real humans.

Suppose I agree, but the plant is cool.

Mega-NPP maybe?

Not really, there’s an OR logical element present in our world.

Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible.

And the “80%” and “20%” solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators).

Nobody does that because the “80% solution” producer wants to capture you, they don’t want alternatives, they want power, and it’s a honeypot.

It’s up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn’t it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it’s much more important.

As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings … you get the idea.

Technology is developed by people to fulfill their goals, more interest - more power - more developed technology.

Hence big tech is where it is, and meshnets-p2p-cipherpunk is where it is.

I don’t think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.

The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them “for merit”.

Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.

Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you’d have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.

Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you’ll have Stalin’s time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you’ll have Nazi Germany’s industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.

SpaceX does launches and Starlink does satellite internet.

I think all the Musk hate here misses that moment - SpaceX does what it’s intended to do which is amazingly cool all by itself, Tesla made electric cars more popular, and Starlink made satellite internet more popular.

These are good.

Musk yes, but there are quite a few Ukrainian servicemen not happy, I think.

USA hasn’t yet built anything like “three gorges” hydroelectric plant, tho

Authority is the right word, nothing in this is about actual products or traditional economic value.

It’s feudal (or crook) impression economy. That “AI” is liked by people who can afford to continuously waste money on it. Such schedules are liked by the same people. They are the “Silicon Valley elite” or whatever.

I’ve read once a description by Russia’s ambassador to Persia during Qajars how this historically worked.

So - Qajar Persian court, they’ve received, say, 2 (I don’t remember, maybe 6) modern (for that moment) Russian cannons as a gift. What do they do with the cannons? The cannons stay with the court and are shot for fun at an empty ground with no aim, while the whole court and the monarch moan “ja-a-a-n” with every shot.

It’s the same. The oligopolization of tech has made these people so much money and connections with other such people who have money, that they don’t care about results at all. It’s all shared impressions of what they “already have”. They don’t have to “run to stay on the same place”. They don’t have to compete - they collectively own search, social media, what we use instead of pen and paper, everything.

Or a more traditional example (I might have gotten the years wrong, but I think the idea doesn’t suffer) - a bunch of knights in XV-century tournament armor are not a very good army compared to cuirassed musketeers with a wagenburg and actual discipline, but the societies are built the way that those real soldiers are very rare, expensive and present only in select important areas during real honest-to-god war. While on their tournament the gentry may pretend it’s still XII century and they are competing in useful things.

Oh. I want a droideka bodyguard.