In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution. There are places where this is unthinkable.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
Yes, that’s because the public has ideologies and corporate interests, and no common idea of what it means “to serve the public”.
Compared to Russia it is, but there’s a lower threshold to start having rights, expressed in money you have to spend on lawyers.
In case of Russia no amount of money is enough to make it democratic and lawful even in some separate, specific, one can even say - personal, situation.
It’s the fallacy of “if it’s bad here, that means that other bad place is similarly bad”, no, that other bad place is an order of magnitude worse, but you are refusing to accept that due to lack of experience. And there’s “worse” someplace else. In many other places, actually.
Pedos sharing their stuff spoil spaces quite a bit.
I mean, it’s far nicer to look for pr0n, or even sfw material, without looking at results with pedo keywords in title sometimes. Talking about ed2k. While I’ve stopped using it lately due to simply not pirating as much, and especially not looking for that specific pr0n movie with that specific one actress that’s nowhere to be found, which ed2k is best for, - honestly that part might have been the main subconscious reason. Moderation is good. Horse porn is funny (it’s technically animal abuse, but the way horse breeding works it’s not that much different) to find, gore seems to be a thing of the past, but that I don’t like.
Nazis are usually those harmless folks posting their, eh, literature, and sometimes long hardly understandable posts about race and alternative history. Usually that’s all text. Their, eh, music is generally not forbidden and available on mainstream sites.
OK, what I was even trying to say - there’s a difference between stinky ideology and crime records being shared, the latter is far more repealing. I’m not afraid of reading yet another post about Hyperborea, Aryans, space lizards and such. I am afraid of occasionally happening upon a murder recording. EDIT1: Or a rape recording.
EDIT2: At the same time some people seem to think that some media being usable for secret communications of a group that sometimes somewhere wishes to raise an armed rebellion or something like that is closer to the latter than to the former, for me it isn’t.
It’s “our brave resistance agents against their dirty terrorists” kind of thinking. People have aversion to perceiving Nazis as same as them by any criterion.
Wrong lesson. All the ways to track you combined don’t leave you an outlet.
Signal is fine to make you feel better.
It’s a social problem that should be solved by social, not technical, means. Awareness, law, burning tires.
EDIT: for moral clarity’s sake - I live in Russia, I’m not spreading awareness mostly, I’m not trying to change any law and sure as hell I’m not burning tires ; but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda, you might try those
Well, it makes sense, that if sex sells (and also rallies, look at 30s’ and 40s’ propaganda), then believable digital succubi are the most expected application of computers once that becomes possible.
It’s actually funny how, looking at stuff retrospectively, the main change of 60s was less idealized sexuality in art and propaganda and artifacts like that, but more in participatory culture.
Things like pr0n in the Internet are sometimes described as continuation of that, I think they are more of a reversal. Pr0n helps to make things taboo.
Not for everyone, of course, but for people with social disabilities. Of the very kind that join radical groups, listen to romanticist (in the XIX century meaning of the word) music, and/or, like me, just kick rocks till being 30 for everything social.
It’s the difference between participatory and herd culture in general. Say, 00s’ Web, where people would have simple webpages, against today’s Web, where technical ability to do something doesn’t matter because people almost fear those doing anything outside of big platforms with company employees as invisible herders. It’s weird, freaky, strange. As if you were doing something illegal.
Those who participate can’t be led by promise of satisfying this or that desire. With the Web example, look at Telegram ; it’s not secure despite its creators almost claiming that, but it does satisfy the desire for having conversation spaces similar to Web forums, with easy discovery ; on most big platforms, that’s made intentionally inconvenient to make people reliant upon recommendations, and recommendations are formed to satisfy advertising conversion goals.
Now, that’s a desire rather high in Maslow pyramid. Sex is far more basic and important for control.
I’ve also recently seen a few Facebook posts by one good newspaper’s main editor, with his excitement about Claude, mostly on using it to learn and think about anthropological stuff. So it’s an intellectual succubus as well. Pretty smart people are vulnerable in the same general way as those lonely people, just with a different profile.
Eh, sorry, but that’s a valid instinct and interest. Yep, someone fully realized as a person and with good social surroundings won’t likely want that. Plenty of people are unfortunately not.
Now when you’re not getting any hints or do have good social surroundings yet go for such a bait, you are not very wise and might not be a good person.
But - sometimes English-speaking Web seems kinda puritan still.
If you are going to answer that last part with observation that such comments are cringe and unlikely to attract another person in a non-puritan setting as well, I am aware of that. Clumsiness exists, stupidity exists, various wounds exist. Have some humanity.
Not even CEOs, you can see various (at some point failed due to low quality high expenses workforce, that can now be replaced with AI, you get the idea) entrepreneurs and non-techies on Facebook write long excited posts about Claude.
About a computer program and a dataset running completely outside their control and scrutiny. Like white colonizers selling rifles to natives, but not machinery to make those rifles. Or ammunition, but not machinery to produce it. Or colored glass, but not technical processes to make said colored glass.
CEOs are right to be excited, they might be able to afford the real thing - self-hosted and with the accompanying processes, like healthy datasets, experienced people, nuances of adjusting models, stuff like that.
But people who are being shown that they can be replaced sufficiently well by a machine, that has another little trait of being completely adjustable - that I can’t understand.
Someone interested in humanitarian sciences and art being excited that there’s a machine parroting them well enough to replace them, except that machine can also be made to produce those things to fascist ends, - I don’t understand that.
Well, they are right, you just have to define “fit” in terms of intelligence and tool use, as is narrated in schools to describe the difference between a man and a chimp. And they are clearly not fit, don’t be like them, they are a bad branch.
I seriously hate this market so much.
People contribute to it. People don’t leave for alternative markets without central networked service dependency. Such alternative markets would need financial power to contribute to their survival (of course there’d be pressure to kill them), and for that they need to grow. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
Until enough people get burned by it, nothing will change. When they will, it’ll still be very uncertain, because there are harder and easier markets to make money. P2P applications make little money, because of their advantages being downsides for those trying to commercially sell them, for example. Providing infrastructure makes more money, but still less than platforms, where you sell infrastructure, connectivity, moderation and advertising simultaneously.
So when it’s only professionals’ and businesses’ choice, we lose and platforms win. They need to eat something, they prefer to eat better than to build a better world where someone else will say “thank you” to them and that’s all.
Conscious customer associations and education are mechanisms that might eventually change things, but that will take time, because both have been unbalanced by the insane amount of money tech industry has raised in the last 20 years and will raise more. Society takes time to adapt. Then it’ll be so-so, not good and not terrible, like with most things.
I was born in 1996, but the older generation (it’s Russia) that remembers Soviet schools sometimes remembers Soviet educational PCs. Those were a few series, I don’t remember names, the point is there were Apple II clones and there were PDP-11 clones (but in PC form factor, even with networking ability in the sense of there being one master machine and slave machines booting from it ; but those were not terminals).
So, that older generation remembers as if something normal being taught to program in BASIC, FORTRAN, later C or Pascal and operate machines. Soviet life was quite a lot poorer than even 90s despite all the retroactive disdain for that decade, still informatics classes were apparently at least educationally useful and had at least one operable machine usually.
The 90s generations at least got some computer instruction of general use.
And my generation got Windows machines and no real understanding by anyone what informatics classes are even for. Unless it’s some special school or at least with math focus.
Things people were taught in the 80s and which somehow don’t transition at all to their operation of modern PCs, that contrast still terrifies me.
So - it’s the same everywhere, it seems, because of the idea prevalent in the 00s that my generation is going to just wing it because of being exposed to electronics since childhood. An absolutely nutcase and absolutely winning (in the sense of popularity) idea.
I even have a pre-school brochure somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, with algorithmic problems and solutions. The earlier the better.
One can think in paranoid/cynical ways - “fools are easier to rule” or “so that’s why they were pushing hacker movies in the 90s to scare everyone”. I honestly think it was just fear of some day being less than capable of understanding the technology we rely upon to keep breathing. And that fear is unsubstantiated, because similarly to that most people don’t understand city planning, logistics, oil refineries, electrical engineering and one can go on. But due to that fear of singularity it was easier to start imagining that somehow new generations will gain hard knowledge naturally.
But even that wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for Microsoft. Hate them with passion. EDIT: For managing to sell, coerce and impose their monopoly upon the world and upon education most of all
More oligopolies than cartels, but zaibatsu are a common stereotype as something culturally normal for Japan, yes.
Of what I’ve read about Japan, a cartel being considered something bad in the society is an improvement.
Ah, yes, the bigger the company, the more willing to save something negligible on tools its business depends upon.
Honestly that’s why I wish more of FOSS were hobbyist like AROS, Haiku and such. FOSS projects shouldn’t be too readily usable by businesses, that allows bullshit shops with arrogant pigeon management to keep existing without building proper processes.
I mean, there’s some equilibrium here probably, but with what projects get from businesses bigger than nation-states using their work, - we’re far from it.
At the same time there are things like Java, PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx and so on. I don’t know.
It just seems sometimes that FOSS breaks market mechanisms in favor of big businesses not giving back to the rest of economy, which seems the opposite of its intuitively and emotionally perceived goal.
But maybe archivers are not it. Not a fan of the idea of having a set of 10 different archivers all often needed, like people did in the 90s. OK, I was a baby in the 90s. Many people didn’t have PCs in the 90s.
But can we just go back to weak connectivity (say, asynchronous message exchange of everyone to everyone via BT ; global cryptographic identities and message ids, sort of a global p2p cryptographically contracted Usenet), a zoo of common operating systems and hardware platforms, evolution, competition, geekiness, interesting things.
An interesting thought for sure, a thought about preparing for winter with, eh, expected uncertainty and fuel crisis started to form in my head. Like framing the balconies and additionally insulating old balcony doors and such stuff. Not even speaking about a reserve of matches, salt, sugar, canned meat and such.
Efficiency of processes is different in every situation, including long-standing ones, like one area having plenty of seawater and some other area having just lots of sand, some places being moderate-temperatured and some like central Siberia with hot summers and cold winters, things like that.
Meaning that one can’t say that gas cars are “better for the planet” or “worse for the planet” than EVs. Period.
This study is true for some set of conditions, but it’s pretty clear that people referring to it will use it outside of the scope.
There are better arguments than unprovable claims. Say, EVs use “universalized” energy, that is, can be charged from the grid, while gas cars require different kinds of gas depending on the specific engine and regulatory requirements. EVs have electric machines in them, pretty similar to those in electric trains or whatever else, but that’s not as important as less wear and more universality. EVs in theory should require less maintenance, but since these are usually new fancy cool things, their electronic components might have the common downsides of all new cars. Fire hazards are different between them. On the other side, gasoline can be stored more easily.
I mean, one would think civilization can exist without choosing just one.
I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.
That aside - my point is that this was expected.
And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.
WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.
I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.
But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It’s just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.
That’s good. It also means that a real job can’t be “done by AI”.
It’s another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.
It accelerates the most things that shouldn’t be done at all. Boilerplate code that’s written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.
That’s useful, one can’t do everything by hand.
Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one’s own life for like 20 years - that they can’t do. And that’s what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn’t matter.