I mean, he worked (before going feral) in the place where much of what made our world different from the 80s was pioneered. Even if we hear about Berkeley or Stanford more.

It’s a situation where you want to follow those having potentially the best inside information. About the culture of the people involved, about their ideas.

It’s still unsettling how in Tolkien’s world Melkor is the weird one out, while the rest of Valar are good. Really seems to be inverted in tech.

And also delay-tolerant not perpetually directly networked systems don’t have to be inconvenient. They are made that by directed effort.

They don’t want to fix it, they want power intended to help fix it, similar to what prison guards have, outside of prisons.

Make trains run by the clock, eh?

He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.

Even better. State programs of giving people bullshit jobs earning their gratitude, loyalty and readiness to join, say, some paramilitary force?

He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.

A knife can be used both for cutting bread and for cutting off heads. And they are.

A gun can be used both for stopping a very bad person and for stopping a very good person. And they are.

And a surveillance net of drones (that can also carry weapons) can be used both for reducing crime and reducing dissent. And it will be.

There are moments when I’m glad I live in a backwards (relatively to the US) country.

I think it’s pretty close, except there’s more pluralism of power.

There are different scientists. Some want the world only populated by people of their race, only speaking their language (or other languages changed so that every translation were linear), and only with their ideal system of government.

With Covid vaccines it wasn’t like this. And I should remind you of Theranos and its backers.

s/admits/boasts/

russification of the economy ?

As a Russian, what’s that? If you mean oligarchy, you already have it. If you mean unseen parties holding power, you already have it. If you mean the down trajectory and deindustrialization, then perhaps a bit.

This right here is a feature that need not be limited to official servers. Signal is centralized, a kind reminder.

That puts limits on scaling it. Fediverse - honestly too centralized for my taste.

Well, if you compare all this to the Fediverse and Threads, then a national segment being functional in case of a potential self-isolation is kinda fine.

And just how they say that an absolutely secure computer is not networked, doesn’t have media reading devices and is turned off, - most of tech is possibly compromised by the USA.

And some of the jamming really coincides with areas where the explanation about Ukraine makes sense (military locations nearby). I’ve, eh, been in one such yesterday and today morning.

About one app for everything, dystopia and so on - the Internet as a thing is designed this way. Notice how Meta itself came into existence, and Google, and them all. After all, the Internet grew out of a military project, militaries usually have one specific approach to hierarchy and initiative. Would be weird if their system weren’t designed with it in mind.

Of course Putin wants more power and surveillance. But since much of the population already does a lot over VK, it’s not such a big change as it would seem.

Centralization, need to have a big commercial provider which you can pay (as someone in Russia …).

OK, I’ll try it.

Yeah, so I have a paranoid (or maybe not) idea that somewhere in 2012 my classmates and teachers played a prank.

That they were insulted by what I said, and decided to check my words (on Silicon Valley people being more noble than Russian elite class). I thought I was talking to them, but they in fact were recording, translating and sending my words to some of those Silicon Valley people (very improbably high-level). And things pretty normal for me to say as almost a compliment (on democracy and meritocracy and freedom and on racism being bad, and MOST of all - on my privacy being more important than their dreams) insulted those people so much that I’ve got a lot of such privacy invasions. So - that in the end, eh, someone of said elite class solved the problem by wasting one of those Silicon Valley people (there was the added insult of that someone being blamed for the thing).

Dunno how to check and whether I should, cause if it happened, I don’t have a nuke.

It’s also a fscking mess to set up a Usenet downloader, especially since it’d be a bunch of buggy weird stuff ending with -arr in the names and web UIs.

And no, torrenting isn’t outdated and isn’t amateur. In Usenet messages are replicated over all services offering that newsgroup. I hope the downsides are clear.

Some kind of Usenet with global identifiers of messages and posters, and with something like Kademlia to find sources for a specific newsgroup(to get all the other side has in it)/post(to get it specifically)/person(their public key), would be much better than just replicating each message everywhere with a local identifier.

No, you don’t get it, the US has so excelled in pitting others against each other to emerge as one victor, than it’s bringing the thing home. So you are going to weaken yourselves by making a quarreling mess of the old system, then it imploding and some nominally democratic and free new system taking over. Probably simultaneously trying to nuke half of the rest of the world.

As a Russian, honestly these are all sorts of shit with no practical difference for us.

Except for Alaska, some people think it shouldn’t have been sold. And 0.7 mln total population is (far) less than Crimea.

That aside, a confederacy (I guess some other word would be better) of the old US and some more autonomous things, like, for example, California, would possibly be a stabilizer.

Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.

I don’t think you are estimating correctly the amount of energy spent by “evolution” to reach this.

There are plenty of bodies in the universe with nothing like human brain.

You should count the energy not of just Earth’s existence, formation, Solar system’s formation and so on, but much of the visible space around. “Much” is kinda unclear, but converting that to energy so big, so we shouldn’t even bother.

It’s best to assume we’ll never have anything even resembling wetware in efficiency. One can say that genomes of life existing on Earth are similar to fossil fuels, only for highly optimized designs we won’t like ever reach by ourselves. Except “design” might be a wrong word.

Honestly I think at some point we are going to have biocomputers. I mean, we already do, just the way evolution optimized that (giving everyone more or less equal share of computing power) isn’t pleasant for some.

I don’t think she consciously did, but HP definitely features abuse and misuse of authority left and right, main characters fighting and bypassing it, injustice, fascism, evil being attractive (at least in the first two books she deliberately makes the world of pure-blood wizards more “magical” than that of the rest, and Harry almost being accepted to it or thinking he would be, except that’s not so), public judgement being always wrong (talking to snakes, Harry being considered cuckoo, werewolves, and what not), evil being possibly all-poweful (the Taboo spell and such), one can go on and on.

And then Harry becoming an Auror, thus sort of a magical peeler, which is a common criticism - well, law enforcement is a necessary task. In a non-degenerate system that involves preventing murder, rape, stopping human trafficking operations.

It’s funny how people usually start with the HP world mechanics being bad, - unbalanced, arbitrary, calling spells out of thin air, - while that’s how our world works right now, except they teach very little magic here (BTW, Racket is very cool - I’m again stalling at what I’m trying to do, though, just no willpower at all). Also notice Umbridge in the book 5, in the real world fighting evil with something you always carry with yourself and only skill being important is not a thing usually, for most intents and purposes, except computers.

That “…” again. I am.