vacuumflower
@vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates 6 hours ago:
That was sarcasm. Making a regulation to punish a big corporation that automatically disqualifies everyone smaller is not punishment for it.
- Comment on Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence 1 day ago:
I would like more something like a GPU to become normal, except it’d be an analog unit for kinds of computation vastly more efficient this way, where you don’t need determinism. Some trigonometry and signal processing, perhaps even some of 3d graphics.
- Comment on Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates 1 day ago:
Of course. Make another regulation only big corps can follow. To punish them, of course. This is punishment.
- Comment on Republicans put tech firms in a vise on Kirk social-media posts 2 days ago:
As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs.
That’s not conservatives, that’s most humans.
Now yes, conservatism is about skepticism of any proposed system of interpreting reality to bring solutions. Sort of a chaotic ideology. There are ideologies chaotic too, but opposite in sign about optimism, ancom and ancap similarly for this purpose, or maybe even Soviet communism (which didn’t specify what “communism” itself is other than “no money, no hierarchy, no government”, because that had to be ascertained). These are all about not knowing what specific system is good or bad, generally, but having an idea of approaching that good or avoiding that bad.
There are also orderly ideologies, like that bog standard liberal democracy that was supposed to always work, or constitutional monarchism, where the “ideal” system is very precisely described and should just be implemented. This also includes Catholic distributivism, which seems somewhere between ancom and ancap, except it’s clear on how it should work.
Fascism notably is all over the place, though, that’s its only definitive trait. Fascism differs from mainstream in a different dimension than most ideological extremes. Its point is that there’s no point, just vibes and will transcending reality. It’s can be skeptical or it can be optimist, it can be progressive or conservative, the point of fascism is that these don’t matter, only what you need and want right now. Truth doesn’t matter, only the dream.
There are also orderly progressive ideologies. US progressives are such. Or leftists who think that Soviet system is their dogmatic ideal, while I have already written before than in Soviet communism it was just a mechanism. The dogmatic ideal was somewhere at some point making that ideal society, quite similar to kingdom of heaven for Christians in perception.
- Comment on What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025? 3 days ago:
Same minus Android apps, like late old Nokia ones. Nokia stuff was perfect. Also UX is always treated today as if those tasks were impossible to combine with a good UX, and thus modern typical UX is just how you can do it.
Except late Nokia before MS acquisition disproves that by its existence. Its UX was better than any of that shit.
- Comment on Big Tech: Convenience is a Trap 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Is AI Facing a Trough of Disillusionment? 1 week ago:
I think it’s pretty close, except there’s more pluralism of power.
- Comment on Russia’s Enteromix cancer vaccine shows promise in early trials 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Russia’s Enteromix cancer vaccine shows promise in early trials 1 week ago:
With Covid vaccines it wasn’t like this. And I should remind you of Theranos and its backers.
- Comment on Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ 1 week ago:
s/admits/boasts/
- Comment on Is AI Facing a Trough of Disillusionment? 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month 1 week ago:
This right here is a feature that need not be limited to official servers. Signal is centralized, a kind reminder.
- Comment on Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn 1 week ago:
That puts limits on scaling it. Fediverse - honestly too centralized for my taste.
- Comment on What would have to happen to make everybody realize we weren't exaggerating when we said Trump would be like Hitler? 1 week ago:
Not as much 51st state as being on the same continent with pretty thoroughly replaced population.
But - OK =\ Honestly I’m not too knowledgeable about Canadian identities and nationalism.
- Comment on What would have to happen to make everybody realize we weren't exaggerating when we said Trump would be like Hitler? 1 week ago:
I’m not sure if Canada really counts as “from outside”
- Comment on Russia targets WhatsApp and pushes new 'super-app' as internet blackouts grow 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn 1 week ago:
Centralization, need to have a big commercial provider which you can pay (as someone in Russia …).
- Comment on Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn 1 week ago:
OK, I’ll try it.
- Comment on Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn 1 week ago:
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) 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.
- Comment on Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on What would have to happen to make everybody realize we weren't exaggerating when we said Trump would be like Hitler? 1 week ago:
That whole country is like Hitler, from the outside. So honestly this just seems to be overly dramatic, should have started worrying about that Hitler stuff sometime earlier.
I mean, when you’d let an American see that you don’t think an American should decide something outside of USA (and that too belongs to natives), 9 in 10 would go livid. Most Americans don’t understand that other countries have sovereignty as good as their own. Or that they are as good as any other people.
It’s really just some of the paint falling off and showing that the wall consists of human bones among other things. As if nobody knew.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 week ago:
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 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.
- Comment on England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost 1 week ago:
That “…” again. I am.
- Comment on UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost 1 week ago:
OK, then - no, not capitalism. Expectation of truth will fuck us. All the stabilizers of the humanity were built reliant on that - if it looks like a duck and so on. It doesn’t work anymore. Can’t blame something on capitalism if with other things equal the change affects capitalist and socialist systems similarly.
Also a new world war seemed like something slowly rolling, with tanks and cargo ships and propaganda speeches.
What people don’t understand is the sheer scale and precision of operations available today. You can prepare for 50 years something that will take 30 seconds, and then we will all have a different world.
I think honestly the Internet is just that - a very slow trap for the rest of the world, being sprung by some parties associated with US military/deep-state/whatever first, and then being continued by Silicon Valley powers that be, only with their own dreams for it.
- Comment on UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost 1 week ago:
Just saying, ending comments with “…” doesn’t make them look smarter.
Which specifically, accepted by most communists, should I read? Will that something allow a model different than that of classes and formations and dialectic materialism? If not, then it is reductionist.
- Comment on UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost 1 week ago:
There are bad things in communism - a reductionist model advertised as fitting for everything (a bit similar to Unix, that), and there are good things in communism - attention to balance of power. Revolutionary ideologies generally have situations warranting a revolution more fleshed out.