What followed in the 40s and 50s was an abnormal period created by the implementation of a significant number of socialist policies that stemmed the desire for blood by the disposessed masses. These fuckers have been working to dismantle them ever since.

It’s not quite true, USA and Canada were also far more anarchist in government traditionally, because, well, at some point they had too much territory loosely controlled and too many developing settlements and too thinly spread populations, and very dependent on new development.

40s and 50s were in many things driven by the defeat of Nazi ideology and imperialism crumbling. Not only humanism and peace were in fashion, but also nobody wanted to go to efforts to keep some brown or yellow people enslaved - sometimes it was “let them live” and sometimes “I don’t wanna die”, but the general mood was that it’s obsolete to rob colonies.

So. Both socialist and western parts of the world somewhat choked that cultural desire of the populace by malicious compliance.

But one thing that didn’t go through a cycle was the tendency for more fine-grained and total control, more detailed laws and overreach. That only grew in the course of XX century. Laws of the 50s were so simple compared to our day, that an average EULA is harder to understand. Laws of the 20s were as they show in the western movies.

So, I’m not going to say libertarianism is key, because any -ism being adopted doesn’t mean automatically finding the solution. But the solution if it’s found will be to this growth of complexity, empowering legal middlemen and interpretators and one nail drawers, and weakening anyone trying to live by the rules.

I think we should let them invent that. It won’t be too long. Perhaps “capitalism” won’t be the word they’ll use.

It’s like “scientific communism” in USSR, where those types thought if you make science support your policies, science will start working the way you want.

Except in this case similarly dense types think if they make computers “tell” they are right, and tell them what to do when intelligent people say “cuckoo” and leave, then it’ll work.

Like that quote about lies, terrible lies and statistics. Statistics too told not what they wanted (when you make up numbers on your own, it kinda works, but with computers you need to have some brains to fake statistics looking nice, and everybody can do it, and it has an advantage in persuasion over just making up numbers, so instead of numbers you need a talking machine).

Honestly many things in this world suck.

Criminal culture is decentralized, neo-Nazis are decentralized, power is decentralized.

Decentralized doesn’t equal good. I mean, I agree, but also one should use things with the smallest possible effective difference between suggested main quality and “what if not”.

That’s also why I’ve become skeptical of encryption lately. If one of your group members is compromised, it’s all compromised, doesn’t matter with how many member keys you encrypt each message, one is enough. In Signal they do that to conceal who’s a member of which group, and that is, of course, a noble endeavor. But see the previous paragraph. Either you expect one thing or the other. Either you are in a public group and have to watch your opsec and words, or you are in some cryptic conclave among trusted brethren. Except the latter is never true. Fringe of psychology and tech, as all security.

It’s similar with decentralization. It’s just a trait. Whether you need it is defined by your goal.

In my opinion it’s good when it’s real. Say, for the goal of countering bad market-driven phenomena in the Internet, - yes, it’s a real solution and it’s good when it works. For the goal of countering authoritarianism and surveillance it’s not, because it doesn’t solve the problem, in such a situation they can block and prosecute whoever they want and they will, and decentralization won’t work by itself.

So, when it works. It works when it allows people making stuff to make money, and when that includes stuff making the whole system work. If such a decentralized set of tools had been already made, it would have already won by market means. Despite all the advertising bullshit, oligopoly and vendor locks.

Yeah, but at the same time - the weather in Vyborg is fine by me, and the weather in Narva\Ivangorod. But the place between them (one the coast) is somehow far more depressive.

And I don’t think I’ve heard Helsinki being called depressive.

It’s something about planning, perhaps? Streets are laid out so that you feel as if you were in a military location. People live in those historical beautiful buildings as if they were birds making nests under the roof, as if people were not the main thing there.

And places around SPb, like Strelna, are also not depressive at all. At least in my perception. That air flavored with Baltic salt, every sea smells differently, the Baltic water smell is nice, in some way similar to Coca-Cola.

It’s the city itself.

I was thinking more about all the dismemberment and depression jokes about the one on Neva with the Aurora cruiser docker yadda-yadda

Living in Petersburg being nice? I dunno

I mean the general public morale, something like that. Where people in western countries complain about “wild capitalism” and so on - in China it’s pretty much jungle.

The economy is heavily influenced by the government if not centrally run.

No, that’s the point, their economy is not.

It seems pretty far from libertarianism.

Politically.

You mean the central strategy of creating the money, imposing capitalism, and violently enforcing extreme privilege/deprivation?

Usually capitalism doesn’t need to be imposed.

Even so called “traditional economy” involves violence as a means of constricting it, but is otherwise similar to capitalism. It’s just that a medieval village dies if its smith doesn’t make needed tools in time, isn’t big enough for two smiths to compete, so if such a competition happens both will simply die of hunger. So all competition in “traditional economy” setting would be first validated by social mechanisms like elders of a village agreeing or being allowed by the guild, if in a town. And so on.

“Capitalism” is what you get when you take that traditional economy and the newly arrived need for mobile labor resources - workers for the factories, laborers for big farms, and so on. You need a socio-economic system where a smith’s son can be a carpenter and vice versa, and both can be recruited and made soldiers.

In the traditional economy there’s no such mobility because there’s no need. Cases where you change places are something exceptional, rare enough to be decided by authority to allow or not. People living in such societies would think you’re as good as a thief if you tried to compete with their local hereditary smith or carpenter. They’d punish you as a thief.

Another thing similar to capitalism, but with constrictions backed by violence, is socialism.

In that thing a group of virtuous well-meaning revolutionaries breaks the society over their collective knee in order to make it closer to an utopian idea, and then basically builds state capitalism with them and their descendants on top.

You don’t have to enforce privilege and deprivation. The victim’s position is disadvantaged by definition.

Because they’re already disconnected from reality and worshiping an obvious pseudo-science?

No, libertarian philosophy is the only thing that didn’t go up in flames for me through experience, of what I liked from time to time in my life.

It feels somewhat general and stupid, a bit like Tao Te Ching. Tao Te Ching is respected and libertarianism is not. Well, except for China, where it’s the other way around, because Taoism is associated with the century of humiliations and libertarianism is what they approximate with some additional steps.

I also wouldn’t say conversational dataset-based systems are obvious pseudo-science when you know what they are and are not trying to replace people with them. And cryptocurrencies have their valid uses.

You should ask yourself a question - is the Web a scam? Right after the dotcom bubble and during that - much of it was.

Just llike with many people, what they say and what they do can be two very different things.

Yes, for my specific point here what they say matters and not what they do.

they talked socialism while being totalitarian state capitalists. This was even noted at the time of the Russian revolution by people such as Rosa Luxemburg.

I prefer “red fascism” over “state capitalism” for USSR until the Thaw. After the Thaw it was more of state capitalism, yes.

All those things also took a hit at the end of WW1, in the Great Depression, and during WW2.

Yes, but the way WW2 ended was a push in the opposite direction. Or it wasn’t, but 20 years later, when some of the ruins were rebuilt, it was retrospectively presented as that and the future as bright and peaceful.

Nobody who was paying attention believed the Russian bullshit, before or after the collapse of the Communist Party’s rule.

I mean, you shouldn’t say those things from a different time and a different context.

Much of the Soviet bullshit that many people in the west still take for truth isn’t accepted in ex-USSR and vice versa.

Much of what inside USSR itself was considered bullshit got a new life in the 60s, when a somewhat romantic view became common that there is some virtuous root of revolution that one can find from that nasty place in which the country was then. It was sort of a rebellion against Soviet reality of that time, but it was also a rebirth of its worldview. World revolution was replaced with progress, peace, socialism, yadda-yadda, ideologically correct science and weeding out enemies of the people were replaced with perception of the cold war and space race as of something that will eventually lead to friendship and unification, and pretty typical militarism was replaced with melancholic pacifism, memory of those “fallen to preserve life itself”, pictures of some transcendent emotion unifying the whole world - some sort of spring air and night sky feeling, I can’t even explain it, but I’ve got my share.

It’s a very potent aesthetic, and very young in feeling. I don’t even think it was bad. Unfortunately, it was all purely emotional. And, anyway, many of the people who contributed to that cultural movement were dissidents 20 years later.

But - much of what seems to have always been obviously untrue or true was a reasonable claim for many people 20 years ago.

You can’t believe what you think you clearly see from today. Not without lots of physical proof.

And things that seem small and trivial from far away could have looked quite big and real for those living them.

forcing governments engage public money

We live in a time when it’s hard to force governments.

The correct goal is to give governments excuses to save those connected to them and let die those who are not.

USSR’s breakup and the dotcom bubble started a new era. Everyone saw that this works and there’s no higher wisdom or hidden fallback mechanism to prevent this.

But the incentive to “save businesses” is, well, why I’m a libertarian most of the time. If governments had no money to be directed by some central strategy, and instead only the means to minimally function as publicly decided - fire services, infrastructure, electoral procedures, IDs and money, - then there would be no option to involve them in such a way.

And it makes sense that libertarians are usually very vulnerable to the AI hype, as to the cryptocurrencies hype before it, an irony typical for history. That means that they’ll be those hit the most.

It’s an intended minefield. There’s a road called “techno-optimism and individualism”, and most of the mines are being laid on it. Similar to the KGB “rotten herring” thing and such. To discredit an idea. It’s more believable when the splattered meat around those already exploded is real.

Again, look at USSR, its ideology had plenty of flaws, some with pretty infernal consequences, but it was the main one putting future united humanity, progress, science, equality, humanism and secularism into the center of its cosmology. It offered pretty dubious tools, but that’s irrelevant. When it failed, all those things listed also got a hit. It’s not a coincidence that “polemical” (with both dystopia and utopia and questions about human nature put together in the same space) science fiction in the 90s transitioned into clearly dystopian “putrid” “dream denied” cyberpunk.

So, asking the past defenders of such a situation again, was XUL really worse or is it in effect the same?

Except XUL also allowed such customization that very rarely an extension would become as popular as they become now. Fragmentation as a defense.

(That refers to the discussions about Firefox dropping XUL in the past, killing many-many good extensions and ways to make them and alternative browsers built on XULRunner.)

For the same reasons. The old rules still work, most of the gold in tech industry is in tall RnD later paid off by scaling indefinitely. Things different from that are either intentionally promoted to inflate a bubble, or popular as a result of wishful thinking where that industry will change in favor of the same curve as with oil and gas. The latter just won’t happen.

Data is analogous to oil and gas here. But more like urine in ancient Rome than like something dug up from the ground.

But there’s still interest in making some protections and barriers to collection of said data, because otherwise those collecting it are interested to immediately use it for only their own good and not even of other fish in the pond.

All automation of decision-making is AI. Entrusting it to an open model trained on lots of data - yeah, I agree it shouldn’t be done.

And that’s the truest, just unpleasant, answer to all the talk about new messenger services and emerging replacements.

Power doesn’t care about rules. Power does care that you don’t have a way to communicate freely. Power punishes you if you try to find a way.

Social problems are not solved by technical means. Or, for the sake of correctness, - they are, but those technical means are called weapons of war. To change the balance of power so that your wishes were respected.

As a theoretical avenue of thought, I’m not sure there’s much harm for 11-17 year olds to talk to “smart” toys with no internet connectivity (at all, in principle, no fucking way) about that stuff. Not much different from Elisa. They are seeking and finding pretty explicit things on the Internet, with their peers, in media. It’s not a question of whether they should, it’s a fact that they predominantly do.

I live in a big city, but I’ve been to a smaller town nearby a couple of years ago, sitting on a bench after one LARP event and listening to a bunch of teens (13-15 years old) discussing everyone they were seeing passing by, and, eh, it was pretty clear they don’t just discuss sex. It’s funny to remember some specific phrases, but it was pretty depressing to sit there then, because when they weren’t talking about sex, they were talking about SCP and footy, and all the time I was thinking of a polite excuse to leave, until I just left. Made a friend, though.

The result is that this is unsustainable unless copyright and IP law except for trademark and authorship are dropped, to avoid imbalance between using AI on existing work to generate commercially clean substance and using your ability, helped by existing culturally meaningful material.

It’s basically an IP laundering technology. Supply to satisfy demand.

When libertarians say that regulations make barriers for those more vulnerable, but not for those who can bend those barriers, they are right. Except I doubt many a libertarian expected to be proven right this way 20 years ago.

And I think they might even drop IP laws. When enough elite types are certain that control of computing power and datasets allow them to remain on top in such an environment.

That’s also where all the advice to get used to AI in all production comes from, I think, they are already salivating at the thought of just reusing old stuff from enormous datasets, legally, not paying anything, and keeping staff only to do basic control of what the machine generates. Basically people who expect that they’ll be able to do the theft of the century and remain elite.

The headlines about AI killing human creativity don’t help, they are telling these people what they want to hear.

It won’t kill all human creativity. It will kill those relying upon killing it. It’s like a gold mine in EU4, except giving inflation 10x the original.

I’ve just read yesterday what the Russian idiom “red price” means (said about the biggest price one can give for something, and already a robbery). So - the opposite of that was “white price”. No, it’s not about civil war. It’s about copper and silver money. There were not that many silver mines in Russia, so when someone decided to turn the printer on, they’d mint a lot of copper coins. While silver money was mostly foreign (“yefimok”, from Joachimstaler, same as taler, dollar, you get the etymology, the international coin of that age, which is also why metropolies had their traditional money and colonies had dollars - dollar meant a silver coin of the same weight as Joachimstaler).

Since I’ve remembered Russian history, that’s also similar to USSR’s advertised strong side - instead of relying upon complex evolution process to achieve big things, we’ll just build a command system in charge of all our resources and plan the path we already know. As you might see, it doesn’t answer where future evolution will come from. It didn’t come at all.

Why do they say these stupid things as if they were giving an order?

They can’t order people to buy their stuff, they can’t order their stuff to work when it doesn’t. Having “AI” in it doesn’t change the latter part in case they think otherwise, just got this idea.

I suppose they like the change from the old “spend lots of resources, then scale indefinitely” with software development to the more traditional in other spheres “spend constant amount of resources for constant result”, and expect it will build hierarchies like everywhere.

Well, companies were going bankrupt long before personal computing.

I don’t know about Epic Games, I think I’ll play Oolite in free time when I’m done with my EU4 addiction. Or actually make something useful.

It can work like jakuzi. Water pressure and rotation. Perhaps with suction. Perhaps with slow brushing.

All kinds of machine-assisted things do much more than you can with your own effort, without getting extreme. Constant slow brushing with no danger of ripping anything out, with constant pressure and suction interchanged, for like 20 minutes without stopping (you wouldn’t clean yourself well enough for 20 minutes without stopping) and with all the expected gels and such - and you’re clean enough without much effort. Would also be economy of water, I’d expect.

Not economy of energy, of course. But energy seems to undergo inflation in our world, while water - the opposite. So.

EDIT: Also when I’m thinking about it, such a machine can even be made work with purely muscular effort. Like a mechanical lawn mower. Still more convenient than having to reach for every place on your back after sitting 10 hours straight behind your desk and with having a migraine.

Sky cool, I’m thinking of the same except I’m far dumber. I’m also thinking of something which can’t be a drop-in replacement, because in my ideology having an address and a session between these addresses is wrong by itself - the base data entity for the network should be a message retranslated wherever and however, perhaps in places subscribed to its partition (that being some kind of number\token\topic\hellknowswhat), while everything involving transient things like sessions and packets should be a layer down and interchangeable, the common layer of the world network should be a bit like Usenet. The whole idea of connecting to a machine over the network seems for me disadvantageous for the best kinds of use - publishing of texts and files, and communication in general, and also advantageous for silos. That imagined good common layer can work over the Internet among other things, but it can be easily adoptable for carrying archives on USB sticks, or exchanging data some other way, where the message travels over these just as well as over the Internet-connected parts. A bit like Briar, except Briar solves real tasks and I’m having a BAD psychosis.