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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Yes. But I think I have a better viewpoint - they want to insert a blackbox mechanism between all our interactions.

    A computer can be an instrument, a set of tools for our mind to do powerful things.

    What such AIs do is to insert an easy to use layer between us and all those tools. A computer here encompasses computer networks, including global ones, and human communication over them. So even between us and all the world.

    So ultimately it’s a way to create Matrix. To control what we think, to control how things we want done are done. To intercept both outgoing and inbound signals, or falsify them.

    I don’t think this is even a question, when the world has a few dominating parties, they will want to exercise such control. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s how governments and huge companies and have functioned for all of history. Because humans are apes and when in power positions, should be brought down to sinful earth.


  • The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.

    The EU doesn’t think. A cell of the organism doesn’t think in organ matters, an organ doesn’t think in cell matters.

    The EU is just built this way, it’s a union of national governments against anything too mobile or evolutionary in their populations. It’s a confederation designed so that there’ll never be a federation of the same countries. Evolutionary mechanisms devour bureaucracies. But bureaucracies can strangle them.



  • is pure tech-bro-libertarianism

    Tech bros are usually not libertarian. Being excited about a failed solution to only one of libertarian problems (blockchain) doesn’t make one libertarian, too.

    And like all libertarians, he’s stuck in the neoliberal mindset of less regulation (don’t scrutinize) and more efficiency (let me be cheap)

    That’s not libertarianism, more like Ayn Rand and her inverse bolshevism with good mighty benevolent industrial aristocracy and bad stupid mischievous everyone else. She even reads like one of Valentin Pikul’s “historical novels”, only with inverted good and bad guys. That ideology is radically different from libertarianism, instead of freedom, voluntarism, non-aggression and such, resulting in a free society with free contracts, Ayn Rand says that some people are better than the others and thus freedom, voluntarism, non-aggression etc are measures by relative value of the offender and the victim. It’s jungle law.

    Anyway, it’s not “neoliberal” either, anti-monopoly regulations are part of the “ideal” free market model. And I think Elon likes patents and trademarks, which are not necessarily there (and in libertarianism are not a thing).

    His transparent reasoning is that if he’s allowed to cut corners, he’ll save money today and consequences can be dealt with when they arise.

    You might have seen the recent news about Tesla sales falling. Maybe it took so long because of accumulated trust into regulators not allowing car makers to make dangerous crap. So - then maybe in other reality, where Elon came to an industry already allowed to cut corners, he’d go bankrupt by now because of consumers understanding who he is.

    Life is complex, I’m not saying he’s right, just that.

    He’s following the software model of release a minimally viable product and patch it later. Only instead of user frustration at being beta testers, you fucking die maybe.

    The way software industry works, a lot of people have died due to its failures. One has to count people who’ve committed suicide due to events cause by some bug or even UX problem, people who failed to communicate something in time, thus possibly saving someone, people who disclosed what they shouldn’t have, thus possibly causing a criminal death, medical errors due to software problems, wars, catastrophes.

    But yes, it’s already allowed to do that and Elon wants such wonders in other industries, so that we’d have a bit of natural selection in our daily lives. Dystopian cyberpunk is called dystopian because it’s not utopian, but being a billionaire, I guess, one would dream of living in such instead of utopian version of boring past.




  • All either lack user directory or use phone numbers as identifiers. Finding people through the same instrument is an important functionality, without which a messaging system will not be popular and thus will not be relevant for such situations.

    If a messaging system uses SMS for confirmation, then, as you might guess, there is some central point sending out those SMS. So it would have centralized registration. Then technically registration can be disrupted (one can imagine some cryptographic scheme to make this the only disruption). Registration is an important part, even for a popular system many people will not have an existing account when they need it.

    User directories - if there is a decentralized user directory listing John Smith, Ivan Ivanov and Obi-Wan Kenobi, then either there will be hundreds of each with no ability to tell which of them is the real one (suppose those names are unique, say, u://jsmith, u://iivanov and u://alongtime ), or you need some kind of registration of public key and nickname pairs. Simplest variant (maybe dumb) is to have the messages telling of such registration having happened to be signed by some “registration authority” or a user delegated (by another message) that right (one would have to trace it to the root sadly). Then, it appears, users may add registration authorities, or choose between them, manually, but then the decentralized user directory would work in some moderated and ordered way.

    I’m not aware of any such system existing, and perhaps something about what I wrote is just dumb.







  • There is a significant difference between state and private monopoly that liberals tend to conveniently ignore. I’m a citizen, not a shareholder.

    This conversation is fruitless because you have neither lived in USSR nor studied it.

    But in general for a person living in USSR “citizen” was their sorry reality and “shareholder” (in different words, but that’s how “common ownership of means of production” was applied - we have a hierarchical structure, a state, commonly owned by all the citizens and in turn administering the public property, which would be everything in economy) was something they were being told from TV they are, but in fact weren’t. One was better than the other.

    Things structurally same are same in operation. Names and ideologies matter zero. State monopoly is worse than private monopoly, because it’s absolute monopoly.

    I encourage you to stop idolising individualism because it’s not a virtue by itself.

    It is a virtue by association with truth, because choices you make are individual and responsibility for them is individual. No matter what you imagine, agree with, sign to, support etc.

    Computer games with easy satisfaction and easy construction of unnatural mechanisms have hurt humanity, I think. The virtue of something being just true eludes many people.


  • Umberto Eco considers Stalin’s USSR as one of the main examples of fascism.

    Fascist “market” economies have anti-individualist propaganda similar to Soviet one, - about everyone selflessly working for the common goal, accepting hierarchies, normalcy.

    Fascism itself is anti-individualist, it’s one of the main traits of it, that an individual is a building block for it and nothing more. Except for the will of the people\nation.… expressed in the personalities of the leaders.

    Free market economies eventually produce monopolies, because the rest start as monopolies. USSR, again, was basically one humongous corporation, even its planning mechanisms were similar to those that exist inside big corporations. And like many a humongous corporation, it broke up into a few pieces because of C-suite politics.