Since a bit earlier or so I’ve read.

Sauron used conversations and scenes to turn Saruman charmed and deadly frightened. Over the palantir, which was a device to see the future, the past, the probable, close and far away. Thus also a communication device.

So basically their name refers to knowing things which are not their fucking concern. Not what you said.

EDIT: Still, the way communication of Saruman and Denethor with Sauron turned them both mad - is a good metaphor of how lots of awesome technology was misused to almost ruin humanity in the last 30 years. I wonder if it’s reversible.

What “they made” 50 years ago is of little value now. Expertise matters, and it’s lost with time passing.

Still - yes. Nationalization is a bad solution because it gives the state power to nationalize. Seems a truism.

Just let NASA work in its normal role. Instead of replacing that with SpaceX contracts.

Nobody thinks about that, just about hitting the people they don’t like. They don’t think of consequences, they don’t think that nationalization means humongous companies and wealth in fact changing hands in favor of people who already control the government.

That’s every fascist regime in history BTW - make your natural opponents hang themselves. Like in Russia in 1999 groups people most hurt by Yeltsin’s regime were deceived into voting for Putin, because he managed to create that “Soviet intelligence agent” image, despite being continuation of said regime. Or again in 2004, when he managed to take credit for growing oil prices, which meant that said groups of people feared literal starvation less, and the factor they’ve grown by compared to 1998 was so huge, that Russia’s level of life really didn’t catch up, but that was enough. Hold people in misery, throw them bones, they’ll be grateful.

Also why most Russians gloated over Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, other oligarchs being beaten by Putin.

Cause the oligarchs seemed the face of that regime, except Putin was its soul materialized. They somehow thought that when he hurts all the oligarchs enough, things will be good.

DOD is also responsible for what they accept.

The internet has plenty of people who don’t want to spend their effort for others’ moneymaking.

All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.

Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.

Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.

But in general what’s hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn’t go there.

Say, it’s not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person’s “internet identity” (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that “internet contact directory” like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.

OK, I’m sleepy. Just - it’s technically possible.

Modern web page design is garbage and unreadable.

Because it’s a “newspaper meets slot machine” design. Kills two birds with one stone, hijacking media (censorship is invisible) and making money (invisible too).

I don’t need to know stacy from North Dakota’s thoughts on an article because 99% of the time it’s toxic anyways. Or misinformed.

And also because not every place is supposed to be crawling with people.

No. You have a toolbox, it’s called a web browser. To unite the particular websites you have a web ring, or your own bookmarks. There were also web catalogues.

First of all, it was performed the way that nobody knew what to even do with those privatization vouchers. They didn’t directly give anyone stocks, just vouchers for part of a company etc. Those had to be exchanged for stocks.

People didn’t know what to do with them, people had problems feeding their families, and people were offered some money for them. And people thought that’s what capitalism is, you get offered money for something, you give it. Nobody scams you, right?

Since those oligarchs happened to all have right friends, it’s without any doubt not a mistake that those stocks could even be sold.

And - attention - another history lesson. All the Soviet propaganda against religion led to everyone becoming “kinda church-loving” in the 90-s initially. All the Soviet propaganda for scientific view of the world led to thousands of sects and charlatans, together scamming most of the population. All the Soviet propaganda for honest and labor ethic led to most people not even considering such scams really scams, because in Soviet propaganda doing business was treated same as scamming someone.

So nobody even thought what’s happening is wrong. And the part of the population which did understand was those who got the shorter stick. People losing themselves in a bottle or a needle, people literally dying from hunger, people having to do crime or prostitution or mercenary work to survive. It was an unholy kingdom where for a part of the population it seemed they are almost the middle class now, just like in those American movies and ads, and the other part saw those ads and those people daily, but could barely survive.

And then, after a few years, the former part grew some understanding that Russia is approaching fascism, and the latter part, which already lived it since 1993, was so broken that it obeyed the fascists after they gave it a bit of a life without hunger and depression in the 00s.

See, there is a layer of the Russian (and general ex-Soviet) culture, in vibes and emotions, showing things as they really were, but it’s horrible to look into that. It was plainly impossible for a normal person to accept some group of people like Anatoly Sobchak’s daughter as opposition. After real opposition figures were being marginalized, jailed and even murdered for a few years. After the Chechen wars. After the way that privatization happened, and the 1993. Nobody would follow people who are just a subset of the same evil, except playing clean because it’s in fashion.

Then, of course, such a decision, so to say, made by a whole country leads to madness.

And this is what we live since then. Those stormtroopers on crutches storming Ukrainian positions - they know that their orders come from the evil itself. They are not fighting for something or against something, only to feel that evil as more material, or take their share of the suffering, or prove something to themselves. It’s a whole society of depressed people who need to prove something to themselves, because everything around is both evil, fake and dirty, one yearns for purification. It’s desperation of the better kind of people, whether you believe it or not. The worst kind finds ways not to die. It’s even natural for humans, like best shown in Japanese culture of honorable death. In European military cultures honorable suicide was a thing, well, in 2022 a few Russian generals shot themselves. I’ve read about them.

It’s really disgusting to be of the “fat” part of the population of these two.

How’s visiting dozens of pages different from visiting dozens of websites?

And BTW, on sites where feeds are in fashion, maybe some kind of Usenet upgraded for HTML and Markdown and post\author hyperlinks would be more in place.

Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

Should just avoid them. That’s hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

I’ve recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it’s designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It’s not obsolete. It’s a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

And even the Web as in year 2000.

Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

But they can be applied to the old model, and it’s simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person’s public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don’t use it to the full extent.

Yeah, people who thought Google wasn’t openly strangling the free (as in libre) stuff because they weren’t that evil - these people just have bad memory. In year 2012 it clearly felt that corps, Google and Facebook and MS and Apple and everyone, are on the move to capture it all without a way out. They kinda made the illusion of being softer later.

So the question is - how do we even advertise legal but unpleasant for them things, avoiding their censorship.

The devices are sold together with the operating system (often unchangeable) and packaged applications and means of installing software, right from the markets.

I mean, I have a solution. It’s counterintuitive and seems unconnected, and too direct, but I guarantee you it’ll work.

Forbidding companies to do moderation or refuse to accept content without technical problems, or banned content (CP and such), and similar good justifications. As in - if your service is up, and there’s user content served from it, it shouldn’t be removed without legal substantiation. It doesn’t matter it’s free, that doesn’t mean you can do all you like. You are not a media outlet, you are a platform for many media, that’s how you work in fact, so yes, your actions do constitute censorship if you do moderation. If you can’t afford to keep it free with such rules, then start charging money for hosting, as it normally should have been.

And, of course, this should include public offering status, the prices should be the same for all users.

I mean, if we had this from the beginning, we’d probably still have the Web like in year 2003.

Reading all such things I’m starting to think “what if I can drive?” I’ve always thought I can’t, but since everyone around who thinks they can drive like suicide bombers, maybe I should find those driving lessons.

Because laws were made by incompetent and malicious people.

Laws should mandate protocols and formats, not implementations. Protocols and formats mandated by the law should be simple. The whole humanity was just fine transmitting telegrams by Morse code consisting of letter groups. Then it was just fine with fax. If what we absolutely require to stay productive needs to be so astronomically complex that one programmer, given ready libraries for XML, encodings, compression etc, can’t write a fully functional and usable by everyone editor for that in 1 month - then such a protocol or format is not good enough to be mandated by law.

even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.

The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.

I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven’t tested it there TBH.

Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just … why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?

I agree he’s not a criminal, but I also don’t understand why is it a pardon without abolishing the law by which he was convicted.

And the way copyright is being treated today, where it’s applied only if you are not a big corp, sucks just as badly.

In this case at least the guy is not in prison anymore.

There’s the interaction model and there’s the technical organization.

The interaction model you’re describing as good existed in unmoderated Usenet groups (personal kill lists to avoid reading something) and in Frost (vulnerable, abandoned, sad, I liked it more) and FMS on Freenet.

However! As yesterday I was reminded, things to ban include not just “wrong” opinions, but also executable binaries with probable trojans inside, murder\rape\CP materials, spam, bots, stolen credentials.

The problem of self-moderation being hard doesn’t exist. Today giving the user control over their communications came out of fashion, but just like for e-mail clients local Bayesian filters existed, one can do today - with even some local AI tool probably, somehow everyone pretends that for such purposes said family of programs doesn’t exist.

At the same time ultimately someone should do the filtering. What you are describing is your own preference in filtering, some other people have other preferences. Expecting people to self-moderate posts with stolen credentials when they are the criminals those are posted for - would be stupid.

So - it’s hard to decide. Fundamentally a post with CP image and a post with Gadsden flag are the same. They even have a similar proportion of people willing to ban them, bigger for CP, but one can’t just treat some point between them as a constant, for which a post reputation system should be designed, to collectively stop propagation of the CP image, but for the ancap flag image to still be propagated by enough nodes. That point will move, there might be a moment when CP becomes more acceptable for users in a segment of network (suppose there are many CP bots and we have temporarily failed to collectively detect and ignore bots), or there might be a moment when ancaps are so hated that they are flagged by bigger proportions of users than CP. One is still a violation and the other is still not.

So - to avoid solving the hard problem, one can have a system similar to a multi-channel ( posts propagated all practical ways, #1 store-and-forward nodes - network services like news servers and nostr relays, #2 Retroshare-like p2p exchange between users - I’m ignorant in computer science, so my own toy program does this not very optimally, but rsync and git exist, so the problem is solvable, #3 export-import like in a floppinet, #4 realtime notices network service like IRC ) Usenet, with a kind of necessary mechanism being used as a filter - a moderation authority signing every post as pre-moderated, checked, banned and so on. The moderation authority shouldn’t be a network service, it should be a participant of the system, with its “signature posts” being propagated similarly to the material posts, because otherwise both the load on the moderation authority service would be too big and the moment it went offline you’d lose a lot.

Then on every kind of posts exchange a storage server or a notice server or a user can set up whether they propagate further everything they have, or only material posts pre-moderated or not banned by specific moderation authorities, and all signature posts, or only said authorities’ signature posts.

However the user reading a hierarchy in such a system sees its contents they should be able to decide by themselves, using logical operators and the moderation authorities chosen.

If we assume that almost everyone almost everywhere doesn’t propagate things flagged as CP\gore\fraud, it would be hard enough for a typical user to get them, even if their setting is wildcard. While the “wrong” opinions they will get.

Then they can add users with those opinions to a personal kill list. Just like in olden days.

The management tends to be in the ASPD direction, and the developers tend to be in the ASD and ADHD direction. Not the majority, not even many people, but there’s a substrate in the cultures, so to say.

Sort of hostile kinds of mind.

The management in such situations dreams of replacing all the developers with “AI” or making them low-paid maintenance element so much, that people of that kind already gloat in the interwebs before that has come even close to happening.

I’ve seen a justification made that “it’s you nerd types who loved to promise replacing all other professions, especially management, in the 00s”, it doesn’t really explain anything, because in that course of thought you just replace lower-level programming with higher-level programming.

But personally I think it’s very simple - the management thinks they are the most valuable people, they create the “ideas” and hire metaphorical brick-laying workers who then fulfill those genial ideas. They see developers as such.

While developers look at this like people who are approached from time to time by clueless apes wanting something and thinking they’re visionaries, whose wishes need to be guessed, critically cleansed and cracked into something barely making sense, from which then a developer derives some specific project goal and makes the clueless ape agree that this is what they meant.

The management works with social matters, the developers with, ahem, how the universe really functions, a level below. The management generally belongs to a culture where everything is weighed on their social level.

OK, what I really wanted to say is that there are 3 “elements”, so to say, here, leadership, metis (in Ancient Greek) and labor. Management ignores metis, developers ignore leadership, unqualified labor doesn’t see the difference between these two, and since both covertly seek affirmation from unqualified labor, it’s a perpetual conflict.

So why are we making the Combine from Vacuum Flowers?

The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual “anime elements” and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste.

OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I’ll still spell it out.

The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it’s almost like feudal Europe’s system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish.

There’s no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn’t equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away.

Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian.

Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I’d want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.