I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some “Zen” in computer UIs and that “Zen” is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of “you don’t understand it”. Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well.

And also another idea of “you dummy talking about ergonomics can’t be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit”.

So -

1. pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked,
2. almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that,
3. blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications,
4. objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that’s why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.

It’s not a glitch.

People have spent billions to build systems where such dissemination of crowd emotion is the main difference from the real web (what was on geocities or even LJ, and a bit of that exists in Telegram, because it’s a Russian honeypot to collect intelligence, and Russia could care a bit less about keeping the line that American social media corps, in its effort to make the honeypot actually attractive to use).

Then spent billions to advertise them. Billions to kill competition.

Then they’ve lost billions from that, and yet doubled down on it.

That just doesn’t happen by accident, it’s a whole era of humanity’s history now. Like 20s-50s (the “bad” kind of change, with goosestepping, cult of strong people, attempts to save empires, preparations for a nuclear war, all that) and 60s-90s (the “good” kind of change, with space race, hippies in the west, Soviet official ideology being peace and unification of humanity - BTW, it’s funny how the western politicians of that time freeloaded on that, never denying such a goal, but also never accepting it, thus getting the good parts without the hard ones) and then what we have.

Well. Not very different from “opening up” to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn’t think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it’s our job to root out our time’s weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

Which means that nice world doesn’t survive evolution.

It’s fascinating to see this find new pastures in the new world. As a proud Russian citizen.

Some day you’ll remember with nostalgie those years of the ruling party actually caring to win elections.

Jokes aside, it’s easier to cheat now because it’s easier to do everything, and that’s because of the Internet and modern computing systems.

You can’t unmince minced meat back.

But you can apply the same change in a different direction and see that today direct non-anonymous democracy is actually plausible, if it’s instituted, for big countries. 100 years ago it simply wasn’t possible. Now it is.

Or that today Soviet system (as in Soviet democracy and not totalitarian state capitalism) is actually possible to build. When they were trying, they couldn’t, they didn’t possess the means.

And that both these things are actually what these people have done to us, but inverted. Our “direct vote” is the data they collect about us to classify and predict us for control. Our “Soviets” are that classification, and our “central planning” is those predictions and control.

They’ve done all this, just directed for their own interest. So maybe one can do the opposite.

That’s old logic that might not be as certain in the new era.

What makes profit, can share it with those making laws.

And one anti-monopoly thing that was at some point common was that it’s illegal to provide a service below market cost to capture markets. Probably if that were applied to the Internet and free services like Facebook and Reddit and Google, many things would go differently.

But at the same time even today payments over the Internet are problematic. If you could pay for storage and computation the same way you pay for landline, without extra bother, maybe we’d have something better.

Подтвержденных сцуко самим протоколом Телеграмки.

Ну и, эм, что у силовиков есть доступ к перепискам, уже возникало в куче уголовных дел. Они не слишком прячутся. И это, видимо, были не локальные трояны.

Т.е. скорее всего доступ со стороны сервера к хранящемуся там.

А ваццап все-таки E2EE и официальный доступ там к метаданным.

They had it coming for those captchas.

It’s as if you hadn’t read the comment you’re answering.

I’m not denigrating anything. I’m saying that “scientific communism” is not science, even if it officially is called that. It’s like doctors of theology teaching you how to build a society. And any “scientific approach to governing” will lead to such a substitution, because people really holding power will invent that to keep it in fact.

And I see that you completely ignored the part about metrics used as KPIs always being gamed, thus hierarchical meritocracy plainly not being possible.

has proven to be incompatible with democracy over time and detrimental to any social contract

I’ve got gangbanged with downvotes recently for reminding that capitalism is literally the first “formation”, if we play by Marx, in relative modernity (antique Mediterranean was a whole different thing, but it relied upon good climatic conditions, good connectivity allowing Egypt to feed the whole of it, common ethnically and religiously pluralist cultural space, and slavery), to offer horizontal mobility of the kind we consider normal, and vertical mobility to a bigger extent than before.

The person I was answering to thought that in a medieval town before capitalism you could just make a thing and sell it. In fact to make a shoe you had to be a shoemaker (by inheritance or by apprenticeship if the master had no children or decided to disinherit them, or by guild if in a bigger town), and if you weren’t, making a shoe even for yourself was considered stealing from the shoemakers.

It’s funny how, say, Robin Hood stories show it as it was, and those are supposed to be known enough, but people have such misconceptions.

Or even Tolkien’s Shire - look closely how Hobbits’ life looks.

A person would literally grow as a non-uniform piece of a non-uniform fabric of the medieval society, they couldn’t significantly change their place whether they were a peasant or a prince. Being born a son of a carpenter, you wouldn’t become cook. If you were the oldest son, you were expected to take on their trade and role of the carpenter in this particular place or part of the city, or to work for the oldest son. You were judged by the surrounding people if you didn’t. If you were the younger son, it was a bit more normal to seek apprenticeship of some other specialty, maybe. So the cookshop’s master could take you as an apprentice, if all his sons would go rogue and not take on his trade, or maybe not, but then even after ending your apprenticeship you’d work for the cook, not be the cook in that cookshop. You couldn’t just open your own cookshop without like everyone approving it. It was a rare event. People in a medieval town wouldn’t understand why they need a third carpenter if there are two carpenters and it always was so. Or why they need a second cookshop if the existing one was always here. It required significant changes - the town’s role growing and it needing to accommodate newcomers, or a neighboring town being razed, thus the balance changing.

So - the purpose of this text was to explain that capitalism has achieved quite a lot. And when you are making a change, it’s not a win-win game, you can both gain something you didn’t have and lose something you had.

Anyway. All this is bullshit. The only ideological virtue humans can have is being able to, quoting Kipling, “… watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools”. That’s because our kind is absolutely incapable of seeing and valuing what we already have and separating dreams of what we don’t from the reality of what we’ll get trying to achieve that. Everything comes to ruin.

So the only good trait of a clearly political ideology would be wide participation and rotation, so that as many people as possible were contributors of a political system. A cook can govern a state (as Lenin said), it’s just important that it’s not one cook, but many cooks, and that none of them keeps a position of power long enough to start thinking they know something, and that none of them can take a position of power predictably.

As you might have noticed, this is the opposite of any meritocracy with “wise elders” deciding who deserves to be assigned to a post and role and who doesn’t.

That be some ebony word?

As to the subject, I have that skin condition, but:

1. Never served in the army, and it’s Russia anyway,

2. I’ve heard in the Russian army that’s generally fine that half your face is fcking red, what matters is that you do shave, and if you shave badly, then yeah, bad things follow, not kicking out, but being force-shaved with a harsh cloth or something like that.

It is both. No human can be entrusted evaluating merit for the “meritocracy” word to form, that is, to defined a hierarchy.

Any metric used as a KPI stops being useful as a metric, have you heard that?

The very moment academics and such are going to decide on real power, you’ll have the right academics emerge, of “scientific communism professors” kind.

Too much drama for something natural for humans, that humans evolve anew when it’s taken from them.

You can’t live without religion, you’ll just invent a new one.

Kinda how Christianity took over Mediterranean when the plethora of old cults turned into something like attractions in a park, and for mystery religions it was just another mystery religion, but easier to access.

Or how Soviet ideology was quite similar to a religion (the magical part was concentrated in the “dialectical materialism” and “scientific communism” things), and when people stopped believing into that, hundreds of sects and superstitious beliefs start popping like mushrooms after a rain.

to have access to Healthcare based on need, higher Ed based solely on merit,

Who will evaluate need and merit?

“Meritocracy” is the one word communists here in Russia use that I’ve learned to absolutely hate, they mean by that a hierarchical system where it’s administratively decided who behaved well and who didn’t.

See, that’s the problem with leftists, always trying to use contrasts to make their virtue signaling look better.

Most leftists are like “we haven’t yet invented a system, but we will compare an imagined one fulfilling all our desires to the worst real world ones”. And those who are inventing systems, are the least popular - cause such a thought experiment system will already be worse than one fulfilling all desires. Not talking sweet enough.

And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Nothing can be that advanced and zstd is good enough.

The idea is cool. With pure p2p exchange being a fallback, and something like trackers in bittorrent being the main center to yield nodes per space (suppose, there’s more than one such archive you’d want to replicate) and per partition (if it’s too big, then maybe it would make sense, but then some of what I wrote further should be reconsidered).

The problem of torrents and other stuff is that people only store what’s interesting to them.

If you have to store one humongous archive, and be able to efficiently search it, and avoid losing pieces - then, I think, you need partitioned roughly equal distribution of it over nodes.

The space of keys (suppose it’s hashes of blocks of the whole) is partitioned by prefix so that a node would store equal amount of blocks of every prefix. And first of all the values closest to the node’s identifier (a bit like in Kademlia) should be stored of those under that space. OK, I’m thinking the first sentence of this paragraph might even be unneeded.

The data itself should probably be in some supercool format where you don’t need to have it all to decompress only the small part you need, just the beginning with the dictionary and some interval.

There should also be, as a separate functionality of this system, search by keywords inside intervals, so that search would yield intervals where a certain keyword is encountered. With nodes indexing continuous intervals they can decompress and responding to search requests by those keywords. Ideally a single block should be possible to decompress having the dictionary. I suppose I should do my reading on compression algorithms and formats.

Probably search function could also involve returning Google-like context. Depending on the space needed.

Would also need some way to reward contribution, that is, to pay a node owner for storing and serving blocks.

Yep, ancap thought in terms of efficiency, to justify ancap, goes after the central controller just not having enough information to fully govern a society well enough.

These fuckers apparently think something changed, if you have one big honeypot of a web and mandate checks (as a justification) that yield said information to them.

BTW, they are right, until we find a way to decentralize services.

I asked because I’ve heard such advice for bloody countryside home floors. Not even something requiring it.

They mean mixing in steel dust or nylon hair?

Hard to believe this is a recent enough thought.

HTML 2.0 doesn’t have tables, and tables are not so bad, even org-mode has tables.

Since HTML 4.01 was a thing when I first saw a website:

Being able to have buttons is good. Buttons with pictures too.

And, unlike some people, I liked the idea of framesets. A simple enough websites could have an IRC-like chat frame to the left and the main navigable area to the right.

And the unholy amount of specific tags is the other side of the coin for not yet using JS and CSS for everything.

I think an “RHTML” standard as a continuation and maybe simplification of HTML 4.01 (no JS, no CSS, do dynamic things in applets, without Netscape plugins do applets with some new kind of plugins running in a specialized sandboxed VM with JIT) could be useful. Other than this there’s no need in any change at all. It’s perfect. It has all the necessary things for hypertext.

How do you use hyperlinks without HTML?

My experience with Macs was that they are bloody unusable, so can’t help you. They cause me anxiety, kill my eyes and irritate without end.

Can’t say it’s worse than Windows, of course.