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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • 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.





  • I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame.

    I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.

    Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.

    Now, instead of teaching clueless people they’ve made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.

    One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn’t matter that there’s a normal filesystem under it, or something.

    One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.

    If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.

    How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven’t been taught, don’t know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can’t learn a single thing?

    That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I’m born in 1996, so I had it easier.




  • I just had a comparison between Musk and Henry Ford pop up.

    And a thought, that enshittification doesn’t hurt us, them too.

    Such people then were capable of organizing efficient mass production with the capital. Now Tesla exists because of SpaceX PR success.

    Musk is not that dumber than Ford.

    The majority didn’t agree that everyone has critical flaws, that was going on for half a century, thus a society for perfect people was built. Everyone has critical flaws and everything has. Difference between programs and laws of 1950 and now is similar, but not computers and humans.

    Hence libertarianism, with nested, parallel and relative legal systems.


  • Not just this, I’m not sure if they checked about LGBT rights in China.

    From outside the first world Trump and his supporters look scandalist, loud, corrupt and incompetent. Which is sad. But they don’t seem fascist most of the time.

    Anyway, if we take Putin, he’s done many things, one thing he’s consistently never done is say antisemitic or easily recognizable fascist things. There is some popularity of Ivan Ilyin around him, who is a Russian emigrant fascist philosopher, though (who apparently wanted to fix problems with Mussolini and the own such “thinkers” of the White movement, except he was on the dumber side, so compared to his writings Mein Kampf seems intellectually elegant).