Soviet surveillance drones, which Ukraine has used a few times as suicide drones, were not much more complex than a radiola. Had a flight program in the form of perforated tin disc, if I remember correctly, and an electro-mechanical system of following those instructions (not a computer). They’d be just sent on preprogrammed routes, make photos, those retrieved and analyzed on return. No radio communications, stealthy enough for their purpose.
Will happen anyway, so rather embrace it as early as possible so that we would be those bad actors and not the sucker good actors on the receiving end.
Though maybe not this with apparently how insecure and poorly thought out it is. Which I suppose is on brand for Dorsey.
I just had a thought how weird it is, there are people whose names millions know, with preconditions (like what basic capital would be in XIX century) millions can easily have (it’s an application in Swift running on iOS), and a lot of people can judge how well or not well they are doing those things.
Yet it’s even a case for discussion, an important thing, like a new interpretation of some opera in theater.
Maybe it’s on brand, but honestly all this is cuckoldish a bit, as if we were criticizing Jack Dorsey for f-cking our proverbial wife not well enough.
I wish there were “anti Silicon Valley” solutions which are to decentralized transport-agnostic chats and forums what Gemini is for Web. A protocol intended to be understandable for everyone, for which you can make a decent client in two-three days. Except all the notes I make for myself are not worth anything until I make a working application, because that process will help me see what I didn’t when imagining.
Not even “further”. They are driving to as many splits as possible, as opposed to ideological differences.
Difference is good, because two different systems can, eh, have kids. One can disassemble them, mix them, see how it works, make thought experiments, discuss again and again. A split doesn’t involve the kids making process.
A split is different from a discussion in the sense that you use a prepared set of shibbolets to tell friend from foe, not leaving any room for synthesis.
When you have that split mentality, you punish attempts at discussion by others by interpreting it always as the biggest split possible, - as if it were worse than actually being a foe applying the same split approach, just like you.
Totalitarian societies usually poison and punish and implicitly tax discussion, but they are always welcoming to splits. And that split mentality endures far longer than the original totalitarian regime, usually. Look at Germans, not the eastern ones, but all of them, - their political and group thinking still reminisces Nazi propaganda. Israel and Palestine are one good example, but this can be seen in many other things.
Which is also why I don’t entirely align with the idea of “new middle ages”. The mechanisms we are seeing are from 1930s, not 1330s and not even 1630s.
Nazis were a bunch of tough but dumb veterans and their conservative sponsors, doing things the way obvious for these groups.
Bolsheviks were a bunch of thieves and college dropouts and their small-noble and intelligentsia sympathizers, doing things the ways obvious for them (that crappy Soviet elitism existed because the sympathizer layer wanted some sort of Plato’s state with a “better” subset of society, ya knaw, the right kind of professors, the right kind of poets, the right kind of journalists, necessarily social sciences as you see, teaching everyone else to live (if you’ve read “Heart of a dog”, professor Preobrazhensky is very clearly that, he’s not a positive character in any way, he’s one of those people who liked social inequality, just felt markets are a wrong way to decide who is where in the hierarchy), and ex-Soviet societies still are divided into “the popular Bolshevik” view of taking everything from the “enemies of the people” and dividing it as the main solution to every problem, and “the elitist Bolshevik” view of “the wrong people that can’t be allowed to make democratic decisions”, the funniest part is that these mostly intersect in the same people, these are two sides of the same coin). They too did things the was obvious for these groups. By the way, thieves and murderers are usually the same kind of personality, and failures tend to use power they have to take revenge, and intelligentsia of the described kind.
These modern idiots are a bunch of piss-smelling mommy’s cheats like Zuckerberg or Bezos who managed to capture a new industry, and their (kinda elitist) professor-cultured predecessors who think that the treatment of the industry that allowed mommy’s cheats to do that should be maintained, and all of them willingly reinforcing the hierarchy of them, a relatively small group of “founders and visionaries”, deciding where it’ll go, but I beg your pardon, there’s no technical reason for any decisions to depend on what they want. I’m certain most of these people are actually not technically more competent or understanding of the domain areas than many other people who’ve never were anywhere close to that “Silicon Valley society”.
But still all of them used different, but similar in effects and covered areas, means of propaganda. Eh, I think I’ve recently seen a wonderful article about various ways in which human psyche adapts for totalitarianism and abuse, except I suspect it was in Russian.
So - IMHO one can draw an analogy between early USSR with Bolsheviks like Stalin (the thief kind) and Bolsheviks like Lenin (the elitist intelligentsia kind) and the tech industry, where Zuckerberg, Brin and Bezos would be like the former, while Linus Torvalds, big people of Microsoft, and so on - all very different people, it’s about culture of the resulting “elite”, - would be the latter. But combined together, as some community with a vision of the future, they are pigs. They look at the world as if it were their place to decide what it will be.
So all I have to say is - in the last ~30 years we have evolved paternalism of a very harmful kind, combined with the split mentality, combined with a structure where paternalists are in power in a hierarchical system. It doesn’t matter that those paternalists employ anti-paternalist slogans and say anti-paternalist words. What matters is what they do.
In any case - in 2012 the former group were in appearances very “liberal”, now they are the opposite thing, and some known FOSS personalities have more right-wing views than you’d expect from their public appearances (which are very liberal). But all this doesn’t matter.
What matters is that for a sane discussion about politics, for example, you should have participants equally ready to accept ancap, fascism, ancom, Confucian monarchy, Buddhist theocracy, direct democracy for every decision, Trotskyist Soviet system (no professional state bureaucrats, all state apparatus roles are filled with random citizens elected\sortitioned by councils, perpetually rotated, no professional military commanders\sergeants, the same thing, and the problem of expertise is solved by good enough common education), I can go on.
Point is that you don’t get into an argument in order to tell friend from foe, you get into an argument to synthesize something new and wonderful. An argument is like a blind date. Why the hell even spend your time on telling friends from foes, unless you are taking notes for a very big kill list, but that wouldn’t be good faith behavior.
So if you think something, you might think differently after the argument.
Except this good faith behavior I described is dangerous when there are a lot of cowards in the society and the legal protections don’t work (you sort of irritate people who’d like a hierarchical society with non-transparent concentrated power, because power is concentrated by groups, and those groups accept new people of their kind, and thus such people have a chance of getting a piece of that power and don’t like you dogfooding mechanisms for preventing such a system).
This is also funny in the sense that one of explanations of Bitcoin is “digital gold” - that world economies and societies went in a wrong direction once they stopped being gold-backed, except gold and everything RL is controlled by governments, while Bitcoin is a subject to freedom of speech and whatever.
An already archaic viewpoint TBH, that many even western governments respect freedom of anything and human rights. And in another sense too archaic - the idea that a currency being gold-backed is something valuable was kinda libertarian around year 2007.
Which is also an answer to people saying that Bitcoin is not backed by anything (like country’s economy in this sense and not technical ability to exchange it for gold), it’s the main cryptocurrency, and it seems to work well enough despite high volatility.
This won’t be a circle though. Today they really like their control and surveillance. A gold-backed currency is where anyone owning N of M can exchange them to gold with which an M is guaranteed by a rate that doesn’t change, load that gold into bags, carry it to another country, go to a bank and exchange that gold to its currency. Perhaps declaring that they are carrying that gold at customs.
Gold-backed for governments - we-ell, maybe in some way.
Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar … being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they’d use different incompatible currencies.
Kill Hitler fundraisers are unironically one of supposed ancap mechanisms against tyranny.
I just love how reality keeps proving me right.
(Would prefer a heaven where it doesn’t, of course)
The British Empire is most notable on this picture with its glaring absence.
Yes, about the British and the French - these are countries that still fought small undeclared colonial wars after USSR ceased to exist.
They still fucking do.
Jordan is still not very different from a UK puppet regime.
Also why the West loves Arab monarchies so much - because they don’t change anything in inconvenient directions. They sell oil, buy weapons, build nice shit. But their countries are not just staying on one place in terms of democracy, enlightenment and human rights - they are further into medieval shit than they were after liberation from the Ottomans. Then they were sort of “naturally”, traditionally tribal and medieval. Not much different from many parts of the world. But since then those puppet monarchies, installed by empires, have been changing their societies in the opposite direction. The West not just supports Muslim religious movements against Leftist movements, the West supports Muslim monarchist and fundamentalist creme-de-la-creme (not) basically Nazi movements like our recent time’s ISIS against Muslim republican and Leftist movements. So some Muslim and socialist mojaheds, like those US supported in Afghanistan, are not good enough when guys like HTS are available. Even Egypt’s ikhvans, with their democratic component, are not good enough. Only Salafi beheaders in black with their nasheeds.
Germany - at some point their society realized firmly that there are mistakes in the past to be worked through. Unfortunately that was somewhere in the 90s, and in the middle of that process they for whatever reason abruptly decided that they have understood enough and are now a morality specialist nation. Which is why a German often feels entitled to express their opinions on the Holocaust as if their nation were participating in the victim role.
In some sense USSR was a huge spoiler. It took upon itself a lot of hopes of this world, despite Stalin and repressions, and then Brezhnev happened - just covering every budget inefficiency by selling natural resources to the supposed enemy, covering every pipeline hole by buying technology of the supposed enemy, resolving every deadlock between interested local producers by cloning technology of the supposed enemy, and so on. Then after 10 years or so the whole Soviet society and even more its elite were confident in Soviet system’s inferiority, and it couldn’t end any other way than it did from that point.
they elected a race to superiority
Unless a member of that race is against Israel, then you’ll get sometimes the nicest kinds of things like “or, so then it was all right for you?” from them - that being about Holocaust.
BRICS has the downside of including Russia.
It might not seem that way, but Russia is actually the shittiest of USA’s minions. Its “independent” actions like war with Ukraine are no more independent in fact than those of Saudis.
It’s definitely aligned with the stinkier part of USA’s elites, but somehow had good enough relationship with all of them.
Maybe reforming UN as a candidate for some actual world confederation would be a better idea.
EUR is honestly a better reserve currency, more stable already.
About divesting from dollars - I dunno how hard this is. Probably would be better for the US to provoke it to signal that time is nigh. Because otherwise this can only happen very slowly.
Nah, the more time passes, the less incentive there is for many people to pursue justice when there are newer things on their plates.
Same as modern Web’s “attention economy”.
But frankly in classical cultures they knew that too, catch the moment, now or never.
are not dropped, “all options remain on the table,” he declared.
That being dicks offered to him
That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.
Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.
We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.
The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don’t have to strip, that is all good. Just them.
It’s normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there’s a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.
So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.
Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan’s industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that “living in year 2000 since 1980s” joke).
Japan back then had (and still has) an interesting socioeconomic system, a bit similar to samurai clans went cartels, where workers are supposed to work all their life in one place (or close to that), don’t squeal about worker rights and such, but be covered by lots of company-provided social nets and guarantees.
Bailouts are unacceptable period. Trained workers, factories, factory hardware, logistics specialists, engineers, patents and so on - they all remain in the economy. That a company fails and goes bankrupt is not a bad thing. It’s just that company. Not the industry as a whole. If there are no additional mechanisms.
Somehow Americans seem to have forgotten that the kind of “capitalism” which gets defended is about this exactly - a company goes bankrupt, too bad. There are other companies which will hire its workers and buy its assets. Possibly new companies created by its former employees. Its shareholders have gambled and lost, well, their problem. That’s what an unregulated market is, by the way, and not bailouts to big fish and horse dicks for small fish.
If something works differently - workers don’t find a new place to work in, factories go to scrap metal, engineers go flip burgers, patents are collected by trolls, and new companies are not being created, - then something has been broken by an existing policy.
Patents are the worst of it, but also non-compete clauses, legal impediments for creating new businesses, legal expenses making it harder, - these things have to be removed.
I mean, people on Lemmy love to dream of something like what you list, those things are good, but maybe fixing some basic things about what you already have is no less useful. Especially since these fixes do not cost any money to maintain, while, well, pensions and healthcare do.
That and also - humans not knowing something can man up and learn it. When they need, they’ll learn.
And OP’s question about European clouds - it depends really. A lot of what this endeavor needs is just advanced use of OpenStack. I’m confident there are plenty of people with such skills in the EU countries.
As for the post content - I dunno, my experience with Kubernetes consists of using it, but not trying to understand or touch it too closely, because it stinks. Maybe those engineers were like that too.