vacuumflower

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vacuumflower,

And if it’s based on algorithms more fit for dating, kids with most problems would be the least likely to find adopting parents.

vacuumflower,

Yeah, I get it, why stream the video if you can generate summary, why find creators if you can generate content, why attract people if you can generate comments, generate, generate, generate …

I think I have a question concerning where do humans fit in all that, except for clicking ads.

vacuumflower, (edited )

That’s because platforms as a paradigm have failed. Their Achilles’ heel has been found, end of story.

Not only in the Web, IRL too. The world is going to be P2P (which is the same as imperial, because an empire is a P2P network united by philosophy, I think I’ve even seen some passage by Marcus Aurelius with this general idea). Call me mad or just scroll further if this looks nuts.

vacuumflower,

If it were for me to decide, they would be down in hiding. Cause being up in arms would mean legs broken, and also fingers or their hands to prevent further use of computer keyboards and mice.

Also an abbreviation which is expanded into “search engine optimization” by the very fscking name means that they are ruining the Internet, or the Web as its part, more precisely.

vacuumflower,

At this point where they say this that openly I think I’ll stop all the efforts at arguing online unless the opponent is quite clearly not a bot.

Lem’s “Bomba megabitowa” comes true in everything.

I like Lem and one may find some solutions in his approaches. But I also liked the Web like 20-15 years ago, it was nice.

vacuumflower,

There are many things further down the road to go wrong with attractive popular girls. 2 most catastrophic cases in my life are with those such as them.

Admittedly I’m the one who mainly failed them due to misunderstandings and passiveness, but when a girl (being all that popular) is used to boys being rather active and competitive and social, and then you are here just cause she happened to like your looks, this may end painfully, for you more than for her.

There are also cases from the post, only I may have noticed, just wouldn’t risk losing an existing good friendship for possible romance.

vacuumflower,

Imagine a girl you like putting a hand on your shoulder, looking into your eyes, saying some gentle word I don’t quite remember due to being mesmerized by those eyes, and you know what I did? I just looked back uneasily for a few seconds, then nervously took her hand off my shoulder, shook it a bit, released it and awkwardly smiled. (That even wasn’t her last attempt to make me happy against my best efforts ; ended bad anyway.)

vacuumflower,

Yep, the reason Macs are more usable is not that they are usable in general, it’s that they can’t keep the pace with Windows.

vacuumflower,

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rather easy.

But anyway, no mainstream user-friendly Linux distribution is that hard to use if you can read and think.

So when people say that they can’t manage one on their desktop - they also usually can’t manage Windows on their desktop, they just think they can.

vacuumflower,

I mean, Azerbaijan/Israel doing that is not something new.

EDIT: Oh, have read the article and it basically says what’s in the title plus what I said in that sentence.

vacuumflower,

I actually really like how he is behaving similar to some 00s web forum owners (I imagine mostly forum text RPGs, cause that’s what I was on as a kid).

Then you could jump to another such forum, and still seamlessly keep contact (via ICQ or something else in other countries) with everybody. Cause the forum was one thing, and chatting with people was a separate thing, not controlled by the same people.

Want that back. And the first 2 HP games. And the web browser being a lightweight program as compared to many other things we’d run.

And Opera 9.

vacuumflower,

Neocities?

I mean, things which worked 20 years ago still work today. You can literally export to HTML from MS Word, am I wrong? Just save the document in HTML and put a link to it from the main page, which you can literally save from MS Word as well.

There are free hostings allowing to create boards phpBB style. One can use them for “comments”.

Doesn’t look cute and modern and blonde-inductive? Well, there’s a logical exclusive OR between blonde-inductive and functional.

vacuumflower,

In 2013 they to some extent still targeted geeks, developers, Linux users.

Also it’s the elitist part of their image, it was somewhat culture-oriented, and that culture involved sci-fi, cyberpunk etc.

And the “anti-utopian” part is classic for Apple advertising.

We so quickly forget that at some point both Apple and Google weren’t perceived as hostile to computer geeks or various high causes and actually as geeky themselves. People would simp for them, not very stupid or ignorant people.

It’s amazing how things come clear with time.

vacuumflower,

I live in Russia and I remember when most people used Rambler as a search engine (I’m not sure if my memory deceives me, but it maybe even was the default in IE after install), and also Yandex.

I was really enthusiastic when Google came to the Russian-speaking Web as a search engine, and also when they rolled out a browser of their own (I was still using Opera, but it was very nice). Google Earth I just loved, simply used it to look at various parts of the world for the process itself, ha-ha.

There was something about the general spirit of Google, with them supporting XMPP and RSS, and with services like Google Code, and events like GSoC.

I think that this push at looking good and geeky from those years was connected to Sun Microsystems still being alive or just recently dead, and thus having to compete with Sun’s image of a really humanitarian company while also really important for the industry.

No Sun - no need, Apple always was elitist and their “geeky” part was always perceived as fake, Microsoft was always perceived as evil, and in general nobody had the bar as high as Sun’s. So they didn’t have to try that hard to seem the good guys anymore.

vacuumflower,

I mean, they could. They have been cutting costs in the wrong areas, though - those harder to replace if exgoogled. There’s plenty of unnecessary fat in Mozilla as an organization. They have been doing lots of expensive (in terms of developer and testing resources) unneeded crap (apparently to support the appearance of relevancy, which is different from relevancy itself), they also don’t need that many management people.

Let’s please remember how Mozilla started. Yes, a browser back then and a browser now are two completely different things, but the imbalance in resources has always been there. It’s just that now they are spreading resources where they shouldn’t, to imitate Chrome in things secondary to a browser itself. They don’t have the resources for that even with Google, and of course they won’t otherwise.

Also supporting something like XULRunner or in general olden times Gecko would help, so that people could use FF’s engine like they still do with Chromium and Webkit. That would increase the amount of people contributing in various ways.

That’s how I see it, my humble opinion and all that.

vacuumflower,

The very fact of doing things like this was in the 00s something which would make your life dangerous. People really good at generating spam would sometimes get their legs broken, or walk out of their window by mysterious causes.

But then non-flat search engines and social media came into existence, empowering these fucks so radically that killing them IRL stopped being a solution, 10 heads would pop up for each one you hew down.

vacuumflower,

Making no backups as a public organization comes pretty close.

vacuumflower,

There’s also another continuation: “fool me twice - shame on me”.

vacuumflower,

Oh. Thx.

vacuumflower,

Slaves will be slaves.

Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank - ‘You won’t need a bank account... it would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year.’ (www.theverge.com)

“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”...

vacuumflower,

I’d argue that even Telegram has a higher chance than X for such a superapp position given the steps they’ve taken.

I live in Russia, have used VK before Telegram became a thing, and the thought of a company owned by Durov with that much power scares me shitless.

I can’t even describe that feeling, emotionally it’s something similar to combination of Saint-Petersburg (I hate that city), Russian-speaking Web (like 4chan gone respectable) and the more elitist layer of Russian university youth (just somehow reptilian and unpleasant and untrustworthy, while not being quite as bright as they themselves may think).

I mean, reading what people say about TG’s protocol may give you some idea as to why TG is bad. Also its desktop client source is open, looking at that is also, eh, an unpleasant experience.

vacuumflower,

I’ve taken trash to subway station a few times.

vacuumflower,

Some even Paradox ones. One can waste many-many hours in CK:DV with Mappa Regnorum mod, for example. Though CK2 is more complex, it lacks the relative simplicity and clarity.

vacuumflower,

In some sense this would even seem an advantage of Windows. (I know it’s the fundamental reason for many hangs and freezes, but the idea that a file is a lockable resource doesn’t seem that bad.)

vacuumflower,

I’d be using Gentoo if not for installing software being something you have to plan for.

vacuumflower,

Yes, the thing is - it’s a choice.

vacuumflower,

Exactly.

Has HP printers always been this bad? (sh.itjust.works)

So my mother recently bought an ET-2800, By HP we had an HP printer before and we got a new one because the old one would not work with my sister’s Windows 11 Laptop. So I had to set it up for my mother, the manual said you can use it without the app. But there was no way to physically do that. Anyway, I downloaded the app on...

vacuumflower,

HP laptops were nice … somewhere in 2011.

And I have two HP mice and an HP keyboard (that one is PS/2, so not very relevant, I guess), which work fine.

vacuumflower,

had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79

Oh, my aunt’s husband was in this situation. And they live in Armenia, where normal Covid treatment was, is and will be virtually nonexistent.

He’s thankfully alive and didn’t lose any of his wits.

vacuumflower,

Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.

Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That’s a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.

vacuumflower,

Because “government research” doesn’t cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.

(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn’t that much better).

Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.

I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.

vacuumflower,

Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.

People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.

If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn’t have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn’t have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn’t make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that’s because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.

It’s actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.

vacuumflower,

There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…

If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.

But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?

You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.

We’re talking about patents right now.

Yes, patent law should be abolished. That’s what I’m talking about while commenting in most threads blaming “capitalism”, because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.

The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…

Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you’d even express it without details.

vacuumflower,

I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.

Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.

vacuumflower,

Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin’s USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.

Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin’s reforms, would those not be neutered.

I’d say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn’t quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.

vacuumflower, (edited )

It’s what terrorists do.

This particular sentence is not entirely correct, as it implies that freedom fighters can’t use terror tactics and thus be terrorists.

Say, if some Armenian force (there are none that’d have the balls) would bomb the Mingechaur dam, the pipes and infrastructure going through Tovuz, other smaller hydroelectric objects etc in Azerbaijan, - these would be actions aimed at fighting for freedom, but very important part of their effect would be terror.

In some way any violent activity aimed at denying someone their feeling of safety is terrorism. Like, say, allied bombing campaign of Germany (its goals were even formulated like that).

I agree that Hamas are not freedom fighters, their ideology is pretty Nazi.

vacuumflower,

It would be if using or not using terror would be orthogonal to success in war. War is a zero-sum game and you simply can’t throw out anything giving advantage - you’ll be punished by evolution, as simple as that.

Unless you are in some artificial situation where rules of war are respected and if they are not you are punished by neutral sides. Sadly our era doesn’t have any such mechanism despite all the declarations. It’s not Frederic the Great’s time.

vacuumflower,

OK, with this I agree.

vacuumflower,

It’s not really about religion. It’s about tribalism and sabre rattling.

One side is barbaric, another side cowardly, so their sabre rattling doesn’t look very impressive, rather disgusting in both cases.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring, effective immediately (arstechnica.com)

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

vacuumflower,

That’s corporatism in a wider sense. Existed since times immemorial. It’s a systemic problem, that is, defined by architecture.

vacuumflower,

Actually the former included the latter. So no.

vacuumflower,

That’s not what I’m talking about, I meant, say, helping those similar to you with the implicit idea that they’d help you too, and that being a common rule in a certain subset of the society, thus working.

Can’t remember now why I chose that word, “corporatism”. (Not important for the subject, but Knights Templar or any trading family or clan that would exist before 1400s can still be called corporations, same for religious sects.)

vacuumflower,

I have my doubts. I think that a jack-like (circular) connector wouldn’t require twice as many wires and circuits. Actually absolutely the same amount. The connector itself would require more metal to make.

And the chance of correctly plugging that in would be like 99/100 (1/100 for breaking it).

Today 17 years ago, on 7 October 2006, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya is assassinated in Moscow for criticizing Putin (www.iwmf.org)

Six people are suspected of involvement in the case – former police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, Chechen-born Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, former police officer Sergei Kadzhikurbanov and the Makhmudov brothers, one of whom is alleged to have been the killer. None of them have been brought to justice.

vacuumflower,

She actually lived long. Say, Alexander Lebed’ died in a helicopter crash in 2002, and Galina Starovoytova was killed in 1998, and similarly bad things (or just their marginalization and presentation as nutjobs by mass media, like with Novodvorskaya and Stomakhin) happened to most of people with actual political potential and spine from the Russian 90s.

deleted_by_author

    •
    vacuumflower,

    Yes and no, they are behaving like Azeris. This is not acceptable.

    vacuumflower,

    “30000 trackable objects in orbit” is nothing. Somebody doesn’t quite understand the scale.

    vacuumflower,

    A new model with a deep travel keyboard, please, Lenovo. Don’t bother me until it’s done.

    vacuumflower,

    Actually at this point I think I’m closer to a fascist than anytime before. (I’m not deleting that sentence, but thinking about the reasons, I’m not, just really want a working system to make evil something with too high a price tag.)

    But in general, in abstract I’m a distributist. It’s something neutrally anarchist, without going into ancap or ancom directions, ansyn would be the closest possibly. Sort of a political ideology close to some general Catholic worldview.

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