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Cake day: April 28th, 2026

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  • I’ve just realized what this family of technologies is - it’s an attack at capitalism.

    That word is hated here, but it’s generally a good thing, with one condition.

    When things marketed are something possible to supply an instruction for and to teach the customers basics of telling good stuff from bad stuff, sort of good lightbulbs versus bad lightbulbs, good radio receiver versus bad one, not very deep knowledge, but high school understanding of electricity, mechanics, chemistry, stuff like that.

    So most of all it’s a family of technologies good for generating “something” that looks plausible for a person about things they themselves don’t do. Meaning - deceiving laymen.

    So, for the commie types, it’s partially good news - it’s their part of history finally, and partially bad news - cause the flood wall they were trying to break because they thought it spoiled the view is being finally broken from the other side by a stream of sewage.

    Just a random passing thought.



  • No they can’t, this is a good faith problem. Fundamentally. You can invent all the words you want and any law will somehow be a couple of terms short of covering the particular description exactly and without doubt.

    You can’t solve this with properly formulated laws, you can solve this with a sufficiently participatory legal system, and British legal tradition is better for that than Roman legal tradition in the first place, but it still is derived from popular power.

    In other words, from societies forming the responses by networks of sufficiently pissed citizens.

    The alternative was the government and big fish being interested in doing the right thing somehow, not the case here.

    This, I think, is related to how all over the world laws have become very precise, literal and with plenty of special cases, which wasn’t the case in the 60s even in socialist countries.

    To replace good faith mechanism with literalism, which allows with sufficient power to create cases immune to law, because some special cases are not written into laws yet.

    Also that naturally makes legal proceedings more expensive.


  • Watch lists are so 1937. The whole point of building datacenters for that kind of thing is to not have the separation between people on watch lists and people not on watch lists.

    So nobody should be ashamed by your measure. We live in a wonderful time when, instead of selecting few suspicious individuals to monitor, you can monitor everyone automatically and don’t have that risk.

    It’s like lossless encoding, like FLAC, versus lossy encoding, like MP3. It’s better to have the former if your resources allow it.

    Watch lists have that downside of being a Russian roulette, what if your watch lists give you a wrong impression of the society outside the watch lists? You might think you have it under control, while you don’t.

    With everyone being monitored if you think you have it under control, you really do.

    That just was a bit too expensive, but times they are a-changing.

    That’s really nice, isn’t it?







  • Open discovery is a hard problem.

    If that seems pseudo-science speak to seem smart, I mean that you need some prior trust. Just like with PGP. Some axioms. In year 2002 those axioms were people you meet IRL and links you saw printed. Now these have been erased as a Web discovery mechanism, so to not compete with search engines and platforms. Links are login-walled and short-living most of the time. People are discouraged from making their own pages and sharing links.

    My Kademlia experiment is more working than not, slowly moving to split core and UI there, to have replaceable cores. Want to try F2F. Especially since it even looks more like something that would work F2F way better. I’ve learned that I’m not as smart as I think while making it. Still don’t have anything resembling indirect reputation, but eventually I want to make that, for some kind of “public” media, where you need to filter the sewer stream.

    (No, I won’t share, it’s a P2P program written in TCL/Tk, entirely, not just UI, except for some bindings in C that weren’t done by someone else. It seemed easier to start with, with asynchronous style being very easy there, but I’ve recently tried writing some other thing in Python and realized just how easier and faster Python is due to everything not being a string, however boring that critique of TCL would seem.)


  • No it wasn’t. It was about a group of people trying to create/design a digital currency, with an open ending that really looks more like “they decided that won’t work anyway”, or even tossing the weapon aside like Luke in Star Wars : RotJ .

    I hope you can see the difference.

    Neal Stephenson is a really good author in the sense of doing both, describing accurately the thrill of creation and discovery or at least being able to touch that with your mind, and also not allowing that optimism feel something to really transpire. The main characters are optimist, the author and with him the reader are not.



  • When I say “in your society you can”, I don’t mean there won’t be pain. I mean it’s socially acceptable.

    Some people live in societies with a significant portion of the population just blanket hating you (I mean, me and people of my views, for example) and thinking you (again, me) shouldn’t exist, because their TV tells them that and they are used to thinking that it’s moral and honest to believe what their TV says. There are people in Russia who think that voting for someone other than currently ruling party’s candidate in presidential and other elections is morally treason. You don’t even feel how far really degraded societies are from yours. There are literally people thinking that even doing what even Putin still allows them to do is treason.

    There are political quasi-religions postulating that living and letting live, and also peacefully facing those you don’t agree with, and accepting that robbing others is bad, and accepting that some things are just not your business, - that all these things are impossible heresy and should be killed with fire.

    Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.

    And that’s a level above not presuming any civil rights. And that is a level above thinking that even talking about such is weird and not normal.

    And even deeper there’s preemptive obedience, where even asking someone expecting obedience from you to express that demand before you follow it is considered disobedience and you only have yourself to blame.

    After that there’s worse, like today’s jihadi Syria or emirate Afghanistan or some village in India.

    There are many levels, yours is mostly envied.


  • Yes, cheap slop made by humans being made by generative models - that I can see too.

    And when all UI design is the same squares-and-shadows sad thing, doing that with a generative model makes sense too.

    Unoriginal tasks are being optimized.

    That happens with every technology, nothing unexpected, if your expectations of the future were formed by philosophy and science fiction, and not specific courses in school or university or job experience.

    A chatbot won’t replace humans making decisions or with roles in social hierarchy, it also won’t replace humans in anything inventive or artful. It can replace any human functioning as a detail in a mechanism.

    Depends what you mean by “severely changing”, in some sense this is return to normalcy.


  • I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.

    But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It’s just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.

    That’s good. It also means that a real job can’t be “done by AI”.

    It’s another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.

    It accelerates the most things that shouldn’t be done at all. Boilerplate code that’s written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.

    That’s useful, one can’t do everything by hand.

    Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one’s own life for like 20 years - that they can’t do. And that’s what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn’t matter.




  • Pedos sharing their stuff spoil spaces quite a bit.

    I mean, it’s far nicer to look for pr0n, or even sfw material, without looking at results with pedo keywords in title sometimes. Talking about ed2k. While I’ve stopped using it lately due to simply not pirating as much, and especially not looking for that specific pr0n movie with that specific one actress that’s nowhere to be found, which ed2k is best for, - honestly that part might have been the main subconscious reason. Moderation is good. Horse porn is funny (it’s technically animal abuse, but the way horse breeding works it’s not that much different) to find, gore seems to be a thing of the past, but that I don’t like.

    Nazis are usually those harmless folks posting their, eh, literature, and sometimes long hardly understandable posts about race and alternative history. Usually that’s all text. Their, eh, music is generally not forbidden and available on mainstream sites.

    OK, what I was even trying to say - there’s a difference between stinky ideology and crime records being shared, the latter is far more repealing. I’m not afraid of reading yet another post about Hyperborea, Aryans, space lizards and such. I am afraid of occasionally happening upon a murder recording. EDIT1: Or a rape recording.

    EDIT2: At the same time some people seem to think that some media being usable for secret communications of a group that sometimes somewhere wishes to raise an armed rebellion or something like that is closer to the latter than to the former, for me it isn’t.