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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Yes, this is bullshit.

    While some sort of a redesign of part of Linux’s internals I could imagine.

    In terms of kernel ABI stability Linux is often criticized even in comparison to BSDs.

    And in general its insides are more messy and “naturally grown”, or so I’ve heard (OpenBSD is the only OS whose internals I’ve made myself familiar with sufficiently ; also put some effort for FreeBSD).

    So my, eh, alternative opinion would be that something is brewing for Linux like what Digital Unix was for BSD Unix. A hybrid cleaned up kernel, maybe support for different ABIs (like what exists in FreeBSD for Linux and older versions of itself, except maybe more ambitious). Maybe even tackling a more open alternative to NT (itself alternative to VMS and David Cutler being the man who did that) while they’re at it. NT is not a bad thing. Even Windows is not a bad thing. Maybe Wine isn’t enough, or maybe it would be cool to have something possible to make compatible with many Windows device drivers.

    At least I hope it’s Linux learning to do EEE and not the other way around.

    Though with Bill Gates and Dave Cutler this really seems like a meeting of legends and nothing more. They’re cool people, but I don’t think they want to play global thermonuclear computing war at that age, unlike just global thermonuclear war IRL, this one is more attractive for younger people. Even if it’s about some project being born, I’d expect that to be “just for fun” for everyone involved, they deserve that after all.



  • Ye-es, and if you call your automation “industrial planning\programming\optimization” the way I’ve seen it first in a student book, you won’t be understood at all, despite that literally describing what you are doing.

    Probably making every piece of progress part of popular culture wasn’t a good idea.

    But that started in the middle of XX century, with various new materials based on oil products being regularly invented.

    Events analogous to a “new material” with computers are a bit rare and very removed from the customer. Yet the popular culture demands some show of progress. They don’t see a lot of real progress in UI\UX\web - monopolies and stuff. So - new applications become subjects of such hype.

    I remember the P2P hype, that was kinda real. Torrents felt like magic.

    I remember the “metaverse” hype, that’s rather old, I didn’t find any satisfaction for that, but probably a group of friends and a Second Life instance could be nice. Minecraft suffices for people today, it’s easier and cool enough.

    I also remember “dynamic web” hype in my childhood, webpages were static, you’d press F5 to check new posts on a roleplaying forum. But there were nice-looking, dynamic, cool, and very inconvenient Flash applications here and there. You wanted to have both the cleanness and interop of the Web and the power and wow-factor of such applications. I wanted that too. Now I understand how dumb I was.

    The cryptocurrencies hype - it was a legitimate subject of discussions for intelligent people, how do you use cryptography to create a value exchange resilient to oppression, because without exchanging real value freedom is not achievable. That was, unfortunately, in the narrow understanding of the rules where the government can demand something from you, but can’t force you or torture you or steal from you. Thus BTC is not anonymous, intentionally.

    There was simultaneously the big data hype, it was discussed as if it’s not Google’s and FB’s pathway to power, but the opposite - finding systemic traits in human societies, probably using that analysis to build a better web, yadda-yadda.

    Then that mutated to the AI hype. But that also wasn’t about yelling “we found AI, give us money”, that was about neural nets yielding funny texts and discussions as to whether good enough imitation is real intelligence.

    Almost like fashion.





  • But that is their dream for the future. Purely automatically managing the populace as some sort of a farm.

    It’s an arms race. Like at any other point in history. Between those who think personal dignity and freedom and equality are a mistake of history or a device to keep the herd patient, and that they deserve to rule, and those who don’t.

    The good part is that this has already been tried. A fast system with deadlocks is not that different from a slow system with deadlocks. And a big redundant system deterministically degrading in itself is not that different from a smaller less redundant system deterministically degrading in itself. No USSR and no Nazi Germany anymore on the map.

    The parts about lying and false pretense of law and democracy are new, but not too much - rulers of Frederic the Great’s time had false pretenses of knightly behavior and following imperial mechanisms. One can even compare 30 years war to our two world wars in the sense of creating a new world order, which was considered impossible to change due to endless horrors following that, but eventually become a farce.



  • It’s not free, but it’s the good part nonetheless - nuclear energy and thus increase in people trained to operate and build nuclear reactors.

    Nuclear energy is, planning-wise, very high quality, you have a lot of control in scaling the output.

    That allows, together with lots of accumulators of various kinds (pumping water up and such), to actually make renewables with uncontrollable output useful.

    Making the average cost of energy better than just that of nuclear.

    So, when Microsoft dies, those reactors and people will be of value.


  • AI slop poisoning is value too. The more everything is poisoned by it, the less useful things trained on new data are. The poison spreads in many ways, it’s not something that can be removed.

    It’s important for prevention of totalitarianism driven by such technologies in the future.

    So I honestly hope it kills the bullshit web and we’ll be back to small communities based on personal ties, where the person making the rules is the webmaster you know, not an anonymous moderator or a bot. That’s killing two birds with one stone, no downsides whatsoever.



  • Things which were obvious for any paranoid I2P user 15 years ago, and were being discussed in Freenet 20 years ago, and by cypherpunks 30 years ago, are again new and unexpected.

    See, you can murder people in the open if you can make it comfortable enough for everyone to ignore it.

    Surveillance and censorship should be scarier, because without them you can cry out about the murderer or avoid strategic disadvantage against the murderer, but are not - most people haven’t been in real danger they understood. And even if they were - suppose that’s already happening, people are being murdered in the open, censorship and surveillance happen, and the latter causes more outrage, - we all can see nobody cares enough to pay with a few bruises for opposing it, not just their living, health, life.

    Here we are.





  • About appearances there’s also that everybody has what you’re describing in their stereotype of Britain (if not itself, then the Harry Potter universe at least), but feels that there’s something “true”, “real”, “deep”, “magical” about it.

    It’s the feeling that “yes, that’s ghoulish, but maybe in the end that’s for the better, how do we even know?”.

    A lot of cheap fantasy books in Russia in the 00s had that feeling too communicated, it’s probably one of the things that prevented the Russian society from being alarmed about the regime we have now.

    The worst propaganda tool in my opinion, because it makes a person look at mafia and think “it’s mafia, but maybe I shouldn’t judge it like mafia, what if they’re secretly beneficial”, or look at jihadist bandits and think the same, or look at a fascist dictatorship and think the same. And worst of all, because in such it exploits openness of mind, as opposed to most other propaganda.



  • Unfortunately they can block services in the Internet, and this federation will consist of Internet services that can be blocked. There’s no need to go a level above that.

    It’s like in the olden days kings couldn’t eavesdrop on everyone, so many people could conspire in secret against them. But with time recording devices, listening devices (including some very smart ones not requiring electricity), secret police organization methods emerged.

    You can’t say that an open federated system will help, just like you can’t say that street gossip will help.

    What we might need is a resilient multimodal communication system for revolutions of the future. Making weapons is now a bit more accessible than in 1917 or 1813 or … , but the coordination of any kind of revolutionaries is less competitive against states than then.

    With functionality including tracking cops and politicians.