That was also the situation with asking about stuff on the town square before the internet and even newspapers and radio. And after that too.

Was being solved by library classification techniques, catalogues, encyclopedia.

Bill Gates, however one might hate him, really likes those things and says useful things on them. In general I think he’s hated more than he should. I mean, OK, shouldn’t have used monopoly practices, then he wouldn’t be.

We’ve had like two decades of machines doing that job well enough for us on a limited amount of pathways and subjects, degrading the results, and we’ve gotten used to expectation that it’ll always work.

Search engines (not all of them, but what end users call that) are not sustainable. In general, automated search, solving end user goals, in the open spaces of objects and tokens and associations.

Web directories and web catalogues were. But where with phone books people knew that some things stop being reachable and the person on the other side is too in the real world, and they might die or change address and phone number next day, - with the Internet people have gotten used to some permanence and easiness which don’t really exist.

So - this is all just the life cycle of the global intercommunication, I think the problem will solve itself.

We hate what those companies are doing because that stops being useful for us. When the Internet is only useful for b2b visit card exchanges and digital marketplaces, it’s not the Internet anymore, it’s Commercenet. When it’s enough of a Commercenet, it’ll be the natural incentive for a big enough amount of people to make and use a different system, which won’t turn into Commercenet in the same way, because the Commercenet already exists and attracts its own users. It will probably turn into something else, like Socialnet or Ragenet or Idiocracynet, but then there will be future other iterations of the same process.

It’s the way evolution optimizes, for humans we can think Internet’s architecture is good enough for everyone, but in the nature it’s better for some uses than the other ones. There are different species of cats on the planet, sometimes coexisting in the same spaces. It’ll be the same way.

One can also expect similar developments from portable computers and portable communicators, usually the same thing.

I mean, if we are taking this outside of the social context, surely they are using AI. A hydraulic integrator is AI. A mechanical calculator with drum registers is AI (I think the person who created one of the more popular producers of those in the 50s was an Auschwitz survivor, talk about weirdly chosen area of business, - though maybe he saw personal calculators as the opposite of big machines usable for bad stuff).

Of course they are using AI.

They might even be using ML in correct ways here.

I mean, again - philosophically you can’t trust laws you infer from data on sufficiently complex processes, which is why Monte-Carlo method should be used in modeling and human brain in design. These things might be used to speed up design, but making correct constraints for that will probably take more effort than just using humans all the way.

That movie gave me uncanny valley feeling all the time, they’ve managed to make some of the shots look very Soviet, but each and every social interaction felt so thickly American that it’s completely alien to anyone even from Western Europe, not even talking about ex-USSR.

Actually a feeling similar to looking at AI slop …

And the main characters’ personalities are all wrong. And the social dynamic leading up to the situation. And the bullshit component - American bullshit and Soviet bullshit are two completely different languages. You should compare something American on “real army life” to Russian movies like “Little green elephant” and “DMB”. The difference will be similarly radical, even bigger perhaps.

Looking at real tapes with Legasov talking to liquidators and such is eerie too, those moments with him saying with smiles that “like with everything, it might be good in smaller amounts”. But it’s entirely different.

Wii classic controller was very nice.

and sticking a finger to law enforcement

No. They are just doing it differently - they have proprietary p2p networks and such doing obscure shit. They are similar to Telegram in that. Good to their users as much as they need that to maintain balance of interests.

There were such very, very bad people, called German National-Socialists. One thing commonly correctly said is that their party’s influential figures were very intelligent, very different from their regular stormtrooper idiots and modern neo-Nazi idiots.

So - this effect of intercommunication is what they had in mind when building their ideology. They also used terms from electrical engineering to describe their policies. We literally live in the world where National-Socialism won, because what the Internet is was the main component of their imagined system. Except, of course, for the racist and genocidal parts, but that happens too, just silently. Such a world encourages these things.

It’s worked so perfectly that we have “natural” and “grassroots” movements organizing using that architecture, structure and logic. If there’s not going to be some new technological and social revolution, undoing this, then the trajectory is obvious.

It’s not a “situation”, it’s normal, it’s common sense that when, say, you plant something to a bigger pot and said something’s roots occupy the space they are given, you are unlikely to successfully move it to a smaller pot.

Or, say, when you’ve got an addiction, - your brain has neural pathways or something grown accustomed for the stimuli you regularly give it, - and then suddenly withdraw on it, say, 3 blocks of sugar every day, but then a day without sugar at all, you are going to have a bad migraine. Or if you are an alcoholic, you might feel bad enough to start breaking things around you.

All the mid-XX century science fiction treated imaginary systems like our Internet as something that grows and dies and is never relied upon as the communication system. Similarly with things developed with such as a given. Similarly with anything that can be compared to a system of roots.

Yes, of course, if you ruin it all every 10 years, like kicking an ant hive, having such complex tall projects might not be an option, but do we really need that, or were Amiga Workbench and Windows 3.11 generally good enough?

We are a tower of Babel civilization, that can’t try new things because of being terribly afraid of losing all the legacy of one humongous root system. This is an illusion, everything requires maintenance, and keeping that ziggurath from crumbling sucks same or maybe bigger resources to maintain it than rebuilding a completely new one every decade, metaphorically. Except the latter would allow us to feel creators with free minds, and also avoid the problem in the post, and the former is perpetual intellectual humiliation.

It’s technically a Czech invention, the word is “defenestration”.

Dunno, my perception of Nordic countries has always been that they have (of course, they’re human) corruption, they have organized crime and they have all kinds of social rot, but they also have no reservations in admitting having those or barriers at discussing and trying to help those, which was the reason for nicer things in their societies. Though inside that perception Denmark has always been the worst.

Still, it’s all dynamics, and of course thinking you’re set causes failures.

Russian money laundering is honestly not as big a problem as the degree of penetration of Russian state secret agents, which both inside Russia and outside is beyond what you’d reasonably expect. If you think a 13 years old girl can’t be an agent, you’re wrong. If you think such agents can’t be a common enough thing, you’re wrong. If you think it’s limited to Russian/ex-USSR nationals and their relatives, you’re wrong.

And that’s the state of affairs during late USSR, these services haven’t become less professional, the world since then was changing fast enough to sharpen them, but also in ways where they always had the resources to survive hardship and learn.

I don’t know what the supreme goals of what one can call Russia’s deep state are, and whether I would consider them something good or bad, but I’m sure western reactions to their actions are all 10-20 years late.

Humanity is progressing all the time one way or another. Also corporation is a word with far wider meaning than often used, a university is a corporation, a security service is a corporation, a military is a corporation with plenty of subcorporations with their own esprit de corps, and even a network of friends playing DND is a corporation, not even talking about religious sects.

And all these corporations function, in regards to cronyism and and quid-pro-quo and silent erosion of mechanisms aimed at transparency and resilience, in absolutely the same way.

So - even in this interpretation there were people agreeing with you, which are now called “not proper communism”, who have ruined all the corporations they could find, have built their own one corporation aimed at first taking power and then fixing the world, it has diverged in a few directions, fostering under their umbrella a few other corporations along the way, and in the end result the territories which those people controlled are still pretty corporate. Except with very peculiar backbones of their organized crime, with traits of a religious sect, which can be traced back to those revolutionaries. There are even a few secret services which have been abolished or merged into other secret services, but in fact still function and their members elect their leaders. It’s scary, ironic, even beautiful, and honestly I respect those people who can keep a tradition even if membership in their structure has nothing to do with money and power anymore.

But you should notice how when trying to build a social mechanism to impose your will upon the world, like, for example, to kill all corporations, you are building a corporation.

I’ve used more words than needed to say this.

Not that. Because their IP and copyright and patent laws are softer, and also more bendable. In practice those laws don’t matter much.

Now “AI”, surveillance and such are ways to bypass those stricter laws on IP in the west. Technologies exist in some socioeconomic context. A big company doing surveillance and “AI” breaking those laws doesn’t expose that it breaks those laws often, and when it does, it can sustain pressure to get its way.

So the appeal of these technologies is to launder data. Which is, fundamentally, same as perfect obfuscation of executable code. And other such things.

That’s money against right, money wants no reverse engineering, no alternative compatible software, no examination of what their stuff does, and no responsibility for the data used. While in right, of course, examination and compatible tools being possible and verifiable supply chain and so on are basic for industrial civilization.

Technically they are funded by taxes, so it’s rather “whatcha gonna do, declare war on me?”.

and the robots are going to be plentiful because once enough of the process of making a robot becomes automated, the cost of it will go to zero.

That’s wrong, new layers of generalization do you know what? They make the thing cheaper or more expensive depending on the balance between the buyer and the seller, which is changed. Nothing more.

And suppose you’re the all-powerful and simultaneously benevolent seller, as a thought experiment. The thing becomes cheaper or more expensive based on its applicability to tasks and your ability to generalize that.

It’s a big matter, manual labor and trades are the part of economies least affected by centralized control and computerization. With software development you can’t replace people with chatbots. But with repeating manual tasks like replacing a window or painting a wall - possible. I mean, no, I don’t think that’s possible either, too many small complications. I don’t know what Elon is on again, of course you need some substances to keep you going in this world when you’re autistic, none of us will judge him for that.

Anyway, your direction of thought is kaboom idiotic, see, you’re as valuable as you’re needed, everything else is driven by that. I mentioned autistic people, well, most people not autistic don’t even notice how rules of dignity and morality they start applying only the layer above their basic one, of social hierarchy and power and alliances. Elon is known to be autistic and there’s a trillion in the title, so he really might believe what he’s selling, but those of us without trillions or even measly billions should know better.

So - robots fulfilling demand mean people not being in demand. That sucks.

SKG doesn’t specify how companies need to solve the problem, only that games need to continue to function after the company stops supporting them.

And that’s the friendliest to companies way possible, just people used to setting laws in their favor think it’s still rude to them.

Some of the quotes are good, yes.

And I agree the more because entertainment involving social interactions is as important as political spaces. It’s not aristocrats complaining about bad cake when people don’t have bread. Most of my social interactions were, actually, concentrated around

The bullshit about it being hard to design anything without a kill switch is irritating. A kill switch is the additional expense and complication. Something without a kill switch might not be readily available to run after the company shuts down its servers, but nobody needs that really. Simplifying things, there are plenty of people among players capable of deploying infrastructure.

In any case, when the only thing you need is documented operation and ability to set the service domain name and\or addresses, where the former the company needs itself and the latter is trivial, it’s all farting steam.

Commercial risks are something businesses have to consider themselves, it’s not government’s job.

Legal risks are exactly their problem to solve.

Company is a body of people, and its moderation can’t be more or less safe, in principle, than moderation by some other body of people with responsibility for that.

Excuses.

Go a few levels of logic deep and all you’ve got left is noise.

Which you often don’t need. Mechanical computers for aircraft operation, or hydraulic computers for modeling something nuclear, things like that.

But there’s nothing “century-old” about all this. They might have non-deterministic steps for some calculation where determinism is not needed (like if you need to ray-trace a sphere, you’ll do fine with a bit different dithering each time) and without it better performance is achievable.

The idea seems to make sense, just - it will never be revolutionary.

That’s all true, but there have been a few things similarly widespread and harmful, which weren’t solved until their turn came. Like lead in everything (not that nobody knew lead is poisonous or that things containing lead end up in the air and in the water and so on), or like child labor in factories, or like slavery (slavery was considered barbaric and gradually outlawed in Europe in the Middle Ages, then it made a comeback during the triangle trade, and for all its time of relevance people argued about its social effect, and that of racial segregation, still it lasted long enough).

This is a problem. It will eventually be seen as a threat. But it’s not that much different from radio.

Meeting up in a pub is a good enough idea no matter which pub it is, apparently, if the Internet shuts down.

That is as it was originally designed. Nobody promised freedom to people starting to use a system the development of which was paid for with military budget. It’s resilient enough. It’s not intended to protect people like us willing to not be controlled by bigger services.