Well, if it is a bubble (at least the centralization part, not the “AI” part), then they are building locations with plenty of energy and water connected. Can help with re-industrialization a bit later.

before the mine gets filled back in.

That has to be prevented from happening, and those mines have pumps in them. Otherwise land around gets poisoned (and also eroded).

So putting useful objects inside those mines at least makes them not just passive expense.

If someone wants to know what if you just don’t pump the water out of an unused mine, leaving it be, then they can read what happens in Donbass now that nobody takes care of those many depleted mines there, due to war. It’s like Mordor basically.

So, when you are, as the classic text says, bayonet-charging the last terrified rapscallion, you suddenly find yourself without a bayonet and with said rapscallion really motivated to take as much moral repayment from your suffering as they can.

Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

First of all, your standard of living heavily depends on how big a network of friends and family you have. If it’s zero, then as a guy your life won’t be very interesting, and as a gal you might run out of non-exploitative choices.

Second, about good graces and such - yeah, doing political activism you might start having problems with banking and many other things.

Nothing as good guy as machine gunning a protest. They are tankies, remember.

Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Oh, yes. My sister’s friend once went to a protest. Each time she crosses the border (has to see relatives in Russia and all that), it’s an hour long interview.

Still Chrome and slow.

For me it doesn’t evoke any nostalgic feelings.

I used Opera between 9 and 12, bookmarks were very convenient, it had a builtin torrent client, and so on. Compact and ergonomic UI, stylesheets and caching modes. And not too nauseating in appearance.

Not segregate society, that was an example of a mechanism (not good, but existent in history), rather leave permission to enter a town or district to its local authorities.

No “we should”.

And most people around don’t like seeing homeless immigrants. Hence the idea.

Racists might actually feel more than average person for those of them of “right” extraction.

But the issue here is that crowds of immigrants seeking for greener pastures can indeed paralyze life in places on their path. Letting them in should be left to the decision of local authorities, so that each such division could determine how many and by which criteria it lets in and accommodates.

Not being allowed into some specific Bumfucktown, but being allowed into some other specific Bumfuckridge isn’t end of the world. While citizenship being almost out of reach is a far harder issue.

I’m not talking about getting rid of currency.

But IRL not just that. They’ve created an environment very good for justifying state control, as a demonstration. That might be the whole point - government elites understand each other. These enormous companies were allowed to grow for a reason. They are already unofficially an extension of governments - many at once. One can say, the connecting layer of the unofficial global government - not like in a conspiracy theory, but in pure effect. Of course, sometimes militaries make coups and sometimes other such mechanisms go rogue, but I wouldn’t hope for that.

And, by the way, if you have an unofficial global government with a common globalized elite in effect, but borders and currencies and customs and citizenships, all of different weight, then you have unofficial segregation in effect. Which we do.

It’s kinda irritating to see Americans perceive American citizenship as some sort of a certificate to be a first sort person, compared to the rest of the world. But honestly that’s how this works with connectivity like now. Now is not 100 years ago. Now having so many different citizenship and migration barriers inside physically reachable world means that said world is as good as one big apartheid South Africa.

One thing communists get right in theory - citizenship should be accessible to everyone who wants it. In practice, of course, USSR had inner registration, and if you were far away from your place of registration for too long with no good reason, that was an administrative offense.

But getting back to theory, it’s better to have local segregation like sunset towns as opposed to segregation by citizenship.

And if most of the population is afraid of hordes of immigrants living on welfare and littering roads with tents, then some segregation you do need to preserve order. And then it’s better to have it local, because that allows for a softer curve, there would be places where immigrants can’t be in by this or that criterion, there would be places where they can live, but not own property, or be, but not live, and there would be places where they don’t have local voting rights, but have all the rest. And there would be places where everyone is welcome. And such for various criteria specific for each administrative division, things like that.

I’m not sure if this imagined picture is more like anarcho-communism or anarcho-capitalism, but it might work. It’s more or less how migration worked in pre-modern times. Even in XIX century Europe.

So - what’s good about utopian dreams not going to happen? Communities championing them are often not very good. The dissonance between what’s championed and what’s achievable leads to hypocrisy. How Soviet Communism was not very free or equal, or how Christianity is far more hypocritical, ritualized and hierarchical than even most orthodox Judaism (not even talking about Christian inferiority complexes towards both Judaism and various pre-Christian religions), or how Western support of democracy worldwide is now a joke about airborne delivery, mostly.

Losing the point, though - which is that the work you’d enjoy won’t be in demand. Including what you’ve described.

Master Of Orion 2 … TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) … Warcraft II …

X-Wing Alliance too, it’s a relatively modern game, but there’s something about the campaign. You really feel yourself a rebel.

They all have that atmosphere of going into the sea for real, I don’t know how to describe it.

Another old game with it is Ascendancy. I always get too emotional from its style and music, somehow it reminds me of how I dreamed of future in my childhood. But I didn’t play a lot of it for the same reason.

Master of Orion 2 is just very playable and comfortable.

TIE Fighter has that sense of humor similar to Dungeon Keeper in some sense.

X-Wing I like more, because of its atmosphere, again, you really feel yourself a rebel.

XvT is for a group of friends.

WarCraft II has amazing music. Other than feeling yourself in a world where moral alignment is not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional, chivalrous honor being the one forgotten. You might not feel yourself the good guy necessarily, but that honor you’ll feel in its campaign. A bit like in Harry Potter such a character as Bellatrix Lestrange has that quality maxed out in the positive direction, which makes her an interesting character compared to most DEs who are both baddies and spineless cowards.

In the “amateur” section with professional cameras and pretty experienced (one could say glorified) “amateurs”.

That might not be what we should be excited to do.

And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.

So here’s the catch, replacing human work with machines where practical usually leaves the parts where humans are needed for being human, not for their output as a part of a mechanism.

For example, humans greeting you at a hotel, humans carrying trays and accepting orders in restaurants, humans as a decoration, humans doing prostitution, human gladiators, human actors. OK, the last part is fine.

All these involve learning and maintaining skills more removed from power than skills of more industrial professions (monotonous work).

Being a nice monkey to those who can afford you as a servant might not be what most people dream about.

Of course all of this might be moot if Shitler manages to start WW3 by attacking Greenland. If that happens RAM prices will be the least of everyone’s worries.

Which WW3? You really mean European militaries won’t back out when threatened? Suppose Shitler kills a few Danish hikers in camouflage with professional pride. Nothing will happen, he’ll just take it.

I swear. For a big war based on alliances and rules to happen you need principles and institutions of the military sort.

Not really the thing, it’s more about censorship than full autonomy.

I mean, if not for sanctions preventing one from using most (usually all) payment methods from Russia, such a disconnection would cause problems.

Now it won’t, so yeah, living in Russia I pretty much can believe that even waking up one day in a countrywide version of Elektrostal town local forum instead of the Internet is possible.

In that case I’m packing what stuff I need and leaving for any direction open. If there will be directions open.

Not really. That’s like saying that a bunch of non-standardized tracks all over some country is a railway system.

It’s already having deeper consequences, if their purchases affect RAM and storage prices, then it means it yields results better than half a year ago.

I agree about “good enough”. I felt that “good enough” moment in year 2006. In year 2009 even more. Some people remember Amiga Workbench of year 1999 stage as “good enough”.

I don’t think it matters which of these is closer to the equilibrium, we’ll learn empirically.

But I’m feeling better that it’s having a hard power redistribution from consumer sector to datacenter sector, that’s not a bad thing, because most of that consumer sector was based on the bullshit you are describing. It didn’t need to, but all the potent avenues of said sector’s development were strangled by RIAA, “protect the children”, “there are wrong people saying wrong things in the Internet” and other such pressures. And also by Steve Jobs and his idea that you don’t need ergonomics or usefulness, just a sci-fi look and a brand, I think that’ll take years to rectify, even though people are slowly getting tired of the “touchscreens are the future, physical buttons are fossil” narrative.

That bullshit drain means that we’ll have a better, healthier consumer sector eventually. And perhaps in 10 years or so something interesting will be happening there. Life is about change and movement.

Talking about computers, definitely yes, functionally. The socially important problems got solutions, imperfect, but replaceable ones.

We had publishing to all the world via Usenet and Web, file exchange with all the world via plenty of FTP servers, way to find those files and published pages via search engines (those real ones, which just indexed file attributes and page contents), our social identities were ICQ numbers and email addresses, our way to repost stuff was sending a link, our way to rate and discover good things was web directories made by people.

For evaluating something on the Web a vote is simply not a universal unit. Every vote is a different person. So upvotes and downvotes lead to numbers being important for ratings on something, which means that the least useful things get the biggest ratings. Because everything useful is offensive to someone.

The only downside that environment had was insufficient easiness of making a webpage, hosting a website, hosting something else.

If I were imagining a solution, it would look like an all-in-one suite like Hotline, but based on how the Web was then, including an intuitive editor (something more like QuarkXPress) for pages and with hosting and mirroring being transparent. A p2p system with cryptographic identities, but manual choice of hosting something. With a p2p contact directory, but many trees of trust inside that directory, where one tree of trust is like one email provider or one xmpp server for identities, that you subscribe to. With “domains” (sort of) being done similarly to that contact directory. With good old Kademlia for finding contacts, domains, groups and separate pages, posts or files. And other than good old Kademlia, possibly some kind of interchangeable client-server things, like storage areas and trackers and relays, to help with offline messaging and NAT’s.

OK, my thought floated away, intuitive management of anything creative in that system is honestly the main flaw of how it was in year 1999. I even wonder if that “agentic AI” they are talking about has a place in such an application suite.

Once again you are talking about programmers in general and not security researchers.

Really, have a look at what it requires to write binary code, let alone reverse engineering complicated code, that somebody else wrote.

I have had a look. I’ve also done some solving of simple crackmes and such. I’m definitely not competent, but to find a security backdoor well-hidden you’ll have to examine behavior, which requires certain skills, and then you’ll have to look at the executable code, and then, of course, having the source is good, but less so if it’s deliberately made look like normal.

I agree with Linus’ statement though:

I think I’m mistaken on that attribution, OpenBSD’s Theo de Raadt is more likely to be the author.

I stand by my opinion that it’s a bad look for a privacy- and security-oriented piece of software, to restrict non-“experts” from inspecting that, which should ensure that.

Yes, I agree that it’s better when the source is present. But if you overvalue the effect, then it might be worse. Say, again, with Linux - plenty of people are using thousands of pieces of FOSS software, trusting that resulting thing far more than Windows. If we knew that the level of trust is absolutely the same, then one could say Linux is safer. But we know that people sometimes do with Linux all kinds of things they wouldn’t do with Windows, because they overvalue the effect of it being FOSS. It’s FOSS, but you still better not store 10 years of home video unencrypted on the laptop you are carrying around, things like that.