My problem is mostly with the moving parts and places with screws, all the plastic there is cracked and crumbling.

So it’d be more like replacing the whole “shell”, which would make sense if I knew where one can buy that, LOL.

People believing in public pressure and grass roots should understand that these don’t work.

Power works, and it depends on what’s possible and what’s not. Surveillance and censorship over these means is possible, takes power and makes one more powerful. Hence it happens.

Technical affect on social matters is slow, we’re seeing it only now. Want different trees - build different genes.

No conspiracy is required.

What have you touched recently? Asking, because my Lenovo V14 thing is fine inside, but everything mechanical is crumbling in my hands.

Hate to add to this.

He’s saying it to heat up the topic.

These people liked the heaps of cheap good hardware after the dotcom crash, so now they want cheap good hardware, specialized.

But that’s the point, these people’s worldview (despite them being older) is the same that I was reading about around year 2010:

1. black box ideology (like Turing test - doesn’t matter it’s imitation if it looks real for us),

2. trust into big data (we don’t know what we’ll do, but if we build big-big computers like zigguraths, and big-big datasets like Azimov’s Empire, we’ll have that cool sci-fi future we were promised),

3. transhumanism (the idea that new technology is not analogous to wheeled carts and knives, going in parallel to human development, but instead something approaching a common point of singularity),

4. mystery (that’s quite old, as one might notice, but in their case it’s the “layers” of existence and knowledge of how it all works, in practice meaning that big tech top people can play with things you won’t ever learn about),

5. conflict as source of evolution (that’s why all around the world doing various gruesome shit starts to correlate with being a western ally, 50 years ago there was some sort of parity ; that’s also why some things really seem like subject to the criterion of building autonomous combat drones and data banks for those ; on Russian state TV they love to talk about yet another wonder weapon being designed, I heartily hope something of that really exists, because what Palantir and company are doing will certainly be real, and for balancing that Putin will do).

When a sewer pipe blows up with a fountain of sewage, people are impressed for a few minutes.

When it just leaks and stinks, people are not impressed even for a few minutes.

Buying a car is pretty capitalist.

I’m not envious and I like the thought of some places on the planet having it normal for one family to have few cars, but - in certain places where capitalism has already been disrupted a few times in history, like Moscow, Russia where I, eh, reside, am headquartered, dwell, roam, … - and those places are richer than much of the world, - people would think the guy from the screenshot doesn’t have many reasons to try disrupting it.

we gar-dena in yeordagum

Yes, when you are not trying from time to time to make something - digital art, music, software, - you might feel as if this opinion were valid.

When you are trying, eventually you gain understanding. Specifically that you have far more time to do what you want if you get paid for that.

Though I haven’t ever sold an intellectual work. Using my vacations and weekends for these things. But I perfectly understand people who are, eh, trying to do more than toying around once half a year.

Their advertising pressed differently in early 90s.

Some businesses have that genetic ideological backbone that defines what they can and can’t do with good results.

In case of Apple - at some point they were a “cheaper and better for home users, but less serious and more toyish” computer company in their advertising and, well, quality. And in some sense this seems to have carried through from the 90s till now, as their equilibrium.

And honestly when in the 90s they were gradually becoming something more luxury, that was already a mistake. Then Jobs came with the NeXT purchase, and, of course, with Apple’s financial situation then it was probably the only way to survive to further go in that direction.

It actually made me optimistic about that company to read rumors about them preparing to go for lower market with another laptop model in 2026.

Because the world has changed, and I’d say not only Mac Pro is a suitcase without handle, I’d also say the same about iMacs. If they are not making an extensible stationary machine, then having a few laptop lines (cheap light, good light, powerful heavier) and a stationary line (well, Mac Mini and Mac Studio seem that, stationary normal and stationary powerful) is optimal. Since each line means expenses and different components and separate advertising.

It sort of feels as if they were returning to the roots. Perhaps they feel that they are stalled or losing in the mobile market, and same with the luxury market - their cult offensive was impressive, but it’s wearing out. While with desktops they have a chance at rapid expansion.

Warnings are usually about things that will happen, otherwise they shouldn’t be called warnings.

What I dislike is how warnings made this all look far cooler and hotter at the same time than IRL.

I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.

Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.

It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.

You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.

Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.

I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.

OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.

It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.

That’s prosody and emotional language. Actually imitating these is what American movies often try to do, even if sometimes for comedy component and not well.

(And don’t ask me about imitating music, one would think music theory is something movie composers all study, yet they usually don’t bother to even look up some basics, like modes commonly used in Russian music, and the resulting soundtracks sound like some sound salad.)

These actually express the same set of feelings all humans have, not really different between Japanese, Somalian and Russian people. Except, of course, for semantic connections and references.

What I’m talking about is level above, of what’s being said in said languages.

When an American is bullshitting his superiors, he’s telling them different things than a Russian when bullshitting his own superiors. When an American is making a presentation to persuade someone of something, he’s also using different means. When an American boss is talking to people below him in hierarchy, he’s also using different means. American bosses derive their social authority through different means than Russian bosses. American prestige and Russian prestige are different. American and Russian perceptions of what looks strong are different. And some of these things are opposites, say, in American perception simplifying the matter at hand for easier comprehension by the listener is a sign of professionalism, in Russian perception it’s as if you were asking to be treated as a clown.

They show Soviet ministries’ officials as some “politicians” or “golden boys” doing their own thing and either oblivious to the matter at hand or treating it as outside their responsibility to understand, even if understanding. But that’s clearly American dynamic. First, in general narrower expertise is more normal for Americans and wider expertise is more normal for ex-Soviet people, culturally, and an ex-Soviet man would at least pretend to have knowledge of everything close to their job. Second, Soviet ministries’ officials would make careers in the areas of economy their ministries were responsible for, or, in other words, the ministry was the area of economy. A Soviet ministry official wouldn’t ask a professor about details of the task at hand, it would be the other way around, the former would be the one having more practice, and the latter would provide theory. The “politician” or the “golden boy” types wouldn’t be anywhere near ministries, they would be diplomats or somewhere in some party things or even special services or journalism. And, of course, by the time someone became a ministry official, they’d be far older than that guy in a suit in the movie. Third, the portrayal of Legasov is almost a caricature for ex-Soviet people, they portrayed him kinda similar to Sakharov, but Sakharov behaved still stronger and simpler, first, and Sakharov had made that funny bomb before becoming a dissident, second, to make that image respectable. Real-life Legasov behaved, well, like a normal Soviet man. And he wasn’t a dissenter.

There are many such things, if they had just looked at some footage with the people the characters were meant to portray, or followed real events more closely, they’d have a good shot for free, without understanding such nuance. But they decided to make up a plot with some message, around just a few events, and that plot turned out something completely American.

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.