Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.

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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • That’s roughly similar to catch up development (which is always faster and easier), except automated. With catch up development those doing it only make waves for some time before they, well, catch up and find deep inability to evolve, similar to USSR, which is where it ends. While with this - things are made from something already created all the time.

    Basically all you need to make something a source of training data, laundered of authorship with plausible deniability, is for that something to be publicly available.

    Meaning that at least in art we might be back to private orders and works available to limited circles of viewers, I think. Once it becomes unprofitable enough to publish your works, and once the existing pool of training data is exhausted and falls back enough compared to what’s in demand and in fashion.

    OK, that’s just an exercise in high school level “outta my ass” style analysis.

    I mean, Antique Mediterranean had all sorts of mystery religions. Perhaps we are on the threshold of an era of mystery art.





  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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.




  • 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.



  • 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.