You have a lot say on this. Its good that someone thinks about these thing. I’m sorry that I can’t really provide you with a good discussion. I don’t know enough about markets etc and I don’t want to spend too long online.

I mean I have a lot to say. I don’t expect people to engage in discussions nor do I really want to create discussion as it eats a lot of time on my end as well.

I agree that can’t really stamp out openness and anonymity online (which is beautiful in a way) but I think that will mostly be reserved to technically capable users in the cracks and niches of the web who can navigate the restrictions. This is a massive tragedy.

You’re right, but we don’t know if the more technically capable users will create elegant solutions for the rest.

I’m sure you have opinios on that

Opinions probably. I try not to judge things though or impose expectations.

I am saying that the internet is as an international object antithetical to nations as its control panel sits not in one nation but all and that nations therefore seek to nerf it, only for it to return stronger and even more difficult to regulate as more and more people adapt to internationalized organizational patterns. As a corollary, there is a real cultural unification happening across borders as a secondary effect. I’ve read people terming it a “discordization” because people are starting to talk the way people talk in Discord chatrooms.

Yes, so you do have to restrict access and notably deanonymize users. California is trying to force OSes to implement age checking, which is of course a way to unmask people online. Protectionism cannot merely be understood as a set of possible tax policies, it is exactly the regaining of nation-centralized control in any sphere of life. States do not want people to be able to choose who to hang out with if the pool is the entire world, states do not have an interest in letting subjects learn about reality beyond a certain threshold where the scope of a person’s understanding exceeds the boundaries of countries.

What I am getting at exactly is the social structure that humans find themselves in. When relations/hierarchies are on the brink of flattening, that is everyone is linked to the next in a symmetrical fashion, like in a family or within small communities 5000 years ago, states, companies and even small businesses will feel compelled to work in such a way that preserves their asymmetrical stance in society. As it happens the internet is extremely good at producing flat social structures, anonymity, reach, openness and near-infinite scalability make it possible. You may be able to neutralize one netizen or manipulate one online community, by the time that has happened five hundred heads of the hydra have regrown. Cost and expenses don’t work out.

Our market has coexisted with an extremely fast global communication network for decades now. Given that the market feels like a quite organic thing, on what authority is the market not meant to coexists with the internet?

I’ll try to explain my thought.

The condition for markets to exist as self reproducing and self-stabilizing objects is government, usu. in the form of a state-entity, which itself is an economic actor that exists in competition with other states and in cooperation within free trade zones. Important note: government forms from market activity, specifically from the control of estates. Taxation is a form of rent, for example. I am not putting the state-before the market.

There is an interest for governments to:

1. Maximize economic output

2. To do so through cleverly tricking other economic actors outside of the own taxation system. I.e. trade agreements with built-in asymettries.

3. And to minimize damage to domestic production. Outsourcing can lead to cornerstones of the economy eroding.

Throw in the internet. We can now communicate and exchange with actors that are not in the same tax system. First and foremost this leads to issues with intellectual property. I’d cite geolocked internet radio stations and piracy. Japan doesn’t care about its citizens pirating manhwas, and vice-versa, Korea doesn’t care about anime piracy, and so on and so on. Then there is trade of physical objects. Say you need a laptop battery for your Linuxed MacBook M1 and a Chinese seller has batteries in stock that are cheaper and better than Apple’s own (happens rather frequently), with taxation at the border factored in you are still getting the most optimal deal. Some might find ways of circumventing customs which sweetens the pot further. Obviously there are issues to the domestic economy that can arise from this.

Trade speeds up and global supply chains gain importance as cross border communication speeds up. At the level of national governments there is a distinct threat presenting itself. There is less control over market activity leading to a speedup of the self-polluting nature of trade, in other words the boom and butts cycle shortens. As a national government you’d want to lengthen the boom and bust cycle as crises are the natural killer of states, along with expansionist nations.

Everything you are seeing, from Chat Control to China’s firewall are attempts to stabilize economies. The internet enables one to build structures that are wholly outside of state control. The state fails to direct the economy as planning starts happening between turfs. The internet due to its nation-decentralized function can aid in forming structures that oppose the state, should it falter.

Let’s not forget one of the biggest threats to the economy that is open source. Patents and DRM are threatened by the unstoppable pace of Blender, Open Office and co… It’s as if people said YOLO, let’s stop exchanging goods and services and at the same time solve very real and pressing issues, some of the biggest problems in fact. It works with much less friction than anything before, it exists as this hobbyist thing that we cannot call economical in any sense of the current understanding of the word and it would not exist if it wasn’t for the internet.

I think that internet access is restricted because of technological constraints, a technological lag in rolling out higher speed infrastructure, and a the lack of demand for that access which is driven by technological and practical constraint. Some complex function of those factors haha. Still, I don’t really know what you are trying to get across.

India and China have smartphone ownership rates of over 85%. There are no significant technological constraints if you are not someone who needs exorbitant download upload speed and low latency. The Chinese have pretty decent internet speeds, faster than most European countries. I also do not at all believe that there is a lack of demand for practical access. The internet is most generally a sensible thing to have access to no matter who you are.

That’ll never work. The internet is messy like a jungle, I might find bird crap somewhere but it will not get me the bird. I might find a turned leaf, but what turned the leaf will never be known to me. All despite me being able to reason and investigate phenomena that occur.

I view all things like I view particle systems: There are general trends, sometimes we can observe how single particles travel and we can derive rules from their behavior. Yet we are never able to see everything at full resolution, let alone know everyone in the way the “evil” “AI” thought experiments portray all knowing bots. What people say about Palantir is very similar falls into the category of we-don’t-know-the-rest-of-it.

No use going paranoid over preliminary results from a tool we readily use but don’t fully comprehend the limitations of (in the meaning of: we don’t know how shitty and unreliable they are in actuality).

I call BS. We’ll see false positives go through the roof. Just another tool to arbitrarily harass opponents.

Don’t hate the technology. It’s great. Just how people organize themselves around technology is not up to date. Markets are not meant to coexist with an extremely fast global communication network that everyone can access, why do you think economies restrict internet access?

Let the internet as a social activity die. It’s got to in order to be reborn haha

you should drive because eating pollutes more

Effective altruist style of reasoning 😹

Debian is kind of too big to fail. Maybe NixOS if you want something that will almost certainly gain popularity in the future.

Don’t think though that distros are the layer which you want to look at. Lots of stuff happens at the level of DEs, drivers and individual apps, which sure is preconditioned by the distro you choose but at the same time not that strict of a thing. You can get anything working provided you have the time.

x11 is still in its last round before retirement it seems, using Wayland is going to future proof what you’ve got majorly.

My 2c. Feel free to critique.

When done replacing your smoke detector, be sure to give me the spent one.

Mmm, yummy americium.

I would honestly love to share my stuff but I’m afraid that what I have to share contains too much identifying information with screenshots and all. I probably spent 24 hours in total with my current install and at least triple as much getting a previous Cinnamon install that I screwed up because I went to the experimental Wayland session to look and act a certain way. Back when I studied architecture we would consider all the failed attempts as a natural and indeed deeply necessary aspect of design, therefore I count the previous install as being the starting point of my current one. I hope that made sense. All of this is to say that I spent an inordinate amount of my recent life on this. I would love to share, but my paranoia is really keeping me from doing that. It took me 24 hours alone to create a decent repository of thematically and aesthetically matched backgrounds with all the selecting and editing of images. There is just so much that you have to do.

Warning you’re going to get the urge to try Gentoo to customize your system even further

Too late

All distributions are easy as long as forum posts and well sorted documentation exists.

And all distribution can be hard when they’re nerfed. Try modding Debian to behave like like a crazy arch setup. Program X requires KDE Plasma 6.5.x, you can only use 6.3.6 because Debian. Then you have to go to a GitHub page and compile an earlier version of program X by yourself. During this you get errors and mess your installs up. You clean up. Rinse and repeat until you have got something working. By then you’ll have spent an hour, if not two. On Arch I would have only had to have typed a little thing into the terminal. This is one of the less complex examples fyi.

In the end it’s gotta work out. A nice evening to you too

Google Translate feels more natural even if it’s not as “precise” than DeepL. I wouldn’t rely on it for communication, or any machine translation for that matter.

As someone who speaks more than two languages I am often dumbfounded by the sheer acceptance of these, I don’t want to call them this, tools.

Use of this stuff always leads to misunderstandings and inefficiencies down the line because you actually need to comprehend a sequence of words’ meaning in order to translate. But ANNs for translation do not understanding anything. They make a relation from a source to a target of some sort purely by way of statistics. That is basically rolling the dice with weights and patterns of distribution, where how you shake the dice is your input/source and the eyes on top is the output.

Now for a short lesson in biology. While it is true that synapses are indeed badly approximated by most ANNs, this is the only thing that ANNs really derive from biology with interesting reproducible properties that can be marketed to people who need to offload responsibilities. There is a complete disregard for internal dynamics of cells and dynamics that happen at a scale larger than the synaptic makeup of an organism. We do not really have the means to regard the interactions between organism and environment as objects that shape perception. We still don’t know how a thought forms and how meaning is generated from a perspective that is not purely philosophical, meaning we definitely do not know how this happens at a biological level. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or misinformed. As long as the biological bases aren’t crystal clear, we will never translate effectively.

A great man of history once said that all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. Of the tens of millions strings of words I’ve heard in my lifetime, this easily ranks as one of the most elegant. Let’s apply this to neuro-“science” in its computerized application. We know very little about the brain. Do you think that whatever devices we make with our current state of knowledge can even come close to what we do as aware beings?

Again, translation is an involved process that uses every function of the nervous system. Using statistical methods to very badly approximate our process of reading > contextualizing > imagining > [any step that could be necessary] > output, where reading is followed by vibes and then nothing before outputting will inevitably degrade information. A short paragraph could be handled when you’re conscious about Google Translate, etc. being used, but a book, something that happens in a very specific and exact environ like a README file or a manual, or god forbid, political philosophy, leads when put through DeepL to consequences that can’t be foreseen. I think of all the times I had difficulties reading descriptions of items on AliExpress due to the site’s translator use. This is not a productivity gain, this is a degradation of quality that will have to be fixed one day eating up precious time.

Hong Kong has got to be pretty darn cool. Didn’t know there was such a thing as a portable rice cooker. You learn something each day I guess haha

…Or maybe pedantry?

Amen

It’s like a drug that not only it’s bad for you, it’s also not fun to do.

Cigarettes after a week?

But now that I’ve said this, does it make you feel unsettled about it?

Considering that rice cookers are expensive where you are from, I suppose it is a sensible choice. I can’t exactly say I’m unsettled. Let’s suppose these devices being much cheaper relative to local salaries and there being plenty space for a rice cooker, then I’d be unsettled. But only if you are a regular consumer of rice, as I am ;)

Proably a cultural thing.

True. Some simply prefer plain-jane cooking or more steaming without the use of a dedicated cooker. A rice cooker though is “fire and forget”, consistent and simple. Most people want that sort of clarity and in that sense I do believe in the rice cooker.

“AIs” can’t even operate vending machines, let alone recognize handwriting reliably or translate text. I know a few people that work in archives with (pre-)medieval manuscripts and I myself have bitten my teeth out on Google Translate™ and DeepL™. That’s how I know. There was also a study done on that vending machine thing. Come to think of it, you could make a simple vending machine that collects usage statistics and sends reports via radio that just works using a few scripts. Emphasis on “works”.

My my my

😹 How are we concerned with statistical systems being vulnerable (which is shitty, sure) when they don’t even lead to productivity increases, that is they cannot even do the jobs they’re made to do? Get real. What a clownshow