I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing

It’s not panic, it’s consequence of networking and a very specific culture having formed for CEOs and such.

A bit like Silicon Valley tech bros, they think they are the chosen ones leading the charge and able to make decisions for all of us, sort of aristocracy.

So in their circles it’s fashion now to play this “AI” thing.

And mechanisms to remove those fools from places they don’t belong to and make them clean streets have rotten.

Usable and decentralized - well, you’ll need some beyond-the-horizon planning for how the development of that will go on. Because 90s Web was kinda normal too, except there were future stages.

You need something that’s usable almost from the beginning, but that is also usable for everything you haven’t yet thought about. Something that allows any use, but doesn’t limit any, even needed only by a handful of people, task.

You need universal open infrastructure. Something allowing to pool public service trackers, storage services, relay services, notification services, key services, search services, but tying them into specific applications on the client. Different applications, over the common high-level medium (of authors and messages and groups, for example ; perhaps subscriptions). And you need that to be untrusted and backed up by DHT and sneakernet as perfectly functional alternative ways for the same system. You need them all.

And you need means of development with higher common, basic level. You need something like Hypercard on the clients, so that development in this “alternative Web” were accessible in its full power. With “cards” shared like messages. That’d be similar to how we fetch different websites.

Messages and people and groups would have global identifiers, tied to cryptography. One could have sort of “permission rule” messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during “replaying” a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn’t, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.

There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to “interpreter” messages containing scripts.

OK. That’s just a pet dream of mine, but I don’t yet have a full picture in my mind.

More formal layers. Similar amount of real ones.

Slaves also could own their own things, which were not owned by their own owner (oof). So they could buy their freedom. It’s complicated.

Free people could carry weapons, participate in politics.

Unless they use IP to prevent new producers from entering the market, there should be a response eventually.

HDDs are precision machinery, of course, but not lost alien technology only old big companies can make.

A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.

We’ve had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.

Now it’s supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don’t think it’ll end.

A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn’t even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we’ll see improvement.

OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components’ prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That’s good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.

I’ve read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That’s a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).

So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing “content” from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I’d want. Including production, standards and everything.

In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.

They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.

That’s why OLE from ORACLE is becoming Rer and not getting his A torn?

Surely they have some explanation how that doesn’t happen, otherwise they are making strange plans.

1. Artists need to eat.

2. Art needs to be a commercial success to defend itself from commercial successes it hurts.

3. Computing industry notably positions itself as replacing art (I don’t mean digital art like tracker music or 3d modeling), in many things where, say, car industry doesn’t. But the suggested replacements are not that. Similarly to how journalism can only be adversarial and offensive to most points of view, otherwise it’s just public relations, because it doesn’t improve anything. Improvement is always adversarial.

And eventually “we” might come to the thought that for many things analog computing is enough. Symbolic calculation, cryptography and such, of course, need digital. But when we are talking about airplanes and satellites, perhaps not.

One thing I somewhat like about the general idea of all those LLMs is that in theory they are closer to something that can work on non-deterministic technology.

I wonder if some sort of FPGA but for analog circuits is possible. To have the advantages of re-configuration that programmable things have, but also advantages of continuous signals.

Steve Jobs knew something about forces not for good.

The industry is not that bad, but it’s just one of them.

People need art. And art doesn’t survive in environments where there should be a winner and winner takes all.

Art is the social alternative of recessive genes. It allows to preserve more than needed “right now in this particular situation”. Without art there’s degeneracy.

That’s how every successful fraud works. If it’s not attractive to people who see it’s a fraud, it won’t have their support. If it’s hard to discover as a fraud, it’s also hard to maintain and always has the risk of discovery.

So the best frauds are those where everyone knows it’s a fraud, and plenty think it’s a fraud they can profit from.

It’s not that. Nobody really expects to achieve firm satisfactory result in something never done before, to justify the risk.

It’s a bubble. That they found money to make such an input into inflating it just means the outcome of said bubble bursting is this good for them.

I’m interested what exactly will happen when it bursts. A dictatorship, or a blitzkrieg against half of the world, or what else.

About me? Well, I don’t object, as I’ve just said. Perhaps I’m just tired of computers. I like them as tools. But I don’t worship wooden planks or vinyl panels or concrete from which houses are built.

That rudeness was in self-critique anyway.

If that helps, Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” I prefer much to “Citadel”. But it’s not matter of preference, I can’t hide from what that book says.

Or if that’s about Rubio, I don’t think anyone doubted.

Well, infrastructure is built by the government in an environment where its use is regulated, and for essential things.

Electricity for data centers isn’t essential. They should build their own parallel grids, a bit like Google and Facebook and such build their own infrastructure.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t develop, but correct management from the governments here would be making them pay for their toys in full. That will also be optimal - they know best which infrastructure and how much they need. No loading the common grid with non-essential things that hurt lights, heating and basic connectivity.

EDIT: Perhaps even a centralized, but separate second grid, for that.

At the same time it’s reminiscent of “caliber”, which one would expect to appeal to good Christians.

Garamond does look somewhat Apple-ishly pretentious, and Lucida does evoke associations with Sun and some corporate spirit, and Arial\TNR\CN trio does feel like “Windows font classic” combination.

But banning a more readable font to show you have “decorum” … there’s a word “чмошник” in Russian, I’ve recently realized I’m that, and also a whole crowd of adults and peers around me 13 years ago. Actually there’s just one girl who wasn’t that, and one adult. Who got the shortest straws in that story.

That word means someone miserable and envious enough to look for confirmations and signs of coolness in all things they use and do.

I’ve also recently realized that I don’t like computer people, and of other professions dealing with calculation and materiel. They are glorified bookkeepers and managers. The reason tech workers dislike management so much is because the whole industry is much like machine-assisted management. Paradox of small differences.

Yeah, I know you lot like being perceived as magicians and the industry as having something to do with intelligence. Read de Saint-Exupery’s Citadel, there’s a passage on “a special book for generals”, and you will recognize that whole industry, from its lowly brick layers to its prophets.

Deregulation would mean these things can’t use public infrastructure.

EDIT: Actually this seems a very fine idea.

so long as I was very clear in all advertising that I’m only building houses and not in any way related to the cars - but if I start putting Lamborghini cars in my advertising I could get into trouble for creating confusion

That’s fine. But suppose your brand is Lambozucchini and you have cars kinda similar to Lamborghini, but with the brand clearly different, just with homage, a bit like Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, where in the world is the problem with that? That should be legal, from common sense.

EDIT: Also nobody confuses Lambo with Lamborghini, a nickname is not confusion and trademark owner doesn’t own nicknames. And they don’t own everything in the world connected to their trademark.