rottingleaf @ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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It's not a point, it's a vibe, after Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky were defeated by Putin, it didn't take much time or fighting to create the environment Russia still lives in (except countless worthy people were probably kidnapped and probably murdered or probably secretly jailed, just because those on top don't like someone being better than them).

Since Confederate States of America have gained a negative connotation and to avoid confusion, you could proclaim Libertarian States of America, I know most people here are not libertarian, but still fucking closer to that than typical trumpists, and they are going to steal the word otherwise. Said as a libertarian and a citizen of Russia, which means I'll enjoy watching the events from afar quite a lot, might even remember to make popcorn.

Eternity. Humans don't really learn.

Or maybe they'll follow the "carpe diem" advice and there'll be no good in realizations.

Yeah, people who thought Google wasn't openly strangling the free (as in libre) stuff because they weren't that evil - these people just have bad memory. In year 2012 it clearly felt that corps, Google and Facebook and MS and Apple and everyone, are on the move to capture it all without a way out. They kinda made the illusion of being softer later.

So the question is - how do we even advertise legal but unpleasant for them things, avoiding their censorship.

The devices are sold together with the operating system (often unchangeable) and packaged applications and means of installing software, right from the markets.

I mean, I have a solution. It's counterintuitive and seems unconnected, and too direct, but I guarantee you it'll work.

Forbidding companies to do moderation or refuse to accept content without technical problems, or banned content (CP and such), and similar good justifications. As in - if your service is up, and there's user content served from it, it shouldn't be removed without legal substantiation. It doesn't matter it's free, that doesn't mean you can do all you like. You are not a media outlet, you are a platform for many media, that's how you work in fact, so yes, your actions do constitute censorship if you do moderation. If you can't afford to keep it free with such rules, then start charging money for hosting, as it normally should have been.

And, of course, this should include public offering status, the prices should be the same for all users.

I mean, if we had this from the beginning, we'd probably still have the Web like in year 2003.

Democracies do have plenty of possible protections. It's just that human nature allows for fallacies like of "once elected leader, always true leader" or, the same, "once captured a market honestly, always a deserved monopoly". Also human nature allows for another fallacy, that being able to threaten "bad" people is beneficial for "good" people. It's not. Any mechanism of threatening people with, say, deportation is not a weapon in the hand of some "good" group, it's a weapon in the hand of anyone who captures it, and its real state and ownership is always unclear.

It's very simple theoretically to defend a democracy, make it so that even a person publicly insulting mothers and sisters of all his compatriots would be completely safe (except for being ignored by some of their acquaintances), and that a person committing the worst imaginable crime could be certain they'll live in prison like Anders Brejvik at worst. No ape vengeance.

One good trait of rules is that they, when followed, work with clear limitations and verification, and that they don't require keeping anyone in fear. A means to keep one man in fear are the same as means to keep a land in fear.

Fear is not only the mind killer, it also kills the dignity of those relying on it for their safety.

It's very simple, don't fear and don't try to keep others in fear. When these are fulfilled for you as a thought experiment, you might notice some glaring flaws in the modern societies that you don't see when thinking inside right\left or libertarian\authoritarian or liberal\conservative categories.

Reading all such things I'm starting to think "what if I can drive?" I've always thought I can't, but since everyone around who thinks they can drive like suicide bombers, maybe I should find those driving lessons.

Because laws were made by incompetent and malicious people.

Laws should mandate protocols and formats, not implementations. Protocols and formats mandated by the law should be simple. The whole humanity was just fine transmitting telegrams by Morse code consisting of letter groups. Then it was just fine with fax. If what we absolutely require to stay productive needs to be so astronomically complex that one programmer, given ready libraries for XML, encodings, compression etc, can't write a fully functional and usable by everyone editor for that in 1 month - then such a protocol or format is not good enough to be mandated by law.

even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.

The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.

I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven't tested it there TBH.

Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just ... why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?

I agree he's not a criminal, but I also don't understand why is it a pardon without abolishing the law by which he was convicted.

And the way copyright is being treated today, where it's applied only if you are not a big corp, sucks just as badly.

In this case at least the guy is not in prison anymore.

Do you know what the Eastern Roman Empire was? Do you know why it doesn't exist anymore?

Because relying on one your enemy to destroy another your enemy is not wise. It seems wise, that's why every idiot believes in it.

If you support the stronger side, they'll add the remaining resource of the defeated to their power and hit you with it.

If you support the weaker side, then none will likely be destroyed.

He’s an opportunist shit stain that deserves everything that is coming for him.

This is miserable. You should be coming at him. Or if he doesn't hurt you right now, coming at those who do.

I think the reactions here show why democracy is so fragile.

Between two shits you should pick the least stinky shit.

In this case defend Musk from Trump and Bannon.

There's the interaction model and there's the technical organization.

The interaction model you're describing as good existed in unmoderated Usenet groups (personal kill lists to avoid reading something) and in Frost (vulnerable, abandoned, sad, I liked it more) and FMS on Freenet.

However! As yesterday I was reminded, things to ban include not just "wrong" opinions, but also executable binaries with probable trojans inside, murder\rape\CP materials, spam, bots, stolen credentials.

The problem of self-moderation being hard doesn't exist. Today giving the user control over their communications came out of fashion, but just like for e-mail clients local Bayesian filters existed, one can do today - with even some local AI tool probably, somehow everyone pretends that for such purposes said family of programs doesn't exist.

At the same time ultimately someone should do the filtering. What you are describing is your own preference in filtering, some other people have other preferences. Expecting people to self-moderate posts with stolen credentials when they are the criminals those are posted for - would be stupid.

So - it's hard to decide. Fundamentally a post with CP image and a post with Gadsden flag are the same. They even have a similar proportion of people willing to ban them, bigger for CP, but one can't just treat some point between them as a constant, for which a post reputation system should be designed, to collectively stop propagation of the CP image, but for the ancap flag image to still be propagated by enough nodes. That point will move, there might be a moment when CP becomes more acceptable for users in a segment of network (suppose there are many CP bots and we have temporarily failed to collectively detect and ignore bots), or there might be a moment when ancaps are so hated that they are flagged by bigger proportions of users than CP. One is still a violation and the other is still not.

So - to avoid solving the hard problem, one can have a system similar to a multi-channel ( posts propagated all practical ways, #1 store-and-forward nodes - network services like news servers and nostr relays, #2 Retroshare-like p2p exchange between users - I'm ignorant in computer science, so my own toy program does this not very optimally, but rsync and git exist, so the problem is solvable, #3 export-import like in a floppinet, #4 realtime notices network service like IRC ) Usenet, with a kind of necessary mechanism being used as a filter - a moderation authority signing every post as pre-moderated, checked, banned and so on. The moderation authority shouldn't be a network service, it should be a participant of the system, with its "signature posts" being propagated similarly to the material posts, because otherwise both the load on the moderation authority service would be too big and the moment it went offline you'd lose a lot.

Then on every kind of posts exchange a storage server or a notice server or a user can set up whether they propagate further everything they have, or only material posts pre-moderated or not banned by specific moderation authorities, and all signature posts, or only said authorities' signature posts.

However the user reading a hierarchy in such a system sees its contents they should be able to decide by themselves, using logical operators and the moderation authorities chosen.

If we assume that almost everyone almost everywhere doesn't propagate things flagged as CP\gore\fraud, it would be hard enough for a typical user to get them, even if their setting is wildcard. While the "wrong" opinions they will get.

Then they can add users with those opinions to a personal kill list. Just like in olden days.

The management tends to be in the ASPD direction, and the developers tend to be in the ASD and ADHD direction. Not the majority, not even many people, but there's a substrate in the cultures, so to say.

Sort of hostile kinds of mind.

The management in such situations dreams of replacing all the developers with "AI" or making them low-paid maintenance element so much, that people of that kind already gloat in the interwebs before that has come even close to happening.

I've seen a justification made that "it's you nerd types who loved to promise replacing all other professions, especially management, in the 00s", it doesn't really explain anything, because in that course of thought you just replace lower-level programming with higher-level programming.

But personally I think it's very simple - the management thinks they are the most valuable people, they create the "ideas" and hire metaphorical brick-laying workers who then fulfill those genial ideas. They see developers as such.

While developers look at this like people who are approached from time to time by clueless apes wanting something and thinking they're visionaries, whose wishes need to be guessed, critically cleansed and cracked into something barely making sense, from which then a developer derives some specific project goal and makes the clueless ape agree that this is what they meant.

The management works with social matters, the developers with, ahem, how the universe really functions, a level below. The management generally belongs to a culture where everything is weighed on their social level.

OK, what I really wanted to say is that there are 3 "elements", so to say, here, leadership, metis (in Ancient Greek) and labor. Management ignores metis, developers ignore leadership, unqualified labor doesn't see the difference between these two, and since both covertly seek affirmation from unqualified labor, it's a perpetual conflict.

On the forums I visited there was an area where new users were allowed, intended for describing who they are and why they should be allowed further.

But generally - I think I might have seen something like that, but without registering it in my memory.

I remember that if you feared everything and only used programs and visited websites your friends recommended, you'd be much better than now. If you were careless, you had a bunch of banners and a porn blocker at the end of the day.

There's something refreshing in this TBH.

Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.

If the web today didn't consist of "5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4", that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.

Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).

That's a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.

That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.

User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.

Maybe that's how it should have been still.

Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.

That's a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That's one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.

Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.

I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.

It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn't fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.

I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It's like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.

I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn't conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or "like native", ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.

So why are we making the Combine from Vacuum Flowers?

The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual "anime elements" and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste.

OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I'll still spell it out.

The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it's almost like feudal Europe's system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish.

There's no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-

<companies>

Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian.

Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I'd want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.