rottingleaf @ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

That "military pricing" is called "corruption". Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

When the funds are provided and it's certain they won't have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

That's about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn't.

OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn't probably blabber too much about US politics.

That wasn't a thing already? Not a requirement for military orders?

You mean they could ship something into the military without proper documentation and bill it every time maintenance has to be done?

Some things in your land of the free seem to confuse me.

Genocide is too strong a word, but South African white population does have legitimate grievances by now. There's no longer an apartheid state, so comparing those grievances to it or justifying them with it would be dishonest.

One thing I personally like more about this than about Briar - routing of messages.

It seems Briar exchanges state of the groups with the neighboring devices, they with their neighbors, and so on.

That might take a few iterations (thus delay) to propagate a message from, say, one side of the crowd to another, and leave different members with different state all the time.

While here, apparently, messages are routed further immediately. From my own toying around - not the best thing too, but initiating synchronization by sender\relay and not by recipient seems sane.

Maybe should rewrite the toy to be nicer. It seems to be closer to real world things than I thought.

I personally think it's not about Mozilla. It's about the Web.

You need to see the bigger picture always.

The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.

The Web wasn't intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.

It's used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.

Why the Web and not just "Facebook native application" and "Google native application"? Well, it's hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don't work in a browser, that browser is doomed.

While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.

So - there weren't that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).

Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.

But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It's an oligopoly.

So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn't allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn't its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn't think of such consequences.

And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that "post #12435324646dasgtshdryh" would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.

That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.

It's just a versions list. And I'm mostly joking. Rather that the "feel" of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn't seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)

Yep.

Parents sometimes can’t help not wanting to put their kids through what traumatized themselves.

Except inverted.

I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative "nice" MacOS and Linux browsers used.

Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).

Eh, my dad wanted me to not be teased because of clothes or whatever. Except I saw through the bullshit and didn't ask anything. So he basically forced me to wear the ugly shit he thought would look good. When all you can wear is ugly shit picked by your well-meaning parents, ya knaw.

"Demonstrative consumption" is the word. It hurt my social ties with those I'd want to talk to, but was ashamed of this, much more than fucking poverty probably would.

He had sort of a trauma from his own childhood, but that's frankly no excuse because he didn't even try to talk to me about this. I'd tell him it's a school half-stacked with children of thieves (aka government workers, it's not USA so I won't take any bullshit about "hard-working administrators", a different part of the world), so, first, I'd prefer to have clear cultural separation from them, second, I didn't want to be there. The dumb fat pig moron wouldn't listen, he thought me complaining is the problem so he should find some way for me to waste my resistance energy.

Well, those little jerks played a prank on him, which I did try to prevent, but as you've probably guessed, he thought my resistance to his good wise decisions to be the main threat, so they succeeded. He tried to blame it on me later. I do feel bad for him, but he deserved every bit.

OK, so much for memories.

That's also why I love the idea of old copper landline. Commutation of connections versus commutation of packets.

So over PSTN traditionally you'd basically send signals. I don't think I need to say much more about how cool it is - you may not necessarily use a modem with a computer over it, you can connect a couple of analog electronic devices that an 80s schoolboy knew how to solder together, for whatever kind of functionality. Those could even be used not only with a phone network, but over radio too.

Now instead of electric connectivity (either you have it or you do not) you have data connectivity, and that is very complex and not a given. It's bad. Like - really bad.

More sophistication in a system means fewer people able to maintain it, fully master it, fix it. Generally.

I can't help but feel nostalgic for USSR in this regard, despite all the truths about it. Many people living there and then knew their shit on most basic technologies the society relied upon. Knew how various machine parts were called, knew enough of mechanical engineering to maintain machines, knew a lot of civil engineering (of the Soviet level naturally, but still a lot), knew enough of electricity and radio to fix stuff if needed (and not break it in the first place), could use a slide rule. Same with chemistry and agriculture. OK, "many" is an overstatement, but more common than now, and it seems to be the case in western countries too.

Just realized that could be read as "bit chicks", which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.

Yes, I didn't think you were, just shared ... In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.

If wanting or receptive to some advice ...

I have done this in the past, but I unfortunately also have BAD and sometimes abruptly drop habits, including useful ones, because they start feeling insincere. Hard to explain.

This is a very precious reminder, cause the former just means that one has to start again and again.

For their benefit and the role that they in company structures, it is one approach that pays out for some.

It's also (hence why I've touched upon conditions) similar to the advice of "want to do something at all, do it badly", sometimes given to people with those involving executive dysfunction.

Unfortunately for us, and humanity at-large, there’s also a statistically-significant increase in the incidence of anti-social personality disorder in those who pursue such positions, compared to the population average.

Yes, I've had a pleasure (not really) of meeting such people.

Anyway, if their common worldview is that we all live on some kind of ruins of a fallen empire, and they are going to be nobles of that society, that doesn't account for universal machines still being universal, and the technologies they rely upon being just as applicable the other way.

I actually liked the way this particular thing works, I've visited the repository and it's much like a real version of my toy of two months. (Except my toy doesn't work for anything real)

My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at "unknown OS FreeBSD" and doesn't run.

I really like this despite using nothing Apple.

From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.

"IRC vibes" -> maybe intended, see BitchX.