So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.

Personal computers of today don’t give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.

Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.

In year 2006 they’d say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don’t do that now, because then you’d be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.

It’s just sad.

You do keep it. That’s the point, how you keep personal computing without being disadvantages in this particular part of the economy.

Except the trap works when their subscription services are still competitive, and locally hosted solutions are part of competition regardless of what they want.

There are industry-wide attempts to ramp up complexity of everything, so that everything were more centralized and local solutions harder to support. I’m not sure what they hope for.

Home consumers can be trapped this way, but they are subject to competition from many businesses.

Also while crypto stuff is unpleasant, it involves decentralized commercial calculation with some of the solutions, meaning possibility of automated service choice in a decentralized network. You can in theory have an alternative to Office 365 running in such a network paid for with Ethereum or TON or something similar. I haven’t researched this supposition.

Businesses are harder to trap this way, because they usually can afford an employee or two to support basic local solutions. Or to pay another small business of 3-4 people doing that.

Or one can think of (playing EU4 right now, so a limited set of associations) gunpowder and chinaware production in Europe, the secrets of both were slowly and steadily spreading, until they were no longer secrets. Here it’s not as much about secrets as it is about evolution catching up with revolution.

The commonality of people just needing to do their work and willing to use computers to help it is slower to react to change than big corporations, but big corporations can’t direct their reaction, they can only slow it down.

So - renting computational resources you possess right now is hard and big cloud providers are doing it, while people just owning hardware don’t. That’s the problem to be solved. Things like boinc and seti@home were altruistic, and I think there’s a similar distributed hentai hosting. The problem is in making such a market for everyone.

That’s what they want, and there’s what you the customer want.

Prices of items and services affect the difference. They’ve judged they have enough dough to close the gap. I don’t know if they do.

Then, if they do, there’s the stickiness of that state. Or how long until alternative personal computing industry evolves outside of power of those interested in it.

Reminds me of talking about property with communists. Private property should be abolished, but personal property is different, that you can have, until someone wants it strongly enough for it to be considered private property.

That’s really interesting. I’ve mostly done only small experiments with generative music and povray renders, sharing them with friends, but that’s usually not enough to call a circle. But my friend has such a circle for poetry. I mean, with poetry this is pretty traditional.

BitLocker is older.

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.

I’ve read someone blabbering how BitLocker is better than FDE on Linux or BSDs just recently. I didn’t do fact checking, but honestly just uploading keys to MS wasn’t something I expected even from them.

In general, calling something that extrapolates and averages a dataset “AI” seems wrong.

Symbolic logic is something people have invented to escape that trap somewhere in Middle Ages, when it probably seemed more intuitive that a yelling crowd’s opinion is not intelligence. Pitchforks and torches, ya knaw. I mean, scholars were not the most civil lot as well, and crime situation among them was worse than in seaports and such.

It’s a bit similar to how you need non-linearity in ciphers.

Well, if it is a bubble (at least the centralization part, not the “AI” part), then they are building locations with plenty of energy and water connected. Can help with re-industrialization a bit later.

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.

So, when you are, as the classic text says, bayonet-charging the last terrified rapscallion, you suddenly find yourself without a bayonet and with said rapscallion really motivated to take as much moral repayment from your suffering as they can.

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.

Nothing as good guy as machine gunning a protest. They are tankies, remember.

Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Oh, yes. My sister’s friend once went to a protest. Each time she crosses the border (has to see relatives in Russia and all that), it’s an hour long interview.

Still Chrome and slow.

For me it doesn’t evoke any nostalgic feelings.

I used Opera between 9 and 12, bookmarks were very convenient, it had a builtin torrent client, and so on. Compact and ergonomic UI, stylesheets and caching modes. And not too nauseating in appearance.

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.

So - what’s good about utopian dreams not going to happen? Communities championing them are often not very good. The dissonance between what’s championed and what’s achievable leads to hypocrisy. How Soviet Communism was not very free or equal, or how Christianity is far more hypocritical, ritualized and hierarchical than even most orthodox Judaism (not even talking about Christian inferiority complexes towards both Judaism and various pre-Christian religions), or how Western support of democracy worldwide is now a joke about airborne delivery, mostly.