Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.

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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Some of the quotes are good, yes.

    And I agree the more because entertainment involving social interactions is as important as political spaces. It’s not aristocrats complaining about bad cake when people don’t have bread. Most of my social interactions were, actually, concentrated around

    The bullshit about it being hard to design anything without a kill switch is irritating. A kill switch is the additional expense and complication. Something without a kill switch might not be readily available to run after the company shuts down its servers, but nobody needs that really. Simplifying things, there are plenty of people among players capable of deploying infrastructure.

    In any case, when the only thing you need is documented operation and ability to set the service domain name and\or addresses, where the former the company needs itself and the latter is trivial, it’s all farting steam.




  • That’s all true, but there have been a few things similarly widespread and harmful, which weren’t solved until their turn came. Like lead in everything (not that nobody knew lead is poisonous or that things containing lead end up in the air and in the water and so on), or like child labor in factories, or like slavery (slavery was considered barbaric and gradually outlawed in Europe in the Middle Ages, then it made a comeback during the triangle trade, and for all its time of relevance people argued about its social effect, and that of racial segregation, still it lasted long enough).

    This is a problem. It will eventually be seen as a threat. But it’s not that much different from radio.




  • There already is, it seems. Just people bombing them are not the west.

    But yes, in the end result what Putin’s propaganda voices were saying turns out to be correct. Not in case of Ukraine during the war (that’s war propaganda, it’s always crazy), but before it.

    I have a pet conspiracy theory, if you wish:

    Either they are this inept or they don’t need Ukraine as an equal ally, and see it being weakened as a good outcome. I don’t think a group of nations still making up the world’s economic and technological leadership can be this inept. So Ukraine is seen as an enemy best weakened.

    They can’t expect Ukraine to attack them, that would be crazy. Or to ally with their adversaries, it doesn’t have many options. Meaning there’s something brewing with the western nations preparing to piss off a loosely defined group of nations, including Ukraine. Piss off so significantly that weakening it is a good idea.

    So the conspiracy theory would be that the west intends to start “WW3: Nuclear drone boogaloo” soon enough. Because their dictatorial, aggressive and in general very bad enemies are not hurrying with this, and are doing just fine winning economically. And the war must start and result in the victory of those most deserving, that is, those with the best global military logistics and the biggest nuclear arsenals.



  • The war has gone on for 3+ years, and it still has two participant nations, with “Ukraine’s allies and friends standing with it” nowhere in sight. No western soldiers dying, but Ukrainian soldiers dying, - it’s a demonstration of values too.

    Other than that any real war treats fit men as a resource. Such a flight will happen in any country at war with conscription, when its population knows what war is.

    A functional military doesn’t do superman shit, it doesn’t have irreplaceable heroes and it doesn’t use smarts. It’s a pipeline. Nobody wants to be fed to it if they can avoid that.

    Most of all - those Europeans cheering how they “stand with Ukraine”. But they haven’t been taught to keep their fucking mouth shut about standing with anyone if they are writing comments and that someone is under bombs.

    So I thought before 2020 that western values are “if we have the same idea of good, we die for you, you die for us”, even if I wasn’t sure if anyone really shares that, I thought the western public kinda remembers something of that.

    Then war in Artsakh happened, and I understood all about western values, western ability to keep their word they chose to give, western honor and what will happen with all that. Just all thieves and cowards, who seem civilized by inertia from robbing half the world. The economic and demographic dynamics show that this won’t happen again.

    Well, not only western, but in general, it turned out that for most Russians alliances matter nothing if the other side is some people who “disrespect them” - how nice, yes, so if I don’t like how a Russian talks, I have the right to not pay them for work or deny them, say, a floating jacket when they are drowning … ah, oops, it’s different, “too much honor for some kebab makers” - that was said by a person for all supposedly good in Russia, against Putin and such, about alliance obligations. These people don’t even understand that fulfilling obligations and being decent people is all about their own honor, and if something is “too much honor” for someone, you shouldn’t give your word.

    So - for Ukrainians it was naturally easier to believe in some “western values” because the west was seemingly helping them, and saying many nice things.

    But I think now they are done with that.

    We’ll have a world where all the politics will function after Conrad von Wallenstein’s army, because to restore understanding of honor you should first impress with all the weight upon humanity, in practice and thoroughly, what role honor fulfills.

    No model is absolutely precise, and no pyramid of modelling to avoid full cost will rid you of need for real feedback. That works for everything in history.


  • Yes, that’s the point. Their glass ball and Tarot layout say you’re guilty, so now you have to prove your innocence. And to prove your innocence you have to collect all the data on yourself.

    BTW, this is far more subtle than it seems, collecting and giving to someone all the info on yourself all the time is nonsense, but collecting it and having just in case for such situations might seem normal for many honest people. Except in fact these are the same, you don’t have tools to collect it all without giving it to someone predictable. So this whole big tech and surveillance con abuses good faith participation in the society. And encourages everyone becoming a cheater.

    The police and other such people know that these are bullshit machines, but use them to cheat with impunity. Sometimes to charge a clearly innocent person, because they have an excuse - the computer did it. And the rest of us are incentivized to cheat to get better ratings for loans and worse ratings for scammers, and better danger rating so that police wouldn’t just use as a scapegoat to close a case like this, instead choosing someone less dangerous.

    Wait till witchcraft becomes a crime again. Nobody would believe in it, of course, but it’d be an easy win for everyone except the convict.

    I don’t care if Soviet caricatures (“Neznaika on the Moon” specifically) were wrong back then, they are correct now. I mean, yeah, they are correct everywhere now, but still.








  • It’s typical, a bit how Russian politicians and members of their families often touch criminal folklore (the higher kind related to student culture, not the lower kind about homosexual ranks) with their mouths, despite being dirty by default for any carrier of that. They also love to similarly spoil patriotism.

    In this case a bunch of stinking orcs is showing that they are the elves you’re gonna get. Get used to it. They’re in control.


  • This was never about security. That’s just the excuse.

    Every technical decision is an excuse to fulfill a social desire.

    There was a time when I was 14 and happy and saw such things in everything around me, and all the fiction I was reading often touched that trait of the surrounding reality. Those books are not considered something for intellectuals or artists, and I have nothing to discuss with such people - that is, strictly speaking not true, but I never know why some things I know and mention are interesting or not, and why some my opinions meet hearty agreement and some are politely ignored. And I never find continuations for those agreements and interests. But I feel as if that planted something deep in my head that has endured all the degradation.

    So. You should also look at things where it seems that technical decisions were made for technical reasons.

    The desktop paradigms, the platform paradigms, the OS paradigms, the ergonomics, - of course. But also aesthetics and visibility, how separate or mixed with the offscreen reality everything is. Also why the Internet is built as it is, why multi-user operating systems and Java really exist, what really is Unix and what really is Windows. About software design and why what embedded developers make when allowed is considered bad design, while what web developers make is considered rather good design, yet the former is usually more stable, secure and maintainable than the latter.

    Not just software, but why is our consumer hardware is what it is, what do we need such complex systems for.

    Not just computers, but construction design - the world now is very different from the world where that brutalist idea of making apartment buildings having a terrace as a “street” to which you have another exit from your apartment was bad due to all the crime. And also there are plenty of covered passages and malls with the same idea, except the framework building is always privately owned, having a different juridical status than a street or a bridge. While Soviet-style microdistricts, and things similar to them, are similarly bad due to crime, yet honestly the “right and good” modern European urbanism moves in that direction.

    All the choices around us are made by humans, driven by social stimuli - that’s the meaning of the word “social”, all the stimuli are there, and economics and technology act more like framework of the possible for the social.