• 0 Posts
  • 1.87K Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2024

help-circle
  • “True” doesn’t equal the whole truth.

    In this case it does.

    Yes, the NSDAP, donning the disguise of a Worker’s Party, adopted a lot of worker movement symbology, and through their prominence has given it awful connotations. Unsurprisingly, the modern ideological descendants have taken up many of those same symbols.

    I agree it was a disguise, but I should note that it also adopted a lot of such parties’ members and activists.

    In any case - evil usually doesn’t call itself evil. The very idea that there’s some new “great evil” waiting to come to the world is wrong. And there were and are a myriad of “small evils” before 1945, since 1945, now and forever, which some very stupid people consider not worthy of fighting because of looking for where the “great evil” will make its comeback. It won’t.

    If one can’t fight those small evils around them, one definitely can’t hope to be useful against something greater anyway.

    Ideological descendants I know about are all minor parties. The big ones people accuse of that simply have no clear ideology, which means fascist stuff is very convenient to give them some color. But nothing more.

    And in the context of people endorsing Neo-Nazi bullshit, the Nazi salute is very much unmistakable as that.

    Yes, only that’s not what I am answering. Just that the gesture’s meaning is not definitively only Nazi.

    That’s the problem with online communities, everyone is trying to appear smart and mysterious by talking in hints and allegories and dog whistles and fuzzy unfinished thoughts, and also just pretending to catch and guess what others think from fundamentally insufficient amount of information.

    Things should be more literal and ordered. Lucian’s dialogues are good as an example of this, I don’t know if that’s how many people really discussed reality in his time, but if really so, then it was a healthier society.





  • Except this is not about ending anonymity in favor of John Buddy Smith, ID 1234-567890, this is about pseudonymity using cryptographic identities.

    And also, as you might have noticed, platforms are fine with their own bots or bots they’ve been paid to allow in.

    Which means that for any kind of real verification you need a transparent system, communities allowing or not allowing something are not enough, any such authority is a point of failure. Transparent like e-mail or e-news, except one can do better now.



  • Any Renpy-based visual novella is a first-class citizen.

    There’s Wine, with PlayOnLinux as the old way to make it easy, and Lutris as the new way to make it easy, and Proton as Steam’s patched downstream of Wine. That covers a lot of Windows games. There are native games, in native Steam too. I mentioned Proton, one can choose it as compatibility option for Windows games in Steam, with varying success.

    Problems I’ve had are with video drivers more than with Wine and such.

    Anyway, I’m using FreeBSD now, even here one can spend some time and have Linux Steam with some things working. That’s if just Wine or just Proton or PlayOnBSD/Mizuma (FreeBSD analogs of PlayOnLinux) are not enough.


  • Akshhhally a lot of what’s now associated just with Nazis was a typical “worker party” symbols set in 20s.

    Torches - because workers would assemble outside of their work hours, and it would be dark, it’s not your soy modernity with labor protections.

    This particular thing called “Roman salute” - apparently wasn’t too popular outside of Nazis and Italian fascists, but there are archive photos of Communists in Russia in early 20s using that.

    The raised fist symbol - well, everybody used it, and again, Nazis too.

    Hammer and sickle - that one was in symbolic of Dolfuss’ Austria, and it’s not a coincidence, it was there because of socdems.

    OK, all that isn’t necessary. It’s clear what gesture Elon intended. It may not be entirely clear what he meant, I think this is not Nazi endorsement, but rather a “f-ck you” to all parties he dislikes, who also happen to be keen on bringing up Nazis. But that wouldn’t be controversial too, just weird for a grown up man.



  • Instance A goes down, you can’t post as your user registered on instance A.

    With cryptographic identities it’s possible that instance A should be up only when you are registering your user. It’s even possible with some delegated rights to another A user that only that user should be up when you are registering your user, the instance itself - not required.

    I’m against the whole idea of federation like in XMPP or like in ActivityPub. It’s stone age. It requires people to set up servers. It ties users to those servers. And communities are unnecessarily ties to servers. And their moderators.

    Ideologically Retroshare looks nicer, for example.

    You need to have messages, containing all the data I’ve described (who messages whom or who messages which communities and time of a message should be used to reduce the amount of data, ahem, stored and transferred by nodes, and also messages should list their dependencies, like - if you are giving some user some mod rights and taking them away a few times in a row, you need to know what the previous message was and the one before it), and shared storage. Shared storage here kinda breaks the beauty, because storage is finite and in fact probably those machines contributing it would function a lot like instances, replicating only communities they want.

    Above that messages layer there’d be the imagined social network itself. I suppose it comes down to CRUD signed by user, user signed by an instance root or better a user delegated that right by an instance root. So everyone can send CRUD messages on anything, but what of all this the client considers depends on what they trust and the logic of processing rights. DoS protection and space conservation here are a case of dependency management, kinda similar to garbage collection.

    Then entity types - I guess it’s instance (people like that crap), community (I think this can be many-to-many with instances, instances are used for moderating users, communities for moderating posts), user (probably a derived user, from what I’ve heard but not understood about blind keys), public post (rich text with hyperlinks to entities by hash, everything is addressable by hash), blob (obvious), personal message (like public post, but probably encrypted and all that).

    OK, dreams again


  • I think they are based on wish to understand everything at once and designate clear most important components, instead of tackling the world’s complexity by the grain.

    They may have internal logic, that’s how European academia evolved from something by the Church for the Church.

    Rejection of logic is more of a crowd instinct present when following anything.

    Say (as an example of something not conventionally religious) Soviet ideology worked more as a religion than as something it pretended to be (a scientifically substantiated path of development for our world). Conspiracies about aliens, power of water and cosmic energies, sects and such were much more popular in USSR than after it died (it would seem their boom in popularity was in the 90s, but that was just visibility due to freer environment). By the way, people sometimes say popularity of such was due to the official ideology becoming less and less believed in, while Russian Orthodox Church (kinda trying to take the place) today … is not perceived as more real than Soviet Marxism-Leninism in year 1988, yet there are no visible conspiracy movements and sect followings, will be interesting to see where this comes, I think just like Soviet conspiracy and sect movements were kinda sci-fi like, the new Russian ones will match the mindset impressed from above.

    Eh, what I mean, religiosity and aliens seem to be the two things most typical for American mass culture dealing with cosmic stuff. So the guy in question is just going along with that, either because of being dumb himself, or because of appealing to dumb people in the most common symbolic language.



  • Distributed (and zero configuration needed), but with centralized development. Federated is not good enough - separate instances may lag behind in versions, or their admins do something wrong, and user identities and posts are tied to them.

    Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.

    A distributed Usenet with rich text, hyperlinks, file attachments, cryptographic identities, pluggable naming\spam-checking\hatespeech-checking services (themselves part of that system).

    It was a good system for its time, first large global thing for asynchronous electronic communication.

    OK, if you are, you don’t pretend, and if you pretend, you aren’t. And if you talk about someone somewhere probably designing something, then you are not making that something closer. I’m tired of typing things in the interwebs people either already know and agree with, or won’t take seriously.





  • “We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”

    Still one step lacking to understand what Republicans already do.

    Moneyed interests are the leaders you get. Money is just one of the kinds of power, but a lot of other kinds are applied in the form of money. You can’t seriously expect to contribute energy of a negligible cost into expressing your opinion and even casting your vote, and even donating a dollar or two, and for that to somehow give real power to your side, even multiplied by millions. You are already choosing from a limited pool of people and positions to support. Defined by parties with real power before your choice. Together with a lot of other conditions of an election.

    This is why the perfect, logical, supposedly honest system the more classical kind of Democrats dream about would not result into a honest democracy.

    This is why the well-meaning kind of Republicans talk about checks and balances, and interpersonal connections between people having power, and gun ownership and in tech it would seem sometimes that they want to get into dystopian future faster.

    That is because dystopian future may be better than dystopian past. Every day of your life is unlike any before it. It’s the same in history and good tall states with institutions and good democracies are devolving into something a bit more “1704 anno domini” all over the world. This is not anything new. The world is always changing. Unfortunately what progressives today consider progress is not the direction in which the humanity is, well, progressing.

    But that dissonance is a clue for us to see. It’s not Bronze Age anymore, but humans are still eating each other. Progress is meaningful on such a scale, and so little affected by someone’s personal decisions, that any party or ideology calling itself “progressive” seems arrogant to the degree of madness.



  • France has a tech sector?

    Aesthetically I like reading technical texts in French.

    (Contrary to the stereotype, romantic texts not so much, that’s where English is better ; and despite trying my best, I still haven’t found a way to like Dutch ; neutral on German.)

    But the point is - has anything big lifted off in France in the last 20 years or so?

    I’m not talking about quite a few particular people whose names should be in history books. I’m talking about companies and systems.


  • Facts are facts, and nothing a human says is a fact, it’s a projection of a fact upon their conscience, at best.

    And those doing the “fact checking” are humans, so they are checking if something is fact in their own opinion or organization’s policy, at best.

    These are truisms.

    There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.

    This is wrong. People like to pick “their” side in power games between mighty adversaries, and to think that when one of the sides is more lucky, it’s them who’s winning. But no, it’s not them. If somebody’s “checking facts” for you and you like it, you’ve already lost. Same thing, of course, if you trust some “community evaluations” or that there’s truth that can be learned so cheaply, by going online and reading something.