just means they are in bed with Nazis

Fascism is always the best business decision. This is the inevitable result of capitalism. The institutions on a good decade are strong and resilient. Oligarchy, yes, but still a more or less free society.

Eventually though, there will be a series of crisis in succession that causes the establishment to weaken just enough for a strongman to slip in and take the reigns. In the 20th century it was the fallout from WW1 and the Great Depression. In our time it was COVID and the Ukraine + Israeli wars (and to some extent, 2008 housing crisis)

One key part of fascism is that it is almost paradoxical

a) A populist-driven ideology, which means it appeals to the lowest common denominator

b) An elitist-driven ideology, which means it idolizes and puts value in the elites of a society

What ends up happening is the state picks and chooses elite groups of people who end up running the show. So for example, if you are Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos… you know that if you play nice with Trump that he will reward you and you will have certain advantages by having a friend in an authoritarian government. You also know that if you don’t play nice with Trump, he will try and hurt you using both legal and illegal mechanisms.

Therefore, the best investment you could make is aligning yourself with the fascist state.

This was always going to happen. Sort of like how humans eventually will catch a cold or develop cancer. The immune system on a good day is strong enough to repel these types of problems. But eventually, you will be under some stress for one reason or another and your immune system is not enough to stop the inevitable cold or what have you.

yeah well said. and while there probably isn’t much of a difference to the people getting rained on with bullets and bombs… i think there is a fundamental ideological difference between at least pretending like you care.

we’ve reached the point where the executive is so powerful he doesn’t feel the nice to put the mask on. it’s a blatant and almost ostentatious use of power.

i think one thing he said in the 2016 election cycle was so spot on.

“I have the most loyal people – did you ever see that?” “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” “It’s, like, incredible.”

Trump says and does ridiculous things (did you see that Gaza AI video?) that have no coherence because he understands his power lies in the chaos. one day he says one thing, one day he says another. ukraine and US will make a good deal one day, zelensky’s a dictator the next day, zelensky’s a good leader one day, and then zelensky’s disrespectful the next, etc etc

it’s sort of like when Stalin would go through one of his purges. He would have a long list of names on a paper and he would look through him. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, he would cross a name off the list. He was reminding everyone that his power was absolute and he could arbitrarily choose to end you or spare you.

Trump is toying with this same type of arbitrarily derived chaos but instead of it being occasional he seems to be embracing it as his source of power. everyone (both his opposers and his appeasers like rubio) get their nerves frayed. you don’t know what’s coming next. who is next on the chopping block. the truth is slowly dissolving until it’s meaningless

and privately supported

we openly sent over thousands of MK84 2,000lb bombs that have used to kill thousands of civilians. not really private to be honest

hell, right after Oct 7 Biden personally made the trip over to Israel to bend the knee on live TV

a chromium skin

so is that the key differentiating issue here? whether someone can mistake it for a real photo?

what if I’m a really talented artist and make a realistic drawing of you posing in a sexually suggestive way. Should that be criminalized?

if I put a watermark “AI generated” on some of this AI porn, does that make it OK? if the issue is someone mistaking it, then the watermark would remove that doubt.

i’m trying to get a sense for the rationale here. basically- does this issue at its core really have anything to do with AI?

not claiming private organizations don’t have to the right to regulate speech on their platforms. was responding to statement

I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.

which to me implies some sort of state censorship on this type of material

Really, I just wanted to understand the rationale behind the desire to ban this type of material.

On the topic of Judge Roberts, on a similar although different legal issue

He wrote the Court’s opinion in United States v. Stevens (2010), invalidating a federal law that criminalized the creation or dissemination of images of animal cruelty. The government had argued that such images should be a new unprotected category of speech akin to child pornography. Roberts emphatically rejected that proposition, writing that the Court does not have “freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Roberts also wrote the Court’s opinion in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), ruling that the First Amendment prohibited the imposition of civil liability against the Westboro Baptist Church for their highly offensive picketing near the funeral of a slain serviceman.

In oft-cited language, Roberts wrote:

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.”

If Judge Roberts were to be consistent, and I make no such claims that he will ever be consistent, I believe he would likewise not support banning fake AI porn.

In this case, it’s clearly a form of speech and therefore protected under the 1st amendment.

I also don’t understand such a strong reaction to non-consensual AI porn. I mean, I don’t think it’s in good taste but I also don’t see why it warrants such a strong reaction. It’s not real. If I draw a stick figure with boobs and I put your name on it, do you believe I am committing a crime?

As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly

yeah this is a part we need to recognize. right now there are essentially three browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Every other browser is some derivative of one of these- mostly Chromium.

Google can change some small detail about how they render HTML or a small part of their JS engine and that has global effects all over the internet. Without a Firefox to compete, they will implement policies to hurt the consumer. People think just because Chromium is open source that this mitigates the risk.

Google’s V8 javascript engine does not only power all Chrome and chrome-derivatives, it also powers nodeJS and therefore vast swathes of server-side javascript as well.

it’s actually difficult to understate how much raw power Google has in determining what you see on the internet and how you see it

we desperately need Firefox. I really hope that an open source alternative could be viable but it’s been decades and we haven’t had a real browser pop into existence. will the death of Firefox mean something else comes out? Or will the death of Firefox be the last nail in the coffin for a free internet?

really it’s a cautionary tale about the intersections of different technologies. for example, csv going into a sql database and then querying that database from another language (whether it’s JS or C# or whatever)

when i was 16 and in driver’s ed, I remember the day where the instructor told us that we were going to go drive on the highway. I told him I was worried because the highway sounds scary- everybody is going so fast. he told me something that for some weird reason stuck with me: the highway is one of the safest places to be because everybody is going straight in the same direction.

the most dangerous places to be, and the data backs this up, are actually intersections. the points where different roads converge. why? well, it’s pretty intuitive. it’s where you have a lot of cars in close proximity. the more cars in a specific square footage the higher probability of a car hitting another car.

that logic follows with software too. in a lot of ways devs are traffic engineers controlling the flow of data. that’s why, like you said, it’s up to the devs to catch these things early. intersections are the points where different technologies meet and all data flows through these technologies. it’s important to be extra careful at these points. like in the example i gave above…

the difference between

WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

and

WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

could be the difference between one guy living a normal life and another guy receiving thousands of speeding tickets https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

How do devs make this mistake

it can happen many different ways if you’re not explicitly watching out for these types of things

example let’s say you have a csv file with a bunch of names

id, last_name
1, schaffer
2, thornton
3, NULL
4, smith
5, "NULL"

if you use the following to import into postgres

COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

number 5 will be imported as a string “NULL” but number 3 will be imported as a NULL value. of course, this is why you sanitize the data (GIGO) but I can imagine this happening countless times at companies all over the country

there are easy fixes if you’re paying attention

COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

sets the empty string to NULL value.

example with js

fetch('/api/user/1')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    if (data.lastName == "null") {
      console.log("No last name found");
    } else {
      console.log("Last name is:", data.lastName);
    }
  });

if data is

data = {
  id: 5,
  lastName: "null"
};

then the if statement will trigger- as if there was no last name. that’s why you gotta know the language you’re using and the potential pitfalls

now you may ask – why not just do

if (data.lastName === null)

instead? But what if the system you’re working on uses JSON.parse(data) and that auto-converts everything to a string? it’s a very natural move to check for the string "null"

obviously if you’re paying attention and understand the pitfalls of certain languages (like javascript’s type coercion and the particularities of JSON.parse()) it becomes easy but it’s something that is honestly very easy to overlook

The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design

It’s not “we know better than you do”

It’s “we have a vision for the desktop environment”

If you granted the user every little thing they wanted, you don’t become a better piece of software. You end up middle of the road. There are limited resources and by keeping a limited scope and having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish- you can do what you aim to do really well. Instead of being mediocre at a lot of things.

My experience with Gnome- it does 95% of what I need a Desktop Environment to do (and certain things others don’t do very well). Some features like

• Being able to push a button, start typing an application’s name, and push enter to start that application
• Being able to push a button, and immediately see at a glance all of the windows I have open and quickly navigate to them
• Being able to easily set keyboard hotkeys so that I launch applications and can run my own custom scripts with the push of a button

Example- I have a script that I set to “Control+Num Pad 5” that opens up a Gnome folder search dialog. I navigate to a folder and click “Ok” and then 4 terminals open on my left monitor. Three small ones stacked on top of each other on the left, one big one on the right. Basically like a tiling window manager. This script has custom commands that run depending on the directory. If I open a react-native folder, it runs an Android emulator and neovim on the big terminal.

Setting that script to a hotkey is as simple as going to “settings -> keyboard -> shortcuts” and just typing in the path to the script and the hotkey combination

• Being able to easily run scripts on files and directories directly from Nautilus (Gnome’s file manager)

Example- When I right click on a pdf file in Nautilus, I have custom scripts that I can run. One is “splitPdf” which creates a new folder called “split” and then creates n.pdf files where n is the number of pages in that pdf. I also have “compressPdf” which will compress the pdf as much as possible and pops up a notification showing you how much. I have one for .xlsx and .doc files called “printPdf” that converts those to pdf files.

Those scripts can be whatever language you want, they just have to be executable, and you just drag and drop them into a specific folder ( ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts if I remember correct)

Those 4 things I think Gnome does better than any other default desktop environment I’ve ever used and I’ve used a lot over the course of my life. The remainder of the items (the 5% of stuff Gnome can’t do) I have found custom plugins and in one scenario it only took me a couple hours to write my own custom plugin.

MacOS does #2 and #4 well by default (although it’s harder to write scripts with their clunky apple script language whereas with Gnome because you can just use regular old fish or bash scripts). With certain applications (like better-touch-tools or karabiner) you can get similar functionality as Gnome.

Windows with Autohotkey does #3 although you have to again use a clunky language (even clunkier than Apple script)

KDE can do #1 (search/launch apps), but feels slower and less streamlined than Gnome’s immediate overview. It does #2 (window overview) and #3 (keyboard shortcuts), but buries these features under layers of settings and inconsistent menus. For #4 (file manager scripts), Dolphin technically supports actions, but configuring them requires wrestling with clunky .desktop files whereas on Gnome you just use fish or bash or python or javascript or whatever the hell you want and stick it in a directory.

In my opinion, Gnome is miles ahead of KDE and while it’s obviously not as polished as MacOS, it has accomplished so much more with its limited resources than a megacorp like Apple does.

What I love is it gets rid of stuff that’s useless. For example desktop icons. What’s the point of having some directory on your computer that’s somehow different than all the other directories? So that you can clutter up your background?

I 100% agree that desktop icons are an outdated concept and I love that Gnome got rid of them in order to focus on the fundamentals. It’s often not about what you add, but what you take away.

NP++ was good 20 years ago during a time with much weaker competition and it’s been coasting on that good will ever since

It’s OK for a text editor (compared to something totally basic like notepad) but other text editors have caught up in every single category

like you said, VS Code is now the default go to code editor for a lot of people. if you don’t use VS Code, you use vim.

for non-coding uses, I don’t see the functional difference between NP++ or something basic like Gnome’s text editor

Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment and that turns some people off. But it’s bold enough to make some design decisions and have a limited scope. KDE tries to be another Windows alternative.

Of course, you could go with a tiling window manager but my vote goes to Gnome. I’ve had a very smooth experience on Gnome for the last couple years.

And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book

The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don’t connect devices to the internet that don’t need to be connected to the internet.

The “internet of things” that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.

I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.

Like, it’s objectively better than a book.

But it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.

I’m not sure where exactly they made the switch. Basically, I got my girlfriend one a year and a half ago and it did not need the software. I explained to her to turn off the wifi and just download books and drag and drop.

But then around Christmastime last year my girlfriend’s cousin wanted an ebook ready so we bought her a Kindle and I gave the same advice. But she couldn’t figure out how to drag and drop, so she brought it over. I was fussing around thinking something was wrong with my USB cable but then I realized it required that special software.

So the switch happened at some point in the last ~18 months or so my memory’s a bit hazy

Amazon just couldn’t let it be. There’s a certain set of people that just aren’t going to opt into all the bullshit. These people just want a plain and simple ebook ready to host their ebooks. They think if they force the special software they’ll be able to do things like sign into your Kindle and change your settings by force.

But what happens? Instead of gaining those people like me or you into their ecosystem, they’re just gonna lose future hardware customers. I would have been perfectly fine buying Kindles for the rest of my life if they had just kept that feature.

I’m sure it’s going to be reversed engineered at some point but it’s absurd. I don’t understand the short-sighted greed.

Up until fairly recently, you could just drag and drop files onto the Kindle with a usb. I’ve had my first generation Kindle for almost 15 years now and it still works. Just download an .epub file, convert it to .mobi with Calibre, and drag and drop it over to the Kindle.

I have a newer one too, that I got a couple of years ago as a gift.

The trick is just disable the wifi and never let it communicate with Amazon servers. They will mess with your settings and push secret updates that remove features. For example, it could “sync” your books with your Amazon account if you naively log into your Amazon account and that literally results in you not being able to remove items from your Kindle without logging into your Amazon account on your computer and going through a million menus. It won’t let you do it from the Kindle, even if you’re offline.

But if you just never let it connect it to the internet at all, you’re fine.

Although the new Kindles now require a special Amazon software to copy files over (because of “convenience”) and it won’t communicate with the usual protocol so you can’t drag and drop like you could for the last 15 years.

So yeah, don’t buy a Kindle. at least not a new one.

Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a “convenient” piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can’t transfer files easily without it.

Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.

Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.

I’ve actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won’t ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.

You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.

Basically, if you’re on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.

I guess the main difference is that I think things are salvageable

To be honest, I think we are very ideologically aligned. I agree that government power is something that should be used with very precise care. Look at what happens for example when we introduce Pell Grants, giving lower income kids the opportunity to go to college.

That sounds great, right? Who doesn’t support that? Well, I sure want poor kids to be afforded the opportunity to go to school.

But look at what actually happens. Now you have a whole new class of people with a sizable chunk of government money. The demand for college goes up. Tuition rates skyrocket. The few thousand you get from the Pell Grant is now meaningless and it counter intuitively costs you more even with the grant.

Who benefits? Not the kids. Not the working class. The college administrators.

Kamala was campaigning “taxes incentives for first time homeowners!” Great. Who is going to say to no to that, right? Support young families. Sure.

What would inevitably happen? Large increase in spending => large increase in price. So if they get a $10,000 tax credit but the houses are $15,000 more expensive- what’s the difference? These are arbitrary numbers, obviously, and not borne out of some analysis.

But who would benefit? Not young families. Banks and land owners.

Government action, usually disguised as something to help is almost always going to be twisted to hurt average people.

But yes, I agree 100%. I rather like Chomsky’s take on this. I’m not an anarchist but he has advocated before for a system where every single use of government power should be consistently and continually challenged. Every single time the government spends a dollar, it needs to be transparent and justified and there needs to be a way to challenge it.

The thing is, government spending is not inherently a bad thing. Government action sometimes is exactly what is needed. For example in an economic crisis, government stimulus can be enough to turn things around or at least ameliorate the situation for the working class.

But and the big but - and the but that basically had made me lose all faith in democracy over the last 10 years or so is the way you put it

But no, “drugs bad,” and the public wants to control “bad” things

Politicians do not do what is rational. They do what is popular. These are two separate things entirely. And even worse, they can modify what is popular with a variety of mechanisms. For a simple example- look at the death tax. You ask average Americans whether they support a death tax, they will say of course not. It sounds absurd, right?

If you call it an inheritance tax, all of a sudden majority of people support it.

So yeah, I think you’re right in that we more or less align on what the ideal system should be but you still believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment and believe that egalitarianism and liberty is possible.

I think humanity is brutal and stupid by nature and we are bound to be ruled by people with strength. I think all government systems eventually deteriorate into fancy feudalism.

For a bit of an absurd statement- I think what we need to do is create a constitution that is very explicit. And then what we need to do is let an AI enforce it. Assuming the AI is objective and not able to be influenced, I think then and only then would we have a free society. And the irony is- we wouldn’t be in control of it.

Maybe I’m just a pessimist about human nature. Don’t misinterpret me, I consider myself a humanist. I like humans. I feel empathy for others. I want the best world possible for everyone.

But I think humans in a group are stupid. The crowd is like a locust swarm, destroying without thinking. It’s sad

You said you’re not pushing socialism, but you didn’t offer what you do support, so I’ll speak broadly.

I’m a bit of a pessimist here. I think free market capitalism is a terrible system that will inevitably crash and fail. It is also the best thing we have come up with so far. Essentially Churchill’s quote. I only hope that after our next foray into fascism we will come out the other side with a new 21st century ideology that is somehow able to fix the fundamental contradictions.

I really support Liberalism (and I mean you know, freedom of speech, free market, pursuit of happiness, etc). I would always prefer to live in a society that gives me the freedom to live life on my terms. In theory, we could have a socialist version of this, but I think like we discussed it falls victim to precisely the same fate. When the Soviets initially took power, they were genuine in their desire for revolutionary emancipation. They did many great things- they created written languages for all of the local ethnicities that didn’t have them. They put local leaders in positions of power. They increased literacy and invested in education strictly for altruism.

That only lasted a couple short decades, however, because the wheels of power inevitably turn. I shouldn’t have to go into detail on the horrific abuses of power that resulted from the developed Soviet state

Here’s the thing, I think you make great points. And the solutions you propose would benefit the system both in the short and long term. But I think collapse is inevitable anyway, and specifically collapse into fascism. Perhaps in a system where the institutions are strong and we have policies in the line of what you’re suggesting (campaign finance reform, proportional representation, etc. I’d even say higher salaries for politicians counter intuitively) the descent will be slowed for a long period of time.

But ultimately, it’s the classic criminal versus police officer. You can put up a border wall to stop drugs coming in, they’ll go under the ground. You put ground penetrating radar sensors, they build DIY-submarines. You invest in a coast guard, they build drones. Etc Etc

It’s a constant battle that requires constant vigilance. However, here’s the kicker. Here’s the reason why it will always inevitably fail.

The people with significant wealth and by extension power- they will always have incentive to change the system to their advance and they will always have the ability to influence it. They will never stop trying to come up with new ways to either exploit current laws or create new ones.

The average people, the consumers and voters, they will sometimes have the incentive to change the system and they will sometimes have the ability to influence it. In times of trouble, people get upset and they start protesting. They start voting for new measures, different policies get enacted. Like you mentioned, we broke up Standard Oil. Or when we broke up the Bell Telephone Company.

During that time people were both discontent, which means they had the incentive to change the system and coincidentally that also gives them the ability to influence the system- politicians are only scared into making positive change for the average person when there is large scale dissent.

But what happened to both of those examples (and virtually every other anti-trust regulation we’ve ever tried to implement)?

Today, Bell Telephone’s descendant is AT&T- a behemoth of a megacorp that participates in an oligopoly over the telecommunications market. Today, Standard Oil’s descendant is Exxon Mobil and remains the largest oil and gas company in the US.

What happened here? Well, the public interest eventually fades. Some other crisis shows up on the news channels and people become content with their lives. If the economy is doing well, people are paying their bills, etc, they don’t care. If they economy isn’t, the politicians have become exceedingly proficient at redirecting that discontent towards scapegoats (today it’s immigrants for example).

So, it’s a simple math equation. Let’s say the corporations win 51% of the coin flips and the free market / law abiding public wins 49% of the time. For a very long time, it can stay more or less even. Cops versus robbers- the equilibrium stays intact.

But imagine a limit that goes to infinity. What happens? Eventually the interest of wealth wins. Now, different societies can have different coin flip ratios.

I think our society is nowhere near 51% / 49%. I think your solutions would bring us closer to that 50 / 50 but due to again, the very nature of the capitalist system- the law will never be in the driving seat.

Two very simple axioms determine that, which we have discussed above

1. wealth tends to accumulate due to economies of scale

2. wealth leads to power and power self-perpetuates

It’s little more than a scary story they tell to convince people to go along with their authoritarian ideas

This is where I think you may have misinterpreted me. I’m not trying to push socialism. I think we’re genuinely fucked and there is no way out.

Sure, but that overlap should be as small as possible while still ensuring a competitive market

This is a fantasy. We talk about “free market capitalism” as if it’s some pristine, untouched mechanism that would work perfectly fine if only the government followed the rules. But the moment big money arises, the entire political field is lured in. Wealth itself becomes a gravitational force that pulls legislators, laws, and lobbyists into its orbit.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s fundamental to the system. A free market can never remain a free market. For two very simple reasons.

a) economies of scale. It’s cheaper to a lot of something per thing compared to a little of something per thing. so there is a financial incentive to get bigger and that is a self-perpetuating cycle. Eventually at the end of the game of Monopoly, there’s only one landlord standing who bought everything else up.

b) wealth is power. if you have power, you will use it to ensure your position is improved. this is human nature. this works the same in any other political economic system.

It’s not that a pure free market is corrupted by government, or that a pure socialism is corrupted by incompetent central planners; both are myths in the sense that they never truly exist in the real world. We either get forms of crony capitalism or state-managed capitalism, but the “free” part is always an abstraction.

What we need to acknowledge is that the political and economic systems are not two separate worlds that only overlap by accident. They’re conjoined twins. Pretending one can neatly excise government from the economy is a fantasy—just as fantastical as imagining the perfect socialist utopia.

The trick is to recognize that the moment large-scale wealth accumulates, it necessarily accumulates political clout. And from there, the “free market” gradually becomes a marketplace that’s anything but free.

This is what people mean by late stage capitalism. It’s capitalism that has eroded all of the public institutions and in a short amount of time fascism will take root. We’re witnessing the transition right now as we speak.