I’ve read recently that Poland’s GDP per capita will soon surpass that of Japan.

Stereotypes from 70s and 80s and even 90s, when you think about it, were repeated and prolonged and perpetuated by the Internet, and the mass media, and the whole climate of 90s+. They weren’t so solid when they existed. It was the reality, but the reality changes.

I mean, even in my childhood (born in 1996, so not too old) it didn’t seem so weird that such things will happen in future, but the further the less likely it seemed.

Now somehow everyone treats it as strange that Sony slowly sinks too.

If they weren’t, they’d probably already made a PSP Slim form factor portable PC with a Unix-like OS, general-purpose, ignoring what everyone does with Android and iOS and such tomfoolery, it would be popular even if said OS would be a walled garden worse than Apple’s. Or maybe some other form factor, point being - Sony is that company that always had perfect ergonomics, they’d think of something, and very virtuous hardware engineering, so again they’d think of something.

What they are doing instead - sigh.

Tech that will allow to murder all Sunni combatants in the world, tech that will allow to murder all monarchs in the world, tech that will allow to murder all politicians in the biggest countries …

OK, ancap is not the left, it’s just that I feel that without ancap “balance of violence” idea there’s not much to say of the left, and with anarchist left it should kinda align.

Because I’m just not interested with the colored-hair polyamorous UBI left, if these 3 things are more important for it than what is being done for their taxes in their name.

I take it he hasn’t heard about “hiding things in the open”.

That would be, for example, using a constant of some near year in “end time” column meaning unfinished action.

Or just making some part that will inevitably have to be changed - “write-only”, as in unreadable. Or making documentation of what he did bad enough in some necessary places that people would have to ask him.

So many variants, and such obvious stupidity.

Yes, but corporate bureaucracy is someone’s property, so ultimately there is a responsible person, always.

You generally won’t understand another person (and adversary especially) if you don’t see how their actions perfectly make sense for them, and without conspiracies.

So - there is one matching variant, that Musk sincerely hates bureaucratic kinds of power, but not proprietary kinds of power. Replacing a bureaucrat with (some imagined good) AI in another assumption would be replacing a mediocre human with inherent lust for power with an unreliable automaton, but without lust for power. The good part here is that humans are unreliable too and working bureaucracies compensate for that.

The bad part is that for every failure a person should be responsible proportionally to their input. I’m not sure they’ll do that, or I’m sure they won’t.

We-ell, the position being saved was a nice feature. And I know all that.

Usually “whistleblower” doesn’t mean saying the obvious.

It’s like various “whistleblowers” proudly saying with worry that ship’s maintenance seems to not be very good, food sometimes not tasty and things stinky, while there’s water filling the passenger deck.

I think the early rounds of those trying to get people to switch to the format were motivated by the fact that tapes were easily recordable by everyone.

Tapes tear and require mechanical parts. But it wouldn’t happen were there not commercial interest.

Plastic shopping bag: lasts 1000 years stuck in a bush outside a Tesco without breaking down

I know you didn’t mean it, but actually they break down into smaller and smaller fragments very easily because of temperatures changing, so not visible after a few winters. Maybe except areas which don’t freeze, like those plastic floating islands in the Pacific.

Backdoored devices are useful for people who can impede that.

And the way EU is approaching privacy, surveillance and all such, - oh-hoh-ho, I don’t think there will be a EU law.

The Russian web is full of that.

This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.

Yes. It makes it appear as if everything real didn’t have any meaning and were just some similar mass, like wine or garum.

While the important people and processes are the middlemen controlling the routes. Or like with USSR, where the real was subject to the administrative and the political.

Since history rhymes, I love how Denmark got absolutely thrashed by Hanseatic cities when it became too dependent on its role as a controller of a big route.

Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.

Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don’t have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.

I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

Right, and wouldn’t it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?

Say, post title contains anything “federal” and “government” like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.

But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don’t want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they’ll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it’s different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.

Renpy becoming popular means there are tons of indie games, visual novella genre, with which you don’t need a beefy graphics card.

I’d also argue that nice graphics is only one component of a good game, and “nice” is very loosely tied to computing power here.

Does it flag “Notmario”?

Because “user-friendly” UIs have successfully, market-wise, killed normal computing (like under Windows 2000, or even like “advanced users” under Unix-likes do, nothing complex or hard, not even harder than the “user-friendly” way, but very scary when you’re conditioned to think it’s not normal to edit configs or run commands ; it’s very stupid, one would think editing files or entering a few words and pressing “enter” are not godlike powers).

That had the (subjectively) positive results of enshittification and monopolized Web.

Replacing the “user-friendly” UIs with mobile-like UIs mostly failed cause those are simply inferior.

But agentic AIs seem the way to go so that the typical user would never ever try to form preferences of how they use things, their own habits and processes.

And yes, the bigger the heap, the easier to hide a microphone there, and each such level of obscuring and generalizing control makes the heap order of magnitude bigger.

I suppose they can offload a lot of them into the ocean or something like that. But still too fast.

Frankly with what’s happening in Syria right now, can Hamas please convert to Shia or anything other than Sunni before I consider this wrong?

I’m fed up with Sunni Islam existing on this planet. Yes, I know that’s the majority of Muslims. Easily no Christian movement is worse than Salafism and Wahhabism, and those two together would be a lot of Sunnis and their most powerful states and factions.

^ hits the the wrong continent

fixed that for you

But skype was really buggy and often did not even work

Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn’t know what’s reliable offline messages and message history, so there’s that).

Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.

Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.

It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.

Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn’t access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.