I’ve read this happened because sometime in the 80s comrade Reagan decided to own the Japanese instead of letting competition do its work (for cars, but with electronics similar things followed). He’s somehow often associated with liberal capitalism and so on, but the guy believed that “monopolies are efficient”, but at the same time by some magic if a monopoly stops being efficient, then all the capital and technology base for competition to replace it will just materialize in one place in one moment all by themselves. So I’m not even sure if “comrade” is irony. The ironic part is that the US president whose term coincided with Soviet system conclusively losing the Cold War is also the one who supported state capitalism and ideologic pressure in society.

And then we no longer have responsible humans with their set of human connections, which are a burden in the sense of corruption and bias, but also the reason the system kinda works, because a human with their friends and relatives at least care to try to avoid jail or infamy.

That wouldn’t work well. You either have that role as a node in the graph or as a responsible agent. In the former case its functionality should be very precisely defined and have no social contention value, which is not true for courts and judges, they are actually half of that social contention. In the latter case responsibility should be clear, that is, a computer program acting as that clerk or higher should transfer same and full legal responsibility to everyone in chain operating it, which is not the case now.

At the same time - nothing really new, power makes rules, the only important part is how fine-grained friction is, which leads to some equilibrium. More fine-grained is gentler, but also benefits those with most power. More coarse-grained means conflict, and eventually still benefits those with most power, but approaches the equilibrium faster. I suppose at this point we’d want the latter, and then the former.

Because, well, these changes erode social systems that had been building up for centuries, so faster is more important. I think.

Self-critique is good, but as someone living in Russia I take issue with this claim.

Electricity you can expect to always be there, and computers too, they are a staple technology by now, it’s like paper. I’m talking personal computers, because with microcontrollers and specialized signal processors and so on nobody even thinks about them.

Food and shelter and medicine - by the measure people had 100 years ago, it’ll never be bad in developed countries.

The last point, about discerning truth from fiction, is the important one, because for that purpose things are and are going to be just the same way as they were 100 years ago and 200 years ago and so on back. There have been a few decades when it seemed that we can do that without authoritative chain of proof, from, in case of a criminal investigation, police assembling facts following due process, them being registered and vetted and verified following due process, everything being documented following due process, then court proceedings and so on. Eh, as someone from former USSR, I feel funny typing this. Well, not entirely, for non-political things this was followed very rigorously even there.

So - we’ve had a timespan of few decades when techno-optimism was misused to erode common respect for due process and following chain of trust in establishing facts.

That’s also a problem with mass media, both with freedom of press and press neutrality and ethics and reputation.

We’ll have a bit of a rough ride until, very slowly through collective experience, we’ll have it as good as before the Internet (the Internet is fine, it’s more about people being eager to believe that technology can remove deontological and social and other philosophical components).

I like a simpler analogy, with websites featuring lots of scraped text to appear in search engines and show you ads (sometimes serve malware).

Was absolutely normal 10 years ago. It’s just Google itself doing this now.

There’s a degree of convergence between different directions of exploration of new technologies’ applicability, one can say.

But also they have a technology a bit too expensive to run locally (not sure of that honestly, but for the same quality of results definitely) but not to run server-side, and much of public Web’s development happened the way that companies that made something couldn’t optimize it niche-wise so that it benefitted only them.

It’s a solution of the problem of freeloaders, in some sense.

I wonder if crowd-funded AI is still going to become a thing. After all, people don’t expect free AAA games, but people do expect free search engines and also free AI chatbots and in general many free things on top of the paid thing they are using to run the free web browser.

I’m optimistic in the sense that paying for stuff is a solution. Most important things being in appearance free is the trap we’ve been dwelling in. Models and datasets are too expensive to just be competitive volunteer undertakings, but making it a business, it’s not end of the world. Until, of course, it’s not illegal to compete with Google and Meta, it’s not.

EDIT: At the same time I’m not missing the fact that in this case Google is too acting awfully similar to those freeloaders mentioned.

Not nicer. Just you’d be more likely to see those going to backstab you deliberately. OK, everyone has their own opinion

Those same middle school politics

Sorry, but as far as I have seen, not having what you called that at all is a precious rarity.

I dunno if I’m more productive on average

You can have controlled registration and authorized relays with Nostr too.

But the part where deploying Matrix is simple is, I suppose, the main reason.

You are saying this as if you were flexing your old age to me, while so am I.

No. You can’t see their face.

Chat rooms and web forums were in some sense safe spaces. There would be intrigue, but somewhat limited by what concerns a specific forum, or even a specific part of it, or a specific chat. Even conflicts in one place between two people would often not extend to some other place.

And also, believe it or not, people frequenting same spaces would sometimes have offline meetings and know each other personally. Especially moderators and such.

But I agree that what you mentioned was like halfway there from today’s online communication which sometimes seems just useless.

I suppose. NOSTR-based Marmot is being developed now, it seems more interesting for me than XMPP or Matrix, but it’s still a new thing.

I get depressed after long periods of remote work, go to office, then remember why I didn’t particularly value the experience, get back to remote.

So here in Russia there’s such a thing as dachas, it’s small plots of land with non-winterproof (sometimes not) small houses (sometimes more like a chickhouse for a human) on them, people go there at summer to have barbecues, grow stuff, have fun.

We have that, it’s on a place with a lot of clay (good for growing apple trees, too) and I have always felt weird from eating and drinking anything with local water (from the well, boiled).

That is, I have ASD and BAD, and my mental condition is always different when being there a lot with that water, it’s both more intense emotions, but also less like BAD symptoms. Also that somehow makes me feel full faster. And stronger.

Honestly it’s as if in the city I had BAD, but there I had BPD. I become more touchy-feely there. Still it feels good and human, just not very safe.

But I’ve also read that water with such contents is not too good for one’s kidneys, shouldn’t overdo it. Better use filters.

The point is, I do feel as if my nutrition were better when using that water. Even a few portions of rice a day with lots of tea feel quite different there. But might also be the cleaner air, it’s a relatively low place, though not a swamp, and a very pretty one.

Because those who see each other’s faces coordinate closer socially and might eat you. We live in a society, not a friendly place sometimes.

Any ideas why it’s always Matrix? Not even XMPP.

With not very performant servers and not very rich choice of clients, and still work in progress. And notably more fit for group chats rather than anything private and secure.

It’s just Matrix being popular?

If you’ve read Lem’s Fiasco, then that’s the alternative scenario where “they” are the society lower technologically. It’s very well written and tragic.

Yes, convenience is often ruining discipline, not for me (ASD) and perhaps not for you, but social ties form between coworkers. That part about behind closed doors - see, they always will.

I mean, we live in a society. Not seeing the faces of the others is a weakness. It’s not all about work.

I’ve described a situation - where you’d want to talk something over a cigarette or a cup of tea with your coworker, for example. Or participate in sporadic conversations while walking around the office, help some colleague, get help from some other colleague.

That’s called a 2 party system. What you seem to wish for is an omniparty system, which in a dialectical anything with competition for electoral victory can’t exist. And if you don’t like this, you won’t like a 1 party system, like in USSR (deceased) or China.

Ranked choice might help. I’ve noticed that support and distaste for that seem to be about similar between R and D supporters in English-speaking Web, but I live in Russia, so it’s just my blabber.

Also the way it is now you have generally red and generally blue and mixed areas, while with ranked choice there might suddenly be raising friction in politics, which in turn might cause upheavals. And with the way everyone on the Web seems to like potential violence, probably not the best idea.

And I have thought in the past about all kinds of potential balanced systems, with pseudo-random choice of representatives, with balancing that and electoral and literally bought places, with various veto schemes, and it’s possible to design a political system doing exactly what one wants, it’s just that nobody is in power to make that and impose it upon others, and in rare situations where such a non-compromising new electoral system creation happens, it’s something like Russian Civil War where the winning side designed a political system where you can technically (mathematically) have guaranteed victory with 3 levels of representation, 2% of votes and gerrymandering.

That’s not very good. That illustrates how those having power to single-handedly change things are not usually those you’d want to.

It’s not that simple, there’s also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.

Yes, for work productivity right now right here it makes sense that working remotely is good.

That has always been known and normal for people who can work remotely. Writers, or anyone who can synchronize their work through runners with envelopes or, later, fax and telephone.

But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they’d prefer not to.

My sympathies with remote work are because I’m spoiled and because of retrofuturistic promises of (almost) everyone working like that, my concerns are because you’d want sometimes to see people you’re working with, and if many people work in one place and some work remotely, then even if the latter work well, they are ruining discipline.