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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

    Perhaps now - yes. 20 years ago one could argue, but today in practice it, as it was intended, simply already doesn’t exist. Those holding the IP are those having enough power to insert themselves in a right place. The initial purpose is just not achievable.

    In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

    Yes, if the artist thinks that. And no, if the artist expects to make some money from every copy.

    Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea.

    That’s true for patents and technologies, but not true for art and software, where it’s improbable to just come up with the same thing.

    Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don’t think that justifies the damage it does.

    Now - maybe. There are a few traditional ways, like authors reading aloud pieces of their creations and people buying tickets to such performances, same with music. And models with paying forward for a request, like crowdfunding or an order.

    But personally I still think some form of it should exist. Maybe non-transferable to companies and other people other than via inheritance. Intellectual work is work, and people do it to get paid. It’s just not good enough if the returns don’t scale with popularity.







  • A small box you can stick into 3 different cases, one looking like a laptop, another like a tablet and another like a phone, can.

    Or a phone you stick into the former two, like a dock station. One could do this with Ubuntu Phone, sadly they failed.

    One can argue that the case of a MacBook and its screen and the keyboard account for much of its cost, but I think the fact itself that it’s a single device with different UIs would make many situations more convenient. No need to synchronize files - it’s already the same storage medium. No need to charge 3 separate devices. No need to stop your work when switching.

    And yeah, I still think the “computer” part costs a lot.





  • It’s quite illustrative of DE’s universe’s relevance to our world though.

    (I’m more partial to SW KotORII: TSL, even if DE feels more like my life, even I wonder if Harry’s ex is too not just a blindingly bright and quite f-ckable picture, but also a murderer ; too autistic to look for authors’ contacts to ask them about it.)

    Barred from expressing with monetizing it, you certainly mean? Otherwise most of fan fiction would have to be censored, having IP owners not willing competition.

    And even then it’s in question, there are plenty of crowdfunded and later paid for indie games set in Harry Potter universe. Those I’m thinking about are NSFW though.






  • 15 years ago this statement would lead to accusations of being anti-globalist, communist, economically illiterate.

    15 years ago this made economical (just not political) sense and was the right approach.

    Now it still is, but there’s an additional quality - I think the incentive is not of public good, it’s of strengthening authoritarianism on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Domestic authoritarians always want to play with their toys without foreign authoritarians meddling. But if the domestic environment is not authoritarian, only foreign is, then they are not in conflict, and the other way around too.

    So this may mean that both USA and EU are changing for the worse, for now.

    Not attacking Linux or LibreOffice.


  • I’ve recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.

    I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you’ll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).

    The reason you don’t choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That’s a knowledge of how casinos work.

    The reason you don’t choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That’s also a knowledge of how brothels work.

    This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.

    So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There’s no way they don’t get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.

    So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn’t bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it’s simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.

    From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.

    With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.

    If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.

    There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).

    Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.

    Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.

    Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.

    So you’d request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don’t have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn’t matter much which ones you’d hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.

    It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it’s present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.

    Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.

    OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there’s no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.


  • That’s more or less what I’ve read.

    In the movies it’s portrayed as if Nazis made everything clean, orderly, “civilized”, but the unfavorable people were removed and killed, slave labor was used and so on, and all of it in the atmosphere of “civilization and normalcy”.

    It’s probably to communicate the shock, but in fact things were like you describe them.

    Nazis would rule in a medieval way, so to say, minus divine right to rule. Random murders (again, without normalcy or formality, just so, and quite brutal sometimes), torture locations in buildings with windows always open amid crowded enough places, where sounds of someone being beaten to death were heard day and night, such stuff.

    The other guy is right too, most people learned to perceive this as normal and not everyone was killed for being not loyal enough, just a few.

    Like in today’s Russia not every 16 years old schoolgirl gets into prison for 8 months for blowing up a petard in a public place, the number of whose who does is not big enough to imprint in the public that this even happens, but enough to spread non-verbal fear. Similar with posting a random protest text, or saying something about war, etc. That’s called making an example.

    OK, Russia’s regime has that innovation of doing these things covertly enough for there to not be open intimidation. Cause open intimidation causes public reaction more than they need. They are more careful.