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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • I’ve recently seen a pic with election results in Germany, and it’s spectacular - one block leading in former FRG, another block leading in former GDR (AfD), and it’s very clean.

    If you think about it, “Europe” has lots of political stability. No democratic uncertainty whatsoever. AfD pretends to be that, but really after that map I can’t think so.

    And the elites are fine with the way US is choosing. They’ll just be the next on it, tinker a bit with the new stuff for their own convenience, soften some sharp bits.

    It’s rather that the rest of the world should unite against the west until it’s too late. Pakistan and DPRK should share their nuclear toys so that everyone had a nuke.

    The coalition of anti-western states, mostly totalitarian and not very nice, would in some bits work like Curtis Yarvin’s (I know it’s mostly wrong people dreaming of it) idea of paradise - the right of exit (changing a country among them) would de-facto exist, and every such state having nuclear deterrence would mean that those more attractive for immigrants won’t be pressured to stop, which will mean slow evolutionary change for more liberty.

    I personally think that (at some point) open immigration is what made the USA more democratic (except racism). Getting more and more different people of non-elite background willing to build a new life is a powerful source of constant hardly predictable change.

    It’s sad that I can’t explain these ideas to people closest to me in their worldview, they are just a bit too conserved in their understanding, and for them I’m picking cannibals over “imperfect civilization” for some abstract benefit. But how is that different from “white man’s burden”, I’m not sure, except “white man’s burden” implied some responsibility for what you’re doing, and Kipling was kinda sad the British empire didn’t find that responsibility in itself. I think it’s the same or worse and the more cynical people understood this earlier.





  • But that is their dream for the future. Purely automatically managing the populace as some sort of a farm.

    It’s an arms race. Like at any other point in history. Between those who think personal dignity and freedom and equality are a mistake of history or a device to keep the herd patient, and that they deserve to rule, and those who don’t.

    The good part is that this has already been tried. A fast system with deadlocks is not that different from a slow system with deadlocks. And a big redundant system deterministically degrading in itself is not that different from a smaller less redundant system deterministically degrading in itself. No USSR and no Nazi Germany anymore on the map.

    The parts about lying and false pretense of law and democracy are new, but not too much - rulers of Frederic the Great’s time had false pretenses of knightly behavior and following imperial mechanisms. One can even compare 30 years war to our two world wars in the sense of creating a new world order, which was considered impossible to change due to endless horrors following that, but eventually become a farce.



  • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldtoquotes@lemmy.mlLenin on inevitable victory
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    13 hours ago

    Lenin didn’t think about that. He liked his own leadership and “inevitable forces of history” which meant that everything will be good. Then he saw how things work and instituted NEP. Then he died of syphilis.

    Norbert Wiener, though, thought about that, he wrote in “Cybernetics” a few obvious conclusions and descriptions of the world of the future, and how we need a cybernetic democracy (that’d be directly voting on many things every day, something that was considered impractical 100 years ago, but is more practical now than normal vote then, yet nobody’s doing it), only he didn’t describe how it’ll be a cybernetic democracy and not a cybernetic tyranny, probably something easy and obvious, not worth mentioning, that’s sarcasm.






  • In appearances he seems to be real. Culturally quite typical for those jerks who are Russia’s elite now, except their older generation holding power kinda hides that.

    Durov is the intermediate generation, gross, but trying to pretend. I don’t know if he was born to such a family (KGB/FSB/nomenclature relatives, getting a good education as a mathematician would check out then) or accepted into their, eh, society seems too strong a word.

    It’s like a network of thieves recognizing each other by their particular kind of behavior. There’s too many of them to firmly know they are talking to one of their own, so that behavior and approach to life is all it takes to be perceived as one of them.

    (I know you won’t believe me, but they think that signature behavior is aristocratic or whatever, talking in Esopean language, dropping hints, not looking you in the eyes, cold faces, being silent and not talking a lot, fish eyes ; there are people with actual noble ancestry in Russia, they do have sort of a common approach to right behavior, and that’s basically the opposite of this - talking to the other person directly, if making hints, then making it obvious that it’s a metaphor, not trying to show contempt or threat in their face, being clear and honest, at least in appearances.)

    Their part of my generation is just shit from the ass. Cunning and more evil, but no class or wisdom at all. I mean, there’s a saying “order beats class”, but they can have order only in ideal conditions too. Using bigger expense to imitate an achievement by smaller expense, which wouldn’t be a compliment to their abilities even if it were real. What’s worst is they don’t even understand it.

    Though this is where I must share one thing I’ve learned from them - you can imitate a level much higher than yours. You may have no taste, but read and imitate the taste of people who you want to deceive, and succeed. You may not know some domain area, but deceive those who do. Not have deeper understanding of some important mechanism, but imitate a person who does to those who do.

    A thought similar to LLM bots in some sense. So - they are dangerous.


  • It’s not free, but it’s the good part nonetheless - nuclear energy and thus increase in people trained to operate and build nuclear reactors.

    Nuclear energy is, planning-wise, very high quality, you have a lot of control in scaling the output.

    That allows, together with lots of accumulators of various kinds (pumping water up and such), to actually make renewables with uncontrollable output useful.

    Making the average cost of energy better than just that of nuclear.

    So, when Microsoft dies, those reactors and people will be of value.


  • AI slop poisoning is value too. The more everything is poisoned by it, the less useful things trained on new data are. The poison spreads in many ways, it’s not something that can be removed.

    It’s important for prevention of totalitarianism driven by such technologies in the future.

    So I honestly hope it kills the bullshit web and we’ll be back to small communities based on personal ties, where the person making the rules is the webmaster you know, not an anonymous moderator or a bot. That’s killing two birds with one stone, no downsides whatsoever.




  • This is wrong. Psychopaths feel themselves just fine in the society and usually don’t become school shooters.

    Shooting up bullies is a very crude solution, one that a psychopath usually doesn’t need.

    In any case most of school shootings I’ve read about were connected to bullying, and bully lives don’t matter. Don’t bully, don’t get killed.

    A psychopath usually plans their murders, so they’ll do just fine with a heavy sharp object or a reactive not intended for food getting into food. A psychopath will also be on the convenient side of any socially approved action.

    I’ve recently fully realized that I’ve met a high quality psychopath once.


  • Things which were obvious for any paranoid I2P user 15 years ago, and were being discussed in Freenet 20 years ago, and by cypherpunks 30 years ago, are again new and unexpected.

    See, you can murder people in the open if you can make it comfortable enough for everyone to ignore it.

    Surveillance and censorship should be scarier, because without them you can cry out about the murderer or avoid strategic disadvantage against the murderer, but are not - most people haven’t been in real danger they understood. And even if they were - suppose that’s already happening, people are being murdered in the open, censorship and surveillance happen, and the latter causes more outrage, - we all can see nobody cares enough to pay with a few bruises for opposing it, not just their living, health, life.

    Here we are.