In Russian language the difference between American and actual Indians is one letter in spelling (easily heard in pronunciation, so only small children maybe mix them up), historically it’s a variation of the same word.

For “turkey” the bird the feminine version of the former is used (and not used to refer to an American Indian woman).

The point is, it’s the main word to refer to Native Americans. “Настоящему индейцу завсегда везде ништяк” and all that.

Not by market share on desktops in particular Western countries, no.

In the world - yes, I’d expect there to be more Linux desktops really existing than MacOS desktops.

Apple is the West in a nutshell, though. When a real need or a problem is mentioned, it’s mentioned only rarely as some selling point - like Jobs saying MacOSX is “very Linux-like” (sic). When a solution reaches reality, it’s done in a neutered way - like Apple still regularly releasing sources. When a real need is fulfilled, you can expect twice the effort to have been covertly spent on negating its effect - like with Apple’s “just works” and sterility and even privacy selling points, which come with walled gardens, closed APIs, short and bad support, and them actually still spying on you. A declaration of effort to tackle any problem existing in the wild is always aimed at portrayal of said effort to be persuasive enough to sell the product and the more efficient, the better, where efficiency means that actually doing anything other than persuasion is against the goal.

See, the difference between market mechanisms and geopolitics is not in people deciding that there’ll be this set of rules here and that set of rules there. It’s due to structure. The bigger that structure makes companies, the more similar market dynamic and scientific&technical progress will be to geopolitics.

Which is why I genuinely don’t understand people who frown at “techno-luddites” like me dreaming of going back to decentralized, even if with worse compatibility, hardware production and simpler software and formats. I would even say that some degree of protectionism from less developed countries would help, where hardware can be imported only if there’s domestic alternative production to match.

I’m more on the libertarian side, but if in XIX century weapons ownership was widespread, and in XX century it stopped being such, because of one’s ability to kill much more people quickly, then the same with electronics would make sense by the same principle. Only the qualitative difference in power comes not with the device, but with the centralized production line it comes from.

Of course, that’s not my proposition. It wouldn’t work.

My proposition would be to try to design some “civilization minimized”, where sufficiently usable computers can be produced in an area of 100k people, with society, industry, communications and warfare approaches optimized for that limitation. That kind of limitation for a self-contained unit of civilization, so to say.

So - one can buy a reasonably good laptop for 500$ today.

What kind of laptop can one produce for that sum in a 100k people settlement? Is that even possible to make it close to 500$ in relative value?

I’d expect we’d need to solve all heavy problems with specialized boards. I think lithography is actually applicable here - we don’t need it very precise, it’s far above our possibilities in such a hypothetical unit, and it would improve resource usage efficiency. And I think a more compact machine of PDP-11 level is possible, with specialized boards in Amiga ideology. I also think we can even have some kind of machine learning, but with analog storage of coefficients to reach anything close to sufficient efficiency. It would be a Fallout-kind computer, nothing fancy, but - possibly usable. For dedicated boards (some of which can, again, solve problems with analog approaches) there is a possibility of optronic elements being more accessible and energy-efficient.

There’s a question of portability - one can expect lithium to just not be realistically available in any random area of the world populated by 100k people. I mean, trying to imagine some autarky …

So maybe not a laptop, LOL.

Nah. That’s bullshit. That won’t work. At least not every 100k people. Maybe every 10mln.

I want that Web to die, die, die.

Gemini is a step in the right direction, but the new Web should be both non-extensible by design and transparently allow distributed storage, distributed untrusted computation, and separation of the concepts of a site and a machine that serves it. In other words, serverless, where websites and services and even web applications are identified cryptographically, and anybody can contribute their computing power (or storage) to a site\service\application, out of desire to help or for money. With smart contracts, ghost keys and other buzzwords I have no real idea about.

And fuck Microsoft.

They should make second dominant subject to such laws too.

Right!

First, Germanic invaders should leave Great Wales and go back to Jutland …

And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from … something.

I guess if you feel enough trauma and humiliation and indignation from what happens there, you might be able to go.

But ultimately, I suppose, it’s just taking full responsibility for yourself, including possible suffering and death. In some sense being afraid is obeying the fear.

As they say, death is unfinished business. When you are not allowing yourself to drop everything and go, you won’t be able to consciously risk your life.

Why I want to talk about this - because someone should fight wars on the weaker side, where it is always harder. Otherwise our world will keep becoming more hellish.

I think the quote that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a bit older, and said about all the lessons of history before it.

Somehow humanity doesn’t like the wisest rules out there. And prefers to read Palanick and talk about post-modernism instead of looking at the root.

It’s not snake oil. It is a way to brute force some problems which it wasn’t possible to brute force before.

And also it’s very useful for mass surveillance and war.

Tell me honestly, are you a bot or do you sincerely believe this shit and based on which qualification and experience?

Gunpowder, electricity, combustion engines, universal electronic computers, rocketry, lasers, plastics - none of these made any dramatic changes. It was all slow iterative process of fuzzy transitions and evolution.

While these made pretty fundamental impacts. Sam Altman’s company is using fuckloads of data to calculate some predictive coefficients, and the rest of its product can be done by students.

It’s just real-life power controllers trying their muscles at bending the tech industry with usual means - capturing resources and using them to assert control. There were no such resources in the beginning, and then datasets turned into something like oil.

Generally in computing (when a computer is a universal machine) everyone able to program can do a lot of things. This makes the equality there kinda inconvenient for real life bosses who can call airstrikes and deal in oil tankers.

There was the smart and slow way of killing that via slow oligopolization, but everyone can see how that doesn’t work well. Some people slowly move to better things, and some were fine with TV telling them how to live, they don’t even need Internet. All these technologies are still kinda modular and even transparent. And despite what many people think, both idealistic left and idealistic right build technologies for the same ultimate goal, so Fediverse is good and Nostr is good and everything that functions is good.

So - that works, but human societies are actually developing some kind of immunity to centralized bot-poisoned platforms.

To keep the stability of today’s elites (I’d say these are by now pretty international), you need something qualitatively different. A machine that is almost universal in solving tasks, but doesn’t give the user transparency. That’s their “AI”. And those enormous datasets and computing power are the biggest advantage of that kind of people over us. So they are using that advantage. That’s the kind of solution that they can do and we can’t.

Simultaneously to that there’s a lot of AI hype being raised to try and replace normal computing with something reliant on those centralized supply chains. Hardware production was more distributed before the last couple of decades. Now there are a few well-controllable centers. They simply want to do the same with consumer software. Because if the consumers don’t need something, they won’t have that something when they see a need.

All these aside, today’s kinds of mass surveillance can’t be done with (EDIT:without) something like that “AI”. There simply won’t be enough people to have sufficient control.

So - there are a few notable traits of this approach converging on the same interest.

It’s basically a project to conserve elites. The new generation of thieves and bureaucrats wants to become the new aristocracy.

That Americans are actually not Americans, but illegal aliens from Europe?..

OK, I haven’t been in the US.

I agree, Democrats are not going to do this in your country.

They are, however, going to continue arming fascist states and supporting with money and logistics their fascist wars.

And the fact that Republicans would be more eager to do that doesn’t mean a lot. Republicans look like useless nonsense evil, a bit like Russia’s regime, and Democrats look like effective intelligent evil - some kind of Empire in old Star Wars.

I really hope Democrats will not be like that after the election, the issue is - currently USA still has a Democratic administration. That administration didn’t even pretend it’s going to check Israel, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Just my PoV as someone who does not live in the USA and is not going to move there in near perspective.

Stealing is not allowed so you can’t do that. You dont own the whole world.

The problem is that everything is allowed, so they just do that.

Those who don’t want to fight in some war - terrorize your population sufficiently and they’ll obey, or you can keep them under propaganda pressure and they’ll agree.

I would be a coward and flee to a better place.

What if someone wants to take your land, demolish thousand years old churches and fortresses and graveyards, kill all your countrymen they can, all that purely out of hate\envy and because they can?

Would you not want to kill some of those people? Would you not want to prevent such things happening.

… and reduce emissions by wasting the rest. But due to negative selection leading into that upper class they won’t be able to manage the planet further despite thinking that they can and will die of hunger eventually.

The holocaust was used as something with which it was somehow immoral to compare other genocides in the 00s. Thus as a tool to make those more acceptable, cause no ongoing genocide can be as bad as the holocaust, or so pro-Israeli organizations say.

That was its only role.

While the David&Goliath narrative in the 70s and 80s was used to make Israel infallible in public opinion, paving the path for Israeli intelligence widely penetrating western governments and structures.

But even this wouldn’t be critical, if not for the West becoming more authoritarian gradually. Notice how the ruling structures in the West have been becoming less and less mobile, the key figures fewer and fewer, less and less transparent, and also older and older, and the concepts of right, law, constitutional law, common sense and natural right fuzzier and weaker, surrendering the reality to fallback mechanisms - as in raw power.

The less transparent a structure is, the easier it can be controlled by blackmail, personal interests and deals that the public wouldn’t want if it knew about them.

Say, about USSR in the 80s - the stereotypic picture of it being some geriatric non-transparent bureacratic warmongering state with fascist policies and degrading society, - it’s correct. The problem is - it just aged faster. The West was simply late by a couple decades. Those components of USSR’s collapse were not conditioned by totalitarian communism in any way. Just in the West late boomers are in power, while USSR was ruled by the last pre-war generation.

Israel is just one symptom.

So this can’t be solved by any conformism, arguing by the rules, proving things in courts, voting in elections. Only by bravery, strength and taking responsibility backed only by what you want and your own decision, no law, rule or vote.

By the way, this is what we call free market.

It just pains me to see, remember Chinese websites and software around 2007-2008?

Everybody (aware) looked at that with terror.

Now it’s the same everywhere.

Could they please retire modern Windows UI design?

Those contrasting color squares are not the zen those designers think. UI layout being different in paradigm for every application is not the productivity improvement they think. Using titlebars for something other than titles and control buttons is not optimization. Those buttons being some scratches on the screen barely visible is crap from any PoV I can imagine.

And somebody should explain to them that a good design for a billboard, a good design for a glossy magazine, a good design for a shop front, a good design for an office, a good design for a videogame, a good design for a movie and a good design for a workstation are all mutually incompatible in vast majority of cases.

And again about zen, simplicity, air and all that. I understand they think they are very smart and understanding of aesthetics. But zen would be having clean window borders and clearly visible control elements, for starters. And buttons not being just color squares. And in general solutions being subordinate to functional goals of the UI being usable. Industrial ergonomics are zen.

EDIT: I know it’s offtopic, not interested - keep walking

I don’t think they’ll drop the relationship with USA ever. They already have the kind of relations with Russia, China, India that any other country would get punished for. They just have too many spies and blackmailed politicians in there. It won’t ever be weak enough to stop being valuable.

But I think the moment Israel loses the protection of nuclear superpowers, it’s done.

Oh. So the intersections between Russia and Israel are even bigger than I thought.

Frankly IMHO Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Israel are in fact a system (maybe even a de-facto alliance) allowing them to be “in different blocks”, but work for the same interest. It’s not very well hidden though, Israel wouldn’t have fuel, steel and textile without Turkey, Turkey would be the main target of justified hate and freedom fighters on ME without Israel, Azerbaijan would quickly find its forgotten place without Russia, Russia wouldn’t entertain its corridors and logistics ambitions without Azerbaijan (and also power projection via its hands but with western military tech), Turkey wouldn’t have leverage on western countries without Russia, and Russia would have less power to stir shit up without Turkey.

A bit similar to how Armenia and Georgia are sort of a micro-system, where together they won’t be immediately eaten by countries from the previous list. But with them it’s clearly visible - if Azeris\Turks\Russians press Armenia down enough, they don’t need Georgia, if they press Georgia down enough, they don’t need Armenia. Both are very close to happening and would mean the end of both countries, unless somebody intervenes militarily, which is unlikely.