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.

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.

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.

And that’s one example of how one progressive goal (of reducing emissions, ecology, regulating industry etc) and another (of right to repair and tinker) can require a compromise.

OK, from where I am your problems in US are cool to read about, here that kind of customization is in the “fuck around and find out” territory with huge fines, but I see no concern about ecology either.

Except not, as the same movie shows, some of them will be crushed and not lost.

That was how USA used China against the socialist bloc after all. Of course they did.

If I were justifying my account name, I’d suppose, for the purpose of future appearing interesting, this might be a coverup.

Such a structure is useful for many things, and while a DC doesn’t have to be that big, a factory producing real things on scale or mass housing or a prepared company town all benefit from being in one place.

So perhaps it’s being built as a DC, but in fact is going to be like a drone factory, or something equally dystopian-futuristic.

Or a humongous supercomputer, whatever.

I’m starting to think along plot lines of science fiction and space operas I’ve seen and read before, they were saying it’s harmful for my development, I didn’t believe them.

Another option - it’s, yes, a scheme and it won’t get built. Just pump and dump.

If that’s going to be one humongous superstructure, zoned inside, then if this fails, they might get a new city. Superstructures like this are nice, just nobody usually builds them (after 50s and 60s, I suppose) for residential areas.

One can repurpose the space for multi-story apartments (I suppose ceilings will be much higher than needed), or malls, or literally everything.

Or factories, if there are problems with exporting orders to southeast Asia.

If this even gets built.

Or if it doesn’t fail, then heat and noise pollution, I suppose. And grid load. Not nice.