s/the tech bros/humans/

Despite “the tech bros” really being that, I’m learning over time about some people surprisingly cowardly and evil, while looking like better versions of me, and some other people looking pretty normal and usual, while being epic and tragic heroes, and some other people looking like a typical Nazi 80 years late to the party, yet more honorable than many, and some other people looking like weak and nice versions of me, while having real warrior spirit.

You have no idea how big the world is in all dimensions. We are all looking at it via our daily interactions, via news and internet discussions, via games and via books, and we don’t see what’s deep inside. Well, I suppose, people who read classics can see something.

And they, these people on top of big tech, being just human, have such powers. What can they do with them? Perhaps we should forgive them for not being wise in deciding to have those powers, and praise them for doing less evil with them than they could.

So. Perhaps in 15 years you’ve just grown.

And also because at some point they hired Signal people to design E2EE for them, I think.

The “encryption for two different receiving sides” part is the one that you, in turn, might have missed. WhatsApp client might just send messages to some additional technical party, which is not your buddy.

Naturally, they are far weaker.

Well, it is an Islamic Republic. Of Shia denomination. Shia technically believe in apocalypse and in bringing it close by battling devilish forces. Which Iranian leaders usually associate with USA and Israel.

Iran would only bomb it when attacked.

Not quite true, they have a Shia version of Trotsky’s world revolution, except about final battle against evil and apocalypse.

Evil on the other hand…

I agree, it would be much better if Israel were located in some part of (former in that case) Northern Bavaria and its problematic (or not) neighbors were Germans, making them more justified bombing targets. Unfortunately in that case it’d be very likely that it wouldn’t last 20 years. There’d be a combined arms operation, some additional smoke from the stoves, and probably neither the Western nor the Soviet side would care much what their pet Germans are doing.

Also for the purpose of minimizing evil locating chip design in Israel is not worse than in USA. I’m not sure whether you’ll want to argue that, just adding.

production lines have been shut down long ago,

If there were demand, that could change.

No specifics, because I don’t remember them. I think it’s even derived from the seti@home codebase. Not sure.

So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.

Personal computers of today don’t give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.

Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.

In year 2006 they’d say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don’t do that now, because then you’d be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.

It’s just sad.

You do keep it. That’s the point, how you keep personal computing without being disadvantages in this particular part of the economy.

Except the trap works when their subscription services are still competitive, and locally hosted solutions are part of competition regardless of what they want.

There are industry-wide attempts to ramp up complexity of everything, so that everything were more centralized and local solutions harder to support. I’m not sure what they hope for.

Home consumers can be trapped this way, but they are subject to competition from many businesses.

Also while crypto stuff is unpleasant, it involves decentralized commercial calculation with some of the solutions, meaning possibility of automated service choice in a decentralized network. You can in theory have an alternative to Office 365 running in such a network paid for with Ethereum or TON or something similar. I haven’t researched this supposition.

Businesses are harder to trap this way, because they usually can afford an employee or two to support basic local solutions. Or to pay another small business of 3-4 people doing that.

Or one can think of (playing EU4 right now, so a limited set of associations) gunpowder and chinaware production in Europe, the secrets of both were slowly and steadily spreading, until they were no longer secrets. Here it’s not as much about secrets as it is about evolution catching up with revolution.

The commonality of people just needing to do their work and willing to use computers to help it is slower to react to change than big corporations, but big corporations can’t direct their reaction, they can only slow it down.

So - renting computational resources you possess right now is hard and big cloud providers are doing it, while people just owning hardware don’t. That’s the problem to be solved. Things like boinc and seti@home were altruistic, and I think there’s a similar distributed hentai hosting. The problem is in making such a market for everyone.

That’s what they want, and there’s what you the customer want.

Prices of items and services affect the difference. They’ve judged they have enough dough to close the gap. I don’t know if they do.

Then, if they do, there’s the stickiness of that state. Or how long until alternative personal computing industry evolves outside of power of those interested in it.

Reminds me of talking about property with communists. Private property should be abolished, but personal property is different, that you can have, until someone wants it strongly enough for it to be considered private property.

That’s really interesting. I’ve mostly done only small experiments with generative music and povray renders, sharing them with friends, but that’s usually not enough to call a circle. But my friend has such a circle for poetry. I mean, with poetry this is pretty traditional.

BitLocker is older.

That’s roughly similar to catch up development (which is always faster and easier), except automated. With catch up development those doing it only make waves for some time before they, well, catch up and find deep inability to evolve, similar to USSR, which is where it ends. While with this - things are made from something already created all the time.

Basically all you need to make something a source of training data, laundered of authorship with plausible deniability, is for that something to be publicly available.

Meaning that at least in art we might be back to private orders and works available to limited circles of viewers, I think. Once it becomes unprofitable enough to publish your works, and once the existing pool of training data is exhausted and falls back enough compared to what’s in demand and in fashion.

OK, that’s just an exercise in high school level “outta my ass” style analysis.

I mean, Antique Mediterranean had all sorts of mystery religions. Perhaps we are on the threshold of an era of mystery art.

I’ve read someone blabbering how BitLocker is better than FDE on Linux or BSDs just recently. I didn’t do fact checking, but honestly just uploading keys to MS wasn’t something I expected even from them.

In general, calling something that extrapolates and averages a dataset “AI” seems wrong.

Symbolic logic is something people have invented to escape that trap somewhere in Middle Ages, when it probably seemed more intuitive that a yelling crowd’s opinion is not intelligence. Pitchforks and torches, ya knaw. I mean, scholars were not the most civil lot as well, and crime situation among them was worse than in seaports and such.

It’s a bit similar to how you need non-linearity in ciphers.

That’s a gross simplification.

First, much of said “fucking it up” was done by Norse influence due to all the Danes. Started a bit earlier than 1066, something-something Canute, something-something Danelaw, something-something great pagan army.

Second, Norman French was one of two clearly separable waves of “French” influence, and the commoners’ Germanic language after it was still very different from what happened after the other wave.

Third, that other wave was Angevin French, which, yeah, made a big influence, in huge part because it happened in the time when English kings were trying to conquer much of France for themselves, and didn’t see themselves as English kings really.