And he started with police officers being supervised, but the real problem is not what we all see about an event, it’s whether we who see it one way have power over those who pretend they saw something else. So if those deciding also don’t want to reduce police officers’ loyalty to their superiors and readiness to obey on the job, they might find an excuse for a clear murder in FHD.

Usually the place of origin of a technology is also where most its uses are pioneered.

Non-malicious compliance would be a protocol extension, don’t ask me how, but if WebSockets exist, then it’s possible to make an EuHTTP standard to which you’d upgrade. So that all these popups wouldn’t be needed and you’d conveniently set things up on the client.

Actually owch. One can just take some WS library and make a Gemini-like protocol, only over WebSockets (allowing for much of normal infrastructure to support it, you know, nginx, haproxy, lots of stuff), that would leverage convenient existing technologies and without need for Google’s browser engine more complex and expensive than a rocket.

OK, that’s called NOSTR, they are just not aiming for replacing Web in any form. For now.

EDIT: And this probably is not what’s being discussed.

I’ve read this happened because sometime in the 80s comrade Reagan decided to own the Japanese instead of letting competition do its work (for cars, but with electronics similar things followed). He’s somehow often associated with liberal capitalism and so on, but the guy believed that “monopolies are efficient”, but at the same time by some magic if a monopoly stops being efficient, then all the capital and technology base for competition to replace it will just materialize in one place in one moment all by themselves. So I’m not even sure if “comrade” is irony. The ironic part is that the US president whose term coincided with Soviet system conclusively losing the Cold War is also the one who supported state capitalism and ideologic pressure in society.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, that’s what they are officially talking about, to reduce the amount of foreign traffic so to reduce the load on TSPU (which is the Russian alternative to China’s GFW). Pretty open about it.

If you’d seen the original statement in Russian, you’d realize this person has no idea what they are talking about at all, and with their job title, the purpose of it is just to present some kinda more liberal viewpoint for appearance.

And yes, it’s possible, Iran and North Korea are doing it, and there are plenty of countries with heavy censorship and regulation, and there’s a piece of good engineering advice I once got - “you get to your goal faster if you don’t pick up boss fights”, meaning that while it’s cool for a commenter on the Web to imagine them taking the hardest and most expensive path to solving the problem of censorship and control, they have different choices.

Less demand for actual children - lower prices for trafficking, which improves every pedo’s level of life, think of the pedos