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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#751

Post by tinco »

CTmystery wrote: post #580
tinco wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That it's the ultimate authority doesn't mean you should always believe it. It's just the best we've got. It's the best thing about science is that it's explicit about the bounds of what we know and don't know. You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision. Regard…

Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.

So science as I view/understand it, is the effort to extract knowledge from the observable universe through experiments, observations and logic. If I compare science to religion, this is where I see the difference: In the church you have the clergy, who preach their understanding of the religion, and you have the basis of the religion, usually a book. To the religious the book or some idea from the book is the foundation, and the clergy are the guides. Similarly in science you have the scientists who do the actual science, and the foundation is observations of the universe. The faith I have and my dogma, is in believing the scientists, that is the part where I can have doubt and where I might be corrected in my beliefs, and the foundation is the actual universe which as far as I have been able to tell is consistent with itself so far. It's a bit of a cop out, because any time someone says "oh but these scientists were wrong", then I will go "ok yeah but those were junk science" and move on with my merry life.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#752

Post by LordDragonfang »

nouveaux wrote: post #80
pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces.

Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:

> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."

It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.

The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#753

Post by treelovinhippie »

sva_ wrote: post #346
pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

> https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

HOT is a temporary placeholder for HoloFuel which is a mutual credit currency: https://blog.holochain.org/mutual-credit-part-1-a-new-type-o...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#754

Post by a-dub »

whatever this will be, will be. que sera, sera...

o' lord, please bless us and protect us from thy holy hells of capitalist economic centralization. please let there be upon us deliverance for all, from this century of hellfire and brimstone, consolidation of silicon and machine code... deliver us with the great gifts of modern encryption for mesh networking with centralized administration, all for a very reasonable monthly price. praise be thy software as a service, so thou may centralize thy administration, simplify thy budgeting and leave thy key rotation to thy pros so thou may fight thy wars for not only a good, but for the ultimate good, against thy centralizing powers of capital that seek not only to enslave us, but divide us for eternity as every man, woman and child pays thy holy rent on thy proprietary servers, enslaved to a permanent life of indignity and servitude to those who own not only thy physical real estate, but thy ethereal real estate in thy metaverse as well..

to whom do we owe for this great beacon of light which shall deliver us all?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#755

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"Your phone can run mapreduce jobs 10x-100x faster than your timeshared cloud instance that costs more. Plus it has a GPU."

Plus you can carry the phone anywhere, e.g., somewhere no internet access, but you need internet access to reach a timeshared cloud instance.

Have been experimenting with running servers on "phones" personally and think we need computers in this form factor that are not "phones".

"One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance."

Same. Can carry Macbook anywhere.

"Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone - well, actually to every software microvendor - to do it for us."

All under the guise of "making things easier". Anything is easier if you do not have to do it yourself. This does not mean the thing itself is becoming easier to do. IMO, microvendors are, intentionally or not, effectively building "complexity moats". When DIY becomes exceedingly more difficult, then we know that no one is "making things easier". They might be deliberately doing the opposite. If the thing isn't any easier for the microvendor, then we are just transferring the burden to someone else, not making the thing easier.

"We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous.""

There is usuallly an HN comment along the lines of "I am thankful that Apple screens apps for me" as if it is some kind of service. However the "service" is not solving problem of "dangerous apps". Someone still has to look at the program and ask, "What is this app doing". Of course, many users do not need to be paying for this "service" because they can select "safe apps" just as well as Apple can. But it isn't optional. Pay up.

"IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware."

Maybe this is, to some small extent, the result of trying to delegate 100% of our responsibilities when using a computer. "Let someone else take care of it."

Not to say I enjoy having to know how to do everything in order to compile and install an OS, a server, and configure it, but I know if I don't then there are consequences.

No problem with running software on a computer in "the cloud" so long as I own the computer. There are consquences if I don't.

Make the choices the marketers want us to make, enjoy the "convenience" (and the expense), but accept the consequences. Take personal responsibility.

When no one knows how to do anything for themselves, then the problem of "gatekeeping" can only become worse.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#756

Post by [deleted] »

pjkundert wrote: post #513
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus. All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid .

[deleted]

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#757

Post by selfhoster11 »

dmitriid wrote: post #187
moistrobot wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom

> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed : -…

That is an exceptionally well designed purchase process. In my case, I had to go through 3-4 months of wrangling banks and other paperwork. I still don't understand my mortgage contract fully. I just hope it doesn't have any "surprises" in it.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#758

Post by catlikesshrimp »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #675
Ensorceled wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?

No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man. This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.

Except there are still warlords, and drug cartels. And police beating black fellows more often than the average.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/africas-top-10-dictator...

You need commanders for war.

Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.

Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#759

Post by selfhoster11 »

munificent wrote: post #388
delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

> That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large

Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.

If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#760

Post by TacticalCoder »

sva_ wrote: post #639
almostkorean wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think Ethereum Foundation gave themselves the majority of Ether? I'm pretty sure it was 15% but I might be wrong

https://etherscan.io/stat/supply 72 million Ether were premined

Out of which 12 millions went to the Ethereum foundation. The other 60 millions were given to people who crowdfunded the project (and they did it using BTC). The ETH supply has more or less doubled since now. The Ethereum foundation holds today about 10% of all Ethereum and as far as I know they are "locked" in a smart contract.

One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.

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