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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#331

Post by tosti »

GaryBluto wrote: post #280
tosti wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi George. Have you seen RoboCop? A free market survival-of-the-fittest gets us closer to a dystopian 1984-like society. Overregulation will also do that. Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it. I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do…

> Have you seen RoboCop? Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?

Because it's a reference most people would get. The entire premise is that everything will be privatised, including healthcare and the police.

(BTW, I doubt a Motorola heart would cost $1, but I still think that's hilarious.)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#332

Post by sham1 »

pocksuppet wrote: post #278
chairmansteve wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups". That old trope. Is that also the reason Miami or St. Louis have less startups? I have started companies in the UK. The process is about the same as in the USA. The problem in Europe is that there is a lot less VC capital. Just like in Miami. It had nothing to do with regulation.

One reason there's less VC capital because they don't control the world reserve currency like the US does, so they can't just print money and export inflation. Thankfully the current US leadership is intent on resolving this discrepancy.

To be fair to us, the Euro is also a world reserve currency, alongside of course the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, and the Chinese Renminbi. And the Euro is in fact the second largest in terms of external reserves, being only beat by the USD.

Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#333

Post by intrasight »

schoen wrote: post #19

I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them. In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph: > We will create a civilization of the Min…

Now, I boil the whole discussion down to the question "What price freedom?" - the sentiment of which is attributed to Jefferson but according to Gemini can be traced back to John Philpot Curran

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance"

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#335

Post by rwmj »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #191

Also old enough to have been pre-internet: > Paper maps were absolutely horrible… No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock int…

It's weird that people (claim to) have had bad luck with cassette tape, because it worked pretty well for me. I don't believe I ever had a player chew tape, although I was never rich enough to afford a car stereo with a tape player so maybe those were more prone to it.

Also, paper maps! Excellent! The trick was you had to have done Orienteering at school, where (and I'm not making this up) a teacher would drop you off in the middle of nowhere with a map and if you were very lucky a compass, and tell you they'd see you back at the school, and if you could try to make it back before 9pm because then the teachers would still have time to get a few rounds in at the pub before closing time.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#336

Post by TFNA »

dgellow wrote: post #308
TFNA wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names…

> would fall apart if their real names were shown I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them

I am talking about the psychological effect, not the accounts being banned. Accounts pretending to be e.g. bona-fide Red State MAGA Americans are not going to successfully manipulate the American populace or move MAGA merchandise if the name "Ramesh Sharma" or "Goodluck Ngozi" or whatever is shown on every one of the account's posts.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#337

Post by devilbunny »

jstanley wrote: post #285
devilbunny wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Only 10%? 2) I can read either way, but with a road map what’s in front of you is generally more important than what’s behind you. By selecting the rotating map you don’t just get a rotating map - you get your position pushed to the edge of the screen instead of being centered, which means much more information is visible about the space in front of you. I switched views strictly for this effect.

You could still push your position to the edge even if you don't rotate the map.

In theory, yes, but it’s not been an option on any I have used.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#338

Post by underlipton »

jpk wrote: post #213
vrganj wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres. There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production. Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms…

"Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.

There's also the, "Burn down anything which isn't owned by a cooperative or human-scale municipality," option/component, where "burn" means anything from, "Deny construction permits," to, "All you had to do was pay us enough to live."

Not saying that anyone SHOULD do it. Just that you would kind of need both, for the non-authoritarian AI future: block the corporate strong-arm, but also build out your own infra because other nation-states are certainly going to do it and use that capability to try to muscle-in themselves.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#339

Post by underlipton »

LocalH wrote: post #162
Animats wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't. Right. In the early days of Etak, the company that invented car navigation systems, I got a tour from Stan Honey. Honey remarked that they originally displayed the map with north at the top, and a car arrow that rotated with the direction the vehicle was facing, like…

So 10% of the population got to indirectly dictate how the other 90% do it. If only left-handed people were so fortunate

You're gonna lose your mind when I tell you about Europe.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#340

Post by patrec »

chairmansteve wrote: post #261
armchairhacker wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups. You may think that’s good, but I’m sure some missed-potential startups would’ve improved QOL. They at least would’ve increased the EU’s economy and internet control and decreased its dependence on the US.

"Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups". That old trope. Is that also the reason Miami or St. Louis have less startups? I have started companies in the UK. The process is about the same as in the USA. The problem in Europe is that there is a lot less VC capital. Just like in Miami. It had nothing to do with regulation.

And of course the reason that there is a lot VC capital in Europe has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you'd be crazy to do a startup in e.g. Denmark (because doing so will likely be personally ruinous even in the unlikely case that you get some traction, due to unrealized gains tax) or to directly invest in one in e.g. Germany (where you'd be expected to physically sit through, on location, a few hours of a notary reading stuff out to you)? Do you actually have any idea how much additional legal risks, costs and time wasting bureaucracy are associated with even just forming a company in a typical EU country?

Miami, and Florida in general, have basically zero universities anyone has ever heard off, and still boast a higher number of unicorns per capita than Germany, despite the latter having at least one world-class technical university.

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