261–270 of 313 posts
How are we on the tech and protocols side of having a truly distributed worldwide mesh-net? i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
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> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.
The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? Digital ID or not, the situation won't improve until we get actual representation that works for the people.
The problem is that this is an extremely difficult step to achieve, because it does not simply depend on the will of the people. It depends on cultural evolution. Human beings are not naturally rational; like other species, we are driven by evolutionary processes that are often irrational and self-interested.
Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development. The French are far from it, and I believe the Germans are as well. Despite belonging to the generation that emerged from a relatively recent period of cultural barbarism, Germany is currently supporting what is considered as the greatest genocide and one of the gravest sets of war crimes of our time. So I would not overestimate the level of civilization of a population whose majority appears unconcerned by what I see as such an obvious moral failure.
In my view, one of the roots of human barbarism is the tendency to overestimate either human nature itself or the moral achievements of one's own culture.
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Another thing that influences change reliably is a good old (threat of) violence.
I would rather not incite violence on this platform. That just gets a bunch of people put in a cage limiting their career options and potentially "justifies" even greater dystopian actions.
What I'm saying is -- if the system degrades to a state that only responds to either money or violence, then ones with no money will eventually resort to violence. And since violence is not the most effective mediator of change, in the competitive environment it's /necessary/ to respond to stimuli other than those two mentioned just to not be outmaneuvered by opportunistic competitors for this sweet feedback signals.
Than being said, maybe I am (unknowingly) an agent of those opportunistic competitors trying to trigger exactly that failure mode.
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> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.
On the contrary, I don't think the current relative lack of arbitrary police brutality depends on the reasonableness of the people in power at all, only on the reasonableness of individual police officers. The police don't suddenly get softer when there's a left-wing government in power and tougher when there's a right-wing government. That "merely criticizing" the state gets you into an adversarial relationship is,…
They absolutely can though, through hiring selection bias, training, firing, promotion criteria, bonuses, performance metrics and quotas, oversight enforcement or lack thereof, etc. It's not quick, but incentive structures can absolutely change an organizational culture.
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people. Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums…
What, you don't think that's how things work already except "the people" whose will is being followed is an even smaller group. Is political activist having a bigger influence over politics than people who slouch on their couch supposed to be surprising or even bad?
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not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society. You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on. You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're…
Public schooling is also hardly a glowing example of how letting the government take over parenting is always good for kids.
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> I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. It is trivial to demonstrate that this is incorrect (despite sounding plausible). There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook. Among other considerations it's worth noting that most of the usual social feedback mechanisms are missing from typical online interactions. > The…
Exactly and the typical societal feedback mechanism for bad behavior are more terrible than the original problem when they are expanded to internet scale and become cancel culture.
I've walked away from so many online conversations by simply not replying, and everything's fine. Those are now just dangling threads in the void that almost no one will discover or care about.
I want the right to not be identified. I also want the right to SELF identify . I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand…
Toxic culture was always there but it really took of with social media where users often have zero shame to self-identify. There are anonymous communities that are far more friendly than the common insta group. "My brain" is perfectly fine with anonymous users. And yes, anonymity should be the default because otherwise the alternative is that you need to identify. If not, most users would stay anonymous because it is…
Outside of that, I have no reason not to be anonymous, and unfortunately it's too risky after the kinds of cancellation campaigns we saw during COVID over procedures, and around the same time, the all-or-nothing nonsense around whether you supported the BLM leaders' mansion fund.
It's not worth losing a job over seeing the writing on the wall before everyone else does, and calling it out publicly.
UA spies on Europeans, and vice versa. Then they share, it's not spying on your citizens, it's called 'intelligence sharing'.
What is UA?