I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some “Zen” in computer UIs and that “Zen” is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of “you don’t understand it”. Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well.

And also another idea of “you dummy talking about ergonomics can’t be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit”.

So -

1. pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked,
2. almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that,
3. blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications,
4. objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that’s why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.

It’s not a glitch.

People have spent billions to build systems where such dissemination of crowd emotion is the main difference from the real web (what was on geocities or even LJ, and a bit of that exists in Telegram, because it’s a Russian honeypot to collect intelligence, and Russia could care a bit less about keeping the line that American social media corps, in its effort to make the honeypot actually attractive to use).

Then spent billions to advertise them. Billions to kill competition.

Then they’ve lost billions from that, and yet doubled down on it.

That just doesn’t happen by accident, it’s a whole era of humanity’s history now. Like 20s-50s (the “bad” kind of change, with goosestepping, cult of strong people, attempts to save empires, preparations for a nuclear war, all that) and 60s-90s (the “good” kind of change, with space race, hippies in the west, Soviet official ideology being peace and unification of humanity - BTW, it’s funny how the western politicians of that time freeloaded on that, never denying such a goal, but also never accepting it, thus getting the good parts without the hard ones) and then what we have.

No, the opposite. To have a normal Linux and an open hardware system. And no Broadcom.

Actually a reimagining of olden ThinkPads with proper screen ratios and keyboards and everything would be nice too.

Refurbished ones have a few downsides.

Well. Not very different from “opening up” to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn’t think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it’s our job to root out our time’s weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

Which means that nice world doesn’t survive evolution.

No, I don’t mean anything like “climate change”, I mean the looming promise of full-blown Orwellian world, that is most beneficial for people in power when it’s not visible or felt, but they can’t prevent it. So over time more and more people will realize that we are already there.

It’s not about less expensive, it’s about not too expensive to try. Say, most Linux phones I can think of start a bit higher than I’d wish.

I think we’ll see a time the general public becomes more conscious of the risks. The world is changing, and has already changed enough.

I’d lower the bar TBH.

No need to have something powerful. No need to have three cameras almost good enough for professional purposes.

Hardware development is not that extremely expensive in this case, it’s not an iPad, we need to fit something like RPi with Linux and Gnome into a box with a battery, a few antennae and peripheral devices. Make microphone and camera with a hardware switch. Maybe even a GPS antenna with that.

It has to be marketed accordingly, as something less. The box shouldn’t be thinner than an iPad or cooler than an iPad, just convenient enough to hold. Ergonomic tests are not that hard. I mean, hiring people to do them costs something, yes.

What matters in marketing when you’re the underdog - is being precise. When you’re the overlord, you are teaching the consumers what to expect, so you can misposition a product. Here, I think, you can’t.

So if you can’t compete in the same niche, make a slightly (but clearly) different niche and make it clear that you are aiming for that, and make a device for that.

And make (like Apple does) a few scripted ways of using the device. Thoroughly checked to be workable.

I guess this adds up to some expense, but not nearly what those companies spend trying to make their things thin, sleek and hard to repair, and appealing to blonde girls.

Telegram

There is corporate interest to that, but I don’t understand how it isn’t profitable to make a device killing it.

An ARM PC in tablet form with Linux and Gnome, with open everything, receiving updates.

BTW, ecosystem is an interesting word. It means a stable system with a hierarchical food chain. Specifically designed to extract value again and again for the same service which isn’t even unique, in a controllable and predictable way. Maybe the Matrix with human farms was more of a prophecy than people tend to think.

It’s fascinating to see this find new pastures in the new world. As a proud Russian citizen.

Some day you’ll remember with nostalgie those years of the ruling party actually caring to win elections.

Jokes aside, it’s easier to cheat now because it’s easier to do everything, and that’s because of the Internet and modern computing systems.

You can’t unmince minced meat back.

But you can apply the same change in a different direction and see that today direct non-anonymous democracy is actually plausible, if it’s instituted, for big countries. 100 years ago it simply wasn’t possible. Now it is.

Or that today Soviet system (as in Soviet democracy and not totalitarian state capitalism) is actually possible to build. When they were trying, they couldn’t, they didn’t possess the means.

And that both these things are actually what these people have done to us, but inverted. Our “direct vote” is the data they collect about us to classify and predict us for control. Our “Soviets” are that classification, and our “central planning” is those predictions and control.

They’ve done all this, just directed for their own interest. So maybe one can do the opposite.

That’s old logic that might not be as certain in the new era.

What makes profit, can share it with those making laws.

And one anti-monopoly thing that was at some point common was that it’s illegal to provide a service below market cost to capture markets. Probably if that were applied to the Internet and free services like Facebook and Reddit and Google, many things would go differently.

But at the same time even today payments over the Internet are problematic. If you could pay for storage and computation the same way you pay for landline, without extra bother, maybe we’d have something better.

Nothing they are doing has any connection to Judaism. Other than bullshit lines Israeli officials say, that also align more with particular kind of Christianity, utilizing kinda augmented Jews’ role in it.

I’ve met Russian-speaking Israelis in TG, and even if he hasn’t, they already think that.

Judaism is not what you’re saying.

Подтвержденных сцуко самим протоколом Телеграмки.

Ну и, эм, что у силовиков есть доступ к перепискам, уже возникало в куче уголовных дел. Они не слишком прячутся. И это, видимо, были не локальные трояны.

Т.е. скорее всего доступ со стороны сервера к хранящемуся там.

А ваццап все-таки E2EE и официальный доступ там к метаданным.

They had it coming for those captchas.

It’s as if you hadn’t read the comment you’re answering.

I’m not denigrating anything. I’m saying that “scientific communism” is not science, even if it officially is called that. It’s like doctors of theology teaching you how to build a society. And any “scientific approach to governing” will lead to such a substitution, because people really holding power will invent that to keep it in fact.

And I see that you completely ignored the part about metrics used as KPIs always being gamed, thus hierarchical meritocracy plainly not being possible.

has proven to be incompatible with democracy over time and detrimental to any social contract

I’ve got gangbanged with downvotes recently for reminding that capitalism is literally the first “formation”, if we play by Marx, in relative modernity (antique Mediterranean was a whole different thing, but it relied upon good climatic conditions, good connectivity allowing Egypt to feed the whole of it, common ethnically and religiously pluralist cultural space, and slavery), to offer horizontal mobility of the kind we consider normal, and vertical mobility to a bigger extent than before.

The person I was answering to thought that in a medieval town before capitalism you could just make a thing and sell it. In fact to make a shoe you had to be a shoemaker (by inheritance or by apprenticeship if the master had no children or decided to disinherit them, or by guild if in a bigger town), and if you weren’t, making a shoe even for yourself was considered stealing from the shoemakers.

It’s funny how, say, Robin Hood stories show it as it was, and those are supposed to be known enough, but people have such misconceptions.

Or even Tolkien’s Shire - look closely how Hobbits’ life looks.

A person would literally grow as a non-uniform piece of a non-uniform fabric of the medieval society, they couldn’t significantly change their place whether they were a peasant or a prince. Being born a son of a carpenter, you wouldn’t become cook. If you were the oldest son, you were expected to take on their trade and role of the carpenter in this particular place or part of the city, or to work for the oldest son. You were judged by the surrounding people if you didn’t. If you were the younger son, it was a bit more normal to seek apprenticeship of some other specialty, maybe. So the cookshop’s master could take you as an apprentice, if all his sons would go rogue and not take on his trade, or maybe not, but then even after ending your apprenticeship you’d work for the cook, not be the cook in that cookshop. You couldn’t just open your own cookshop without like everyone approving it. It was a rare event. People in a medieval town wouldn’t understand why they need a third carpenter if there are two carpenters and it always was so. Or why they need a second cookshop if the existing one was always here. It required significant changes - the town’s role growing and it needing to accommodate newcomers, or a neighboring town being razed, thus the balance changing.

So - the purpose of this text was to explain that capitalism has achieved quite a lot. And when you are making a change, it’s not a win-win game, you can both gain something you didn’t have and lose something you had.

Anyway. All this is bullshit. The only ideological virtue humans can have is being able to, quoting Kipling, “… watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools”. That’s because our kind is absolutely incapable of seeing and valuing what we already have and separating dreams of what we don’t from the reality of what we’ll get trying to achieve that. Everything comes to ruin.

So the only good trait of a clearly political ideology would be wide participation and rotation, so that as many people as possible were contributors of a political system. A cook can govern a state (as Lenin said), it’s just important that it’s not one cook, but many cooks, and that none of them keeps a position of power long enough to start thinking they know something, and that none of them can take a position of power predictably.

As you might have noticed, this is the opposite of any meritocracy with “wise elders” deciding who deserves to be assigned to a post and role and who doesn’t.

That be some ebony word?

As to the subject, I have that skin condition, but:

1. Never served in the army, and it’s Russia anyway,

2. I’ve heard in the Russian army that’s generally fine that half your face is fcking red, what matters is that you do shave, and if you shave badly, then yeah, bad things follow, not kicking out, but being force-shaved with a harsh cloth or something like that.

It is both. No human can be entrusted evaluating merit for the “meritocracy” word to form, that is, to defined a hierarchy.

Any metric used as a KPI stops being useful as a metric, have you heard that?

The very moment academics and such are going to decide on real power, you’ll have the right academics emerge, of “scientific communism professors” kind.