Yeah, blowing up satellites and cutting undersea internet cables would be (a short) prelude to world war III.

There is also a recent academic book (by an Ukrainian academic) about the maidan massacre: The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: The Mass Killing that Changed the World | SpringerLink

Evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt the far right / oligarchs were behind the mass killing of over 100 people and blame it on the government in a false flag operation. But people in the west will never hear of this. And if they hear they will dismiss it as conspiracy theory or propaganda. So it’s really no wonder people like linus react like this.

Wikipedia relies on sources, and humans choosing the sources like newspapers. And those newspapers are more and more inside a “bubble” that rejects any evidence or reporting presented by a competing bubble.

Right now wikipedia is covering up one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our times, because the newspapers are covering it up, or rejecting evidence because it’s by the “enemy”. Part of this is a defensive posture against AI bots and enemy disinformation.

It also has to be a waste of some resource that is rare to not use up and throw away like this.

Thanks, this gemini protocol looks interesting! This would be an easy protocol for distributed p2p hosting / caching / archiving of websites similar to federalist. I just wish gemtext would support bold and italics and hyperlinks.

Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?

And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.

I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.

Well in this case they used his likeness and brand to appear more legitimate and make money. So I’d argue this is trademark (even if not registered) so a legitimate complaint.

I don’t believe in “copyright” for a voice. See for example impersonators. But in this case it’s a deliberate deception which is pretty simple.

I don’t believe in intellectual property at all and think it is a form of theft, to deprive others from common knowledge or information just to seek rent. In case of patents I equate it even to aiding in genocide, since most advances in more energy efficiency use are patented and exploited for profit and slowing down adaptation. Without exhaustive attempts to try other systems to pay creators, copyright law is a moral abomination. That is a philosophical or ethical argument, not a legal one.

IMDB used to be independent and have a pretty amazing forum for movies. Like people would have lots of debate and discussion and insight. I loved going there after watching a movie. It was sort of “secondary literature” and nothing like this existed before. Then they just decided to delete countless contributions and shut it down. Instead of paying for moderation for the few trolls.

Of course there are plenty of other movie forums, some even copies the old posts and there is r/movies, but it’s much more fractured now. There are certain network effects for social media that need to reach a critical size.

And then amazon, a book seller, bought IMDB and eventually burned down the discussion section - which contained so much “secondary literature” about films. I’ll never forgive them for that.

Ok this is seems like a problem of trademark not copyright, or impersonation and fraud by pretending to be him. It’s about his name, not really about his voice. His voice is also pretty generic EDIT: it’s only in this specific market segment that it’s problematic.

Not just tech, all over the product spectrum. They started by selling books.

A large problem is payment system and accounts. I hate going to a new shop and create a new account, a new password, bla bla bla. I hate it. And wiring with online banking is still a pain the ass, you have to enter some password into your shitty phone keyboard and then wait for an SMS… paypal and amazon payment make shopping convenient.

So part of the problem is banks who have been sleeping on the job for decades. At least here in Europe. You finally can wire money so it arrives immediately from your bank account at a shop! (without having to waste some tax on a payment provider either). But 2 factor authentication is still a pita. Where is my online bank with easy to use FIDO2?

There are now alternative popping up because amazon has become so enshittified (high prices for many smaller items and reviews etc). And of course I’m a fan of aliexpress but shipping from China is stupid too.

We definitely need to avoid a monopoly by a corporation like amazon.

The problem is that electronics make you dependent on a expensive, long and fragile and closed source technology. This is the opposite of liberation. Except for prosthesis of course.

Ideally we’d rather have 3D printed sensory and internal organs to augment ourselves. Things that don’t wear out but can repair themselves and grow to become truly part of our body. Augments that last a lifetime and ideally extend our lifetime.

The ultimate would be a type of biocomputer that we directly control with our brain and that can alter our body. Which is science fiction of course, but imagine meditating to reconfigure your body in some internal space, like changing your sex from male to female and then slowly growing towards that over a few months. That is far off obviously, but it marks the goal we should move towards. Not electronics or mechanics as a foreign object, but biological systems that become part of us.

Thanks. I imagine most unicode characters and emojis are just copied over from some default font?

Maybe they’ll patch it into a https://www.nerdfonts.com

The worst part is the banks. You have to get lucky to be allowed to use online banking without agreeing to some sucky TOS.

If I run some AI model on my GPU and power my computer via solar power and some batteries, am I actually contributing significantly to GHG emissions?

Like what is the embodied energy of an AI model?

As usual, pundits and scientists confuse what is and what could be with the truth. For example plastic recycling isn’t possible because “right now economics don’t make it profitable”. Meaning capitalism is killing us, not plastics. I suspect the same is true for AI.

Not sure what sapphire means, but here is the article. Just appending records and differential backups would seem to be the way to go.

the new optical disks are claimed to be “highly stable so there are no special storage requirements.” The researchers tout an expected shelf life of 50 to 100 years

I had (naively) hoped that starlink wouldn’t even need a license to operate in a specific country. When their satellites eventually fully communicate between them without ground station it becomes incredibly powerful. Sort of like one of those ancient world wonders. Technology now allows to live and work everywhere in the world or on the ocean in seasteads.

Unfortunately it’s owned by greedy oligarchs and the planned multiple constellations make a kessler syndrome more and more likely.

I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of “Last Words (2020)”.

Well yeah but BluRay is still much more expensive and smaller capacity. Lets hope this new 125TB disk works out