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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • And not the cartoonish stupidity said MMO is.

    I also just read all the development issues about the SWKOTOR remake.

    Frankly the reason I’d want KotOR III is because of the plot and the music and the rest of what makes a game from non-technical point of view. What engine they’ll use, what combat system, all that is unimportant.

    And they could call it something else. I just want Onderon, wandering Jedi, Sith magic, tombs and artifacts, and that feeling that there’s only your soul and the universe.





  • Everybody does ; when all voices get equal publicity, there is evolution. When voices that get publicity do so by being put in spotlight by someone looking after their own interest, that evolution stops working.

    My opinion is that centralized search engines and centralized social media and in general centralized services must die. I don’t know how we are going to do it, but they are fucking the humanity up big time, not even what Mr Hitler and his friends did (despite killing a lot of people, that failed to become mainstream and some kind of immunity emerged), but more like rolling back 200+ years of development of civic nations.


  • “Almost real time” is not what I’d call necessary.

    Weighting results - I’d expect user feedback (good result, bad result, combined with keywords from the request) would be good enough. Similar to ed2k for files’ reputation.

    The index is going to be big, yes. But if we want a p2p system with split storage and computation, something between Freenet and Ceph, may be doable.

    A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.

    With some kind of such a p2p system I can imagine the overhead to be like 10 or maybe 100 times Google. But not what you said.


  • I’m just thinking - 12 years ago there was a lot of talk of politicians and big corpo chiefs being replaceable with a shell script. As both a joke and an argument in favor of something requiring change.

    One can say it was saying that these people are not needed - engineers can build their replacements.

    In some sense AI is politicians and big bosses trying to build a replacement for engineers, using means available to these people.

    Maybe they noticed, got pissed and are trying to enact revenge. Sort of a domain area war.


  • Yep. In cryptography there was a moment when cryptographers realized that the key must be secret, the message should be secret, but the rest of the system can not be secret. For the social purpose of refining said system. EDIT: And that these must be separate entities.

    These guys basically use lots of data instead of algorithms. Like buying something with oil money instead of money made on construction.

    I just want to see the moment when it all bursts. I’ll be so gleeful. I’ll go and buy an IPA and will laugh in every place in the Internet I’ll see this discussed.




  • For the same reason it became more popular than other search engines in 00s. Those would give honest search results, Google would have various kinds of complex foolery approaching ML to give people what they wanted quicker.

    One can say their corporate culture shows signs of overfitting for that situation. And not just theirs. In general those attempts to make products more competitive with even more complex foolery outside of the main functionality - are that.

    Except when products are simply less usable for said main functionality, people use them less even if they don’t consciously realize that.

    Also - what is Google in essence? It’s saying that some computing thing is too smart for you to run it at home or self-host it. It can only be done by the very smart and important people in companies with trillions in capitalization. And because you can’t, you are by some cultural taboo forbidden, to run it at home or self-host it, they get to manipulate results to make you give money to the people partnering with them.

    We all know there’s nothing fundamentally or practically impossible in making a search engine. If we don’t have to cache pages, it’s actually easy.

    The issue is in the service requirements. What the Internet needs is a technically transparent p2p market of services. Where storage and computing power can be transparently donated (or sold) just like in some countries you can sell power to the electric grid.

    OK, I’ve described the magic wand. That’s the strategy. Tactics is for someone actually capable of conceiving the thing. LOL


  • Owch, I should start a blog. My chain of thought went from this to meshnets and presumption of innocence, and in the dispersed intersections of these to communications control and totalitarianism, and there I wrote some kind of socio-political rant (again) for a fiction book or movie.

    I can’t erase that much text, so it’s under a spoiler tag.

    spoiler

    We live in a pretty usual time. We grew up in an unusual time, though, fueled by anti-colonialism, WWII experience and Cold War, and then some optimism over its end. When some kind of justice could really be had in the West and even the second world.

    Soviet dissidents would use Soviet laws in Soviet courts against the Soviet system with their defenders honestly working for that goal, and the only way the system was able to confidently close them was by inventing a non-existent kind of schizophrenia and then forcibly putting them into mental institutions.

    One can say those formerly privileged parts of the world are turning into some kind of Turkey as shown in Midnight Express, and hopefully the third world is moving in a different direction.

    When I was 12+, I would talk pretentiously and vaguely how all this won’t last and we are seeing the last decade of it in any notable form (while in fact it was dying when I was a baby), and that the solutions are in decentralization and preparation for underground communication and asymmetric warfare, keeping in mind that the enemy won’t be using anything conventional or predictable either.

    I think this is symmetric to why we are seeing such decay - because for information people have lost understanding that you should always read between the lines, and for justice people have lost understanding that it can never be had by the law without spending blood, sweat and tears, and that this is not end of history and neither information nor justice are something we can reliably have in any matter in any moment.

    So that advice is simply about being more humane, rejecting absolutes and burning idols, and knowing there’ll always be a situation where you are morally right, but the whole world, the law, the opinions, the public morale and the balance of power - they will all be against you and you should still fight and shouldn’t accept it. And also that civilization is similar to Ouroboros eating its tail - you have to ruin some parts for it to live, and those parts don’t want to be ruined and have that supported by laws and popular opinions ; you have to be destructive.

    The culture of resistance. Something old Star Wars EU had (literally, in the WEG guidelines from 1994 PDF I have, comparing the Empire to the “civilized world” and saying that Empire’s civilians generally don’t feel any different and don’t know about Empire’s atrocities, unless they are personally affected).









  • Ayn Rand was not libertarian. She herself said that many times. And as a libertarian - we don’t want her.

    Anyway, tired of that idea of libertarians as conservatives small enough to kick.

    Bailing out big companies is not libertarian. Considering them above the law isn’t that, too. While Ayn Rand was fine with both and kinda thought that there are better and worse people, more and less useful, and the more useful must be catered for, bending laws included. She was basically an inverted bolshevik, where for those guys all economical problems could be solved having one unchecked state-corporation with instead of many, for her all problems could be solved with many unchecked corporations.

    Also calling USA before and during depression a completely free economy would be kinda insincere. It’s also not libertarian to shoot at strikers.