Oh, so NOSTR is not hated here anymore. Good Anakin good.

Seriously, an amazingly successful platform.

People always want to try subtler and subtler tech, and NOSTR’s dumb architecture with relays is something that could only be conceived by people not that fond of tech brilliance. And that’s good and right! And if those people are cryptobros, then so be it, they found the right way and this is what matters.

They had a task one can’t solve with classic P2P, because mobile devices and energy consumption and uptime. They solved it the old-fashioned way which is still right, kinda like Usenet, except reducing news servers to asynchronous relays.

NOSTR already has some standard extensions for moderated communities, I’m just not sure if there are any clients supporting that.

People disclose more when they think they are safe. Your typical Windows user from year 2009 with their collection of porn banners and botnet nodes would have their private info safer than a new Linux user of the same time. Because the Linux guy would believe he’s free now.

I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes. Or every schoolboy using “but I’ll be able to examine the code” in arguments. Or “but the sources are open” on the subject of OS security even by literate people, while how many people have looked at those sources? If just 3-4 times that amount of people look at Windows components’ disassembly with the same effort, they’ll probably have the same effect on security, one can conceal backdoors in source code well enough. There are so many things one can remember, but those were nice times.

Same with “security” in the Internet. We were using ICQ and everyone knew one can spy on those messages, we were using HTTP and POP and IMAP without encryption and everyone knew one can spy on these too, but we were fine - we adjusted our behavior for that knowledge and used the Web as it should be used.

And what’s the funniest, this “insecure” Internet was more secure, because people acted on the right premises and formed behaviors that made it secure. When you know something is unprotected and can’t be protected, you are not completely taken by surprise if it’s lost.

Now teenage girls use centralized services as they would use private diaries, where an unclearly defined group of people can see the content of those. Many of them think it’s safe because that’s called “private messages” and they “didn’t give access” on some webpage of that service, or even just because there’s a lock sign in the browser address line.

People think they have been given magic that obeys them, magic is different from tech in not requiring understanding to obey. There’s, obviously, no magic, only things fully understood obey their owners, and almost nobody fully understands even door locks.

So - I think the new important kind of social advertising is teaching people to not trust security. Security is like a war victory, it’s not guaranteed and never certain enough to rely upon it. No system based on implication of functional security must be used.

We must use only openly unreliable systems.

That also applies to home appliances (intended) and all kinds of complex devices. When those came with schematics and detailed maintenance manuals, people dreamed of something not requiring these, and as we can see, that something is not better and doesn’t take less effort when breaks.

Unreliability is freedom, and reliance is slavery. But at the same time unreliable systems are better than no systems. Unreliable systems are the compromise between luddism and degenerate civilization.

You shouldn’t worry about this. You should laugh more at sovcits, second amendment fanboys, militia enthusiasts, gun nuts, and even (real and not “conservative right liberal using the word cause it’s less common”) libertarians. Because allowing some jerks to decide these things for you is fine, right? We’ll vote for someone better and they’ll make more laws, we don’t need fallbacks and overrides to remove cancerous laws by force.

I think I like the “fallbacks and overrides” pair, because it complements the “checks and balances” one. Directly opposite, but with the same spirit. Something of Tao Te Ching in it.

other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?

I’m not bashing it, just kinda full of some things of its legacy.

I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all

Too bad.

Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad?

No, in the way Soviet propaganda presented Soviet citizens its place in the civilized part of history. Which ideas we follow, which we don’t, what is civilization and what is barbarism. Community and ascetism were kinda there, and it was thoroughly militarized and in theory prepared for a supposed full mobilization all the time, except nothing would really work. Not much more than that.

Soviet propaganda was actually very keen on that idea of civilization, antique references all over the place when you read anything touching philosophy from approved things. And the descent to barbarism would be what the “imperialist” or “capitalist” world was doing.

At the same time, due to Soviet economy’s limitations, there was also promotion of ascetism as something morally superior, say, they have all those nice things and rock-n-roll, while we have well-read people and value the spiritual above the material. That part is not new, of course, it can be found in German and Austrian stuff before WWI and in every totalitarian regime around.

I think some of the people creating that aesthetic were actually sincere, which is hard to imagine now, but touching it you feel that. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a painful one.

What does this have to do with Spartans specifically? I don’t know, but the structure of the Soviet society for me looks like something deliberately imagined after a romanticized version of Lycurgus’ Sparta, except done by crooked mind and crooked hands. Which would match the demographic of “old Bolsheviks” and other revolutionaries of early XX century, who were mostly students (mostly dropouts too) of social sciences.

Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy.

USSR was the same except it made trash aristocracy. There was one difference, the CC CPSU really was a college, Brezhnev couldn’t make decisions all alone, for example. But, well, Sparta was sort of a college on top too, if I remember correctly.

See those movies and stories of USSR’s public culture of the 30s-50s - that pompous imperial pretense, those main heroes with steel scornful faces looking down at subservient or immoral or not to be trusted helpers. Not everything, but there is a feel.

Like “Fourth height” - unironically a movie of a girl who flew airplanes in her teens, in USSR, as sport, then became an actress, and then a medic on a frontline and killed there. That’s even less normal social level in the USSR than, say, in England. But such things were given as a something normal, there are those people rightfully better in our just socialist society.

Again, that’s Stalin’s time.

I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.

You do realize all the official parts of Soviet art were about ideology and what didn’t impede it? And heavy industries were built around military goals. Most of Soviet industries existed in peacetime just so it would be easier to convert them in case of war, and what they were producing in peacetime was secondary.

Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.

They were actually subsidized (or one can say paid as mercenaries) by other cities\rulers often. They were apparently not too shit at war for that, but certainly not qualitatively better than everyone else.

The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.”

Nah, it even officially was world revolution first, military for that, industries for that, communism later. Stalin retconned it into socialism in one country, but industries still for war, because it fit him better. After him Soviet ideology was retconned into socialist friendship of peoples, unification of humanity and industries to achieve that and communism.

in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.

Usually hateful parts are done “because we can” and are not the main reason.

I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.

For a couple of years, until that was made illegal and a mental illness, together with banning abortions and other progressive socialist future-aimed policies.

Basically a group of Marxist revolutionaries captured power in a big enough country, and their intention was to build a new society, a new world order, without capitalism as they saw it, and by means they could somehow devise.

So - I’m too dumb to expand well on this, but see the (formally dead since late 20s) concept of a soviet (a council) in the initial intended system. Citizens would both decide the fate of their polity and be inseparable from a collective, so soviet system is very simple - an atomic unit (a house, a factory line) elects their representative, on the next level (a factory or a street, for example) such representatives elect ones for the next level (a district or a town), and so on. A polity can retract their representative any time, they just need to vote on it. That works for all levels, so if the new representative decides to retract polity’s vote for the level after it, there’s a new vote, and a chain effect is possible of removing the highest representatives.

This would seem OK and fine for you, but in fact it means that a lower polity can be pressed\intimidated\deceived into doing what I described any time, and so on. Which is why during Stalin’s ascent to unchallenged power he didn’t even break that system, just put a little bit of social pressure more via speeches than via threats.

So - this mandatory grouping seems to me in idea similar.

One can see some similarity between Soviet education not system, but rather pipeline, and the age cohorts in Sparta, say, toddlers were “consecrated” or “accepted” into “oktyabryata”, in 12 (if I remember correctly), into “pioneers”, schools and universities and technicums all had that strong grouping in activities, say, schoolchildren were sent in groups by age to mandatory competitions and warlike games (“Zarnitsa”, BTW, actually a good thing, teaches one orientation, coordination of movements of large groups of people, use of radio for communication and detecting communications of others, - all useful), students were sent in large groups to construction sites or harvests to work, etc. There were both rituals and actual mechanisms similar.

OK, I guess I’m just trying to find something

US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.

I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.

The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.

Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.

will preach to them about Spartan values or something

Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.

But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.

Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.

USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.

Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.

Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.

and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot

Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.

The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.

Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.

The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…

That’s a wrong hope in any case.

That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system’s evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.

There should be a porn movie with that headline

Not solving any of the stated goals at the same time.

It’s a diversion. Its purpose is to divert resources and attention from any real progress in computing.

Dunno, the part about generative music (not like LLMs) I’ve tried, I think if I spent a few more years of weekly migraines on that, I’d become better.

I won’t read the article now, but

arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance

this is bullshit, a categorical statement.

There are good processes and there are bad processes. Good processes are usually functional for people of (sensibly) different mindsets and mental conditions. Bad processes are usually “one size fits all” in one way or another.

There are things a team can’t have, and there are things a talented individual can’t have.

There’s also experience that covers holes one can’t plan for, yep.

Zaybatsu. Japan lives in the 00s since the 80s, as they say. Since 1880s.

Yes, surely people capable of denying someone popular are soft pussies. It’s the opposite, they impose their will upon the party. Evil, not pussies.

I take it he hasn’t heard about “hiding things in the open”.

That would be, for example, using a constant of some near year in “end time” column meaning unfinished action.

Or just making some part that will inevitably have to be changed - “write-only”, as in unreadable. Or making documentation of what he did bad enough in some necessary places that people would have to ask him.

So many variants, and such obvious stupidity.

You generally won’t understand another person (and adversary especially) if you don’t see how their actions perfectly make sense for them, and without conspiracies.

So - there is one matching variant, that Musk sincerely hates bureaucratic kinds of power, but not proprietary kinds of power. Replacing a bureaucrat with (some imagined good) AI in another assumption would be replacing a mediocre human with inherent lust for power with an unreliable automaton, but without lust for power. The good part here is that humans are unreliable too and working bureaucracies compensate for that.

The bad part is that for every failure a person should be responsible proportionally to their input. I’m not sure they’ll do that, or I’m sure they won’t.

Does it flag “Notmario”?

I suppose they can offload a lot of them into the ocean or something like that. But still too fast.