One can elect a small group which will and will sign its connection to something intermediate. Then only they will.

Yes, people grew with subconscious feeling that cautionary tales of the old science fiction are the way to real power. A bit similar to ex-Soviet people being subconsciously attracted to German Nazi symbolism.

Evil is usually shown as strong, and strength is what we need IRL, to make a successful business, to fix a decaying nation, to give a depressed society something to be enthusiastic about.

They think there should be some future, looking, eh, futuristic.

The most futuristic things are those that look and function in a practical way and change people’s lives for the better. We’ve had the brilliance and entertainment of 90s and early 00s computing, then it became worse. So they have to promise something.

BTW, in architecture brutalism is coming back into fashion (in discussions and not in the real construction), perhaps we will see a similar movement for computing at some point - for simplification and egalitarianism.

So why would they accept said AI-generated applicants?

If we are making a global system, then confirmation using some nation’s ID can be done, with removing fakes found out later. Like with IRL nation states. Or “bring a friend and be responsible if they are a fake”. Or both at the same time.

How do you use Sybil attack for a system where the initial creator signs the initial voters, and then they collectively sign elections and acceptance of new members and all such stuff?

Doesn’t seem to be a problem for a system with authorized voters.

I suppose “proposal” here means proposal to some government, not to Google, and then the question is whether it’s going to be like Russia’s “Vkusno i Tochka” in place of McDonalds. Because, ahem, maintaining Chrome is not that easy.

With the USA I’d rather expect it to be called Maxest or Maxer

It’s literally making screenshots and recording sounds.

What’s funny is that for enormous big systems with network effects we are trying to use mechanisms intended for smaller businesses, like a hot dog kiosk.

IRL we have a thing for those, it’s called democracy.

In the Internet it’s either anarchy or monarchy, sometimes bureaucratic dictatorship, but in that area even Soviet-style collegial rule is something not yet present.

I’m recently read that McPherson article about Unix and racism, and how our whole perception of correct computing (modularity, encapsulation, object-orientation, all the KISS philosophy even) is based on that time’s changes in the society and reaction to those. I mean, real world is continuous and you can quantize it into discrete elements in many ways. Some unfit for your task. All unfit for some task.

So - first, I like the Usenet model.

Second, cryptography is good.

Third, cryptographic ownership of a limited resource is … fine, blockchains are maybe not so stupid. But not really necessary, because one can choose between a few versions of the same article retrieved, based on web of trust or whatever else. No need to have only one right version.

Fourth, we already have a way to turn sequence of interdependent actions into state information, it’s called a filesystem.

Fifth, Unix with its hierarchies is really not the only thing in existence, there’s BTRON, and even BeOS had a tagged filesystem.

Sixth, interop and transparency are possible with cryptography.

Seventh, all these also apply to a hypothetical service over global network.

Eighth, of course, is that the global network doesn’t have to be globally visible\addressable to operate globally for spreading data, so even the Internet itself is not as much needed as the actual connectivity over which those change messages will propagate where needed and synchronize.

Ninth, for Wikipedia you don’t need as much storage as for, say, Internet Archive.

And tenth - with all these one can make a Wikipedia-like decentralized system with democratic government, based on rather primitive principles, other than, of course, cryptography involved.

(Yes, Briar impressed me.)

EDIT: Oh, about democracy - I mean technical democracy. That an event (making any change) weren’t valid if not processed correctly, by people eligible for signing it, for example, and they are made eligible by a signed appointment, and those signing it are made eligible by a democratic process (signed by majority of some body, signed in turn). That’s that blockchain democracy people dreamed at some point. Maybe that’s not a scam. Just haven’t been done yet.

Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it’s a bubble and it’ll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company’s performance, so no need even to know.

Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet’s major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.

Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn’t risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.

And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.

Just a conspiracy theory, don’t treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.

An electrician’s work or a plumber’s work are also complex. Or carpenter’s.

Come on. This is not about complex theory being used, this is about messed up instruments, where layers upon layers of bullshit are laid to deliver upon hype.

People writing compilers and operating systems and cryptography libraries are those who need real education. People who make websites or Android apps on the framework of the day - need knowledge that is a thing in itself with no fundamental value.

Yes, Ayn Rand IS a Libertarian,

She didn’t call herself a libertarian and explicitly said she isn’t, libertarians don’t call her a libertarian and explicitly say she isn’t, only people not knowing what the hell they are talking about call her a libertarian.

There’s absolutely no reason to call her a libertarian. No matter how you’d want that to accuse libertarianism of whatever bad.

It’s actually funny, there is a bunch of ideologies, all different, and like all of them not mainstream and not left are bunched by idiots under libertarianism just like this. Rand isn’t libertarian (not even in history of her beliefs), Curtis Yarvin isn’t libertarian (despite history of his beliefs), Silicon Valley bros aren’t libertarian (despite them using the word sometimes to the confusion of everyone), and neither are Zelensky and Milei (I mean, there is some awareness of libertarianism in his approahes).

I find it interesting, so many proponents of Libertarianism don’t realize that the limits we put on these things they want to exist to stop people from creating neo-feudal fiefdoms.

Bullshit. You might also want to think who’s “we” and what externalia does giving that “we” an ability to “put limits on these things” possess.

If a government is too weak to stop large scale organized violence you get warlords, of some form, in the modern case it’s whoever has the most wealth to found the largest private army.

A government is large scale organized violence and warlords.

But hey, your not too far off the mark with the whole Nazi bit, after all the word Privatize was invented to describe what the Nazis did with state property.

That claim would require sources, I doubt you have any.

To a psychiatrist. Anyway, maybe they were right and it’s really just ASD+BAD.

but they’ve also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android.

Symbian and Maemo were better.

Also Nokia was the only non-US company of these.

I remember that those were used for games like Travian (displaying time and resources), dynamic content (like blasting music on a webpage) and web chat (that’s what I blame the most, because it was in demand).

Well, they didn’t do that, but I can imagine another “standard and convenient” way could have been taken to add realtime notifications to a webpage - a set of tags for displaying messages of an IRC channel, sending a message to an IRC channel, and so on, with maybe associating actions (going to an URL? or maybe updating part of DOM, but without full agility of JS, just add/remove/replace tag by id) with events. Like refreshing a page on a message in the channel, but no more frequent than N seconds.

Combined with iframes (I’ll admit I consider iframes a good thing, burn me at the stake), this could give you a pretty dynamic experience.

IRC is, of course, not secure, but maybe if such functionality were present and if it became popular, IRC over SSL would become normal earlier too.

Or maybe something like WS could have been standardized far earlier. For pushing events to client.

I agree about F5, but the effect of realtime changes was psychologically very strong.

So coding trade schools need to be created.

It’s not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.

Today’s programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.

In USSR there was a program of “programming being the second literacy”, with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).

BTW, Soviet trade schools (“primary technical school” that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn’t considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.

Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of “we can live like this no longer”, and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn’t see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.

The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.

Again that thing with union pressure and outsourcing, the latter exists because the former in practice doesn’t.

Everything would work better with unions. Unions-unions-unions.

Socialism was intended as a solution to a real problem. Some its parts turned out to be deadly poison, but that’s about those making immobile hierarchies and using force. Unions and associations and artels, - all these are a system of tools solving some problems, and the best part about them is that they are not hurting market mechanisms, just adding better response times and organization to their sides.

When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you’d be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.

So here I won’t agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn’t be shit at their jobs.

Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.

I wanted to become a dev 12 years ago, when it was still cool.

Needless to say that I haven’t, even if doctors I talked to refused to diagnose me with ADHD, my ASD and BAD and anxiety from many things kinda make it not a very good direction.

So - now I could probably become a dev, with the experience gained. But it’s really not the time when this is a good choice LOL.

In the 90s “web” was about knowing FTP, HTTP and HTML. Should have stayed this way. Scripts in browsers were a mistake.

I take it there are not going to be many autistic new devs in the coming decades over there, with such requirements.