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7 days agoDonate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.
baltakatei
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: [email protected]
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
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Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth
Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics’s consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.
from Chapter 1
If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses.
But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants.
Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy.
If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so.
Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world.
Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance.
Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.
These facts are related.
Relevant excerpt from part 11 of Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:
Artificial Inanity
Note: Reticulum=Internet, syndev=computer, crap~=spam
“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.
“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.
“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.
“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”
“The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.
“Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”
“So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?”
“Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”
4·19 days agoAudioAnchor + Syncthing for Android via F-Droid has been my mobile audiobook app stack. Takes some setting up and concatenating audiobook mp3s into mkv’s for convenience, but I haven’t had to touch it since… 2020?
34·19 days agoFiling this under “Closeted conservative so ashamed of their kink that, instead of discussing their feelings with a therapist, psychiatrist, or even a trusted friend, believe everyone must share their taboo thoughts and therefore be preëmptively punished to stamp out the contagion since the only honorable alternative is undergoing apoptosis like some malfunctioning cell”.
I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.
It seems that that joke situation is upon us.
Enforcing anti-trust laws is low-hanging fruit. Then, Article 5 the Constitution to explicitly require civil law (law by legislation) over common law (law by precedent); it’s slower, but France and Germany get by.
Historically, I think with queer/unusual behavior were simply exiled/forced into suicide if they couldn’t mask. I’m glad I live in a part of the US that isn’t a monoculture as political originalists would have it revert to. Witchburning and lynchings are for losers.
Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.
Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.
Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.
A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.
He’d sooner take the oligarch route and privatize the FAA, fill it with his own loyalists, then give his flights priority wherever he goes, including whatever private aviation business (e.g. FedEx clone) he wants to push.
2·1 month agoEven if it is in jest, that’s a block.
It’s not a death threat if you’re supporting their death wish.
Fast lane to parasite town.
It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).
There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.
Hard to execute your Machiavellian overnight decapitation conquest when so many people believe in the checks and balances designed to inhibit takeover by a King.
The relevant section of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) that Trump, despite having four years to have his loyalists prepare a government takeover, has failed to do over the past few weeks:
… on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be enabled by their discontinuance to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits. Whosoever, either through timidity or from following bad counsels, adopts a contrary course, must keep the sword always drawn, and can put no trust in his subjects, who suffering from continued and constantly renewed severities, will never yield him their confidence. Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, so that they may be more fully relished.
“Trust the Fungus.” –Luigi
Americans have been so fat and happy that they’re literally sick. They need a few more LA fires and pandemics to wake up from the intellectual coma they’re in.
Come and get me.
It only takes one person to make 1 cubic meter of black hole to destroy the biosphere by ripping Earth into an acretion disc.