No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.

Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.

It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.

In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.

Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).

That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.

Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.

It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.

That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.

People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.

It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.

You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?

I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.

Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.

You’ve skipped half or more of what I wrote. Especially about not putting in jail people who committed war crimes in Iraq and about supporting people like Putin against everyone else in the ex-USSR in the 90-s.

I’m not talking about nation building under American control, but killing a million of a country’s population warrants reparations, international courts, official apologies (real ones) …

Currently weakening the Russian military in Ukraine. Do you want to broaden the war?

In 2008, not currently.

It doesn’t seem to be a lot of thought in this particular “US bad” narrative. There are real criticisms to be made of US foreign policy but you’re missing them all by a longshot. Maybe consider that the US isn’t some nation of supermen that is capable of solving all of the world’s problems but it just doesn’t want to. It’s more accurate to say the US isn’t actually capable of solving many of the problems in the world, and tends to make a lot of messes by misunderstanding other countries and it’s own capabilities.

Yes, if you replace what I said with weird imagined things.

It doesn’t take to be a nation of supermen to stop arming Turkey, Israel, Azerbaijan, put sanctions on them and forget they are of the same species.

And it seems to actually be close to “some nation of supermen” when supporting the bad guys. There’s definitely some beef to US’s capabilities when it wants to fuck something up and arm cannibals.

It’s not that hard to not act. The problem with the US is that it does bad things, not that it doesn’t do good things. But if it just can’t play hegemon differently, then it could at least try to clean up sometimes.

I would say election interference still mostly works in the “all the world trying to somehow affect US” way as opposed to “US interfering with some country’s elections”.

Simply because affecting the power balance in the metropoly is much more rewarding.

Russia is a scarecrow.

First, it’s not new and even USSR during fscking Cold War would fund and influence the so-called progressive youth (not what’s called progressive now) and parts of the Democratic Party. I guess that Biden guy stopped being a Soviet asset long before being elected president, but he definitely was at some point.

Second, Russian meddling is not even comparable to Israeli, Turkish, Saudi meddling. The problem is that they seem to agree with each other and often cooperate these years.

Third, it’s not even a big deal, we know that politics involve such meddling. They wouldn’t think the same about the USA if it would show some responsibility. Restore Iraq after fscking it up. Investigate war crimes and give some justice to their victims after that invasion. Protect Georgia against Russia. I guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movements instead), but at least fixing things that wouldn’t be broken without USA seemed logical.

So close, but not there.

OK, you’ll know that I’m right when you somewhat expand your expertise to neighboring areas. Should happen naturally.

Are you a software developer? Or a hardware engineer? EDIT: Or anyone credible in evaluating my nonsense world against yours?

you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it

No you can’t. Simplifying it grossly:

They can’t do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, “there’s no spoon”, “this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it” kind of solutions.

And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer’s time.

We need software developers to write computer programs, because “a general idea” even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.

That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.

You can take your porn collection on a few USB sticks. And games. And movies. And books. And music.

Sanctions are supposed to make life difficult for the people in sanctioned countries so that those people maybe start doing something to the person causing the problems.

Nah. They are supposed to reduce connectivity for everyone except the right people with connections, who deal in shit big enough, like oil, gas etc, but not us serfs and not businessmen who don’t respect their government officials enough to bribe them. This worked especially well in the Iron Curtain times, and it seems there are people nostalgic of that now.

First, spitting into my soup for something other people did is not going to make me more pissed at them (suppose I already was), it’s going to make me more pissed at those spitting into my soup.

Second, knowing that Israel isn’t sanctioned, Turkey isn’t sanctioned, Azerbaijan isn’t sanctioned, but Russia is, not being better, makes it extremely hard to believe that those sanctions are meant to solve problems. Even if I didn’t know how they work.

Third, a country can’t make something a crime outside their jurisdiction.

Nah. Arbitrary shit that doesn’t hurt those who did the crime, but does hurt me, is not repercussions. Neither is it a crime to find tools to solve such problems.

Yes. This also works with epidemics. Die too quickly - less chance to infect others, being one man short makes your community poorer, which means fewer travelers, which also means less chance to infect other communities.

One reason Black Death led to so much witch hunting and jew burning and talk about divine punishment - many people were immune even when exposed to piles of bodies of infected, while those to get sick would die very fast. That’s one way a highly deadly and quickly developing disease can survive, be deadly only to some part of the population. Well, rats and water too.

I think that’s intentional. Nation states and other powers that be have working propaganda mechanisms.

A real AGI is a change most important in the sense of power, not in the sense of economy (because we know how to make new humans and educate them, it wouldn’t be a qualitative change there).

All this AI gaslighting is intended to stall real advancements there.

The Web in some sense was produced in the context of AI research. In general semantic and hypertext systems were. And look what it has done to the world. They may just not want another such cataclysm.

EDIT: Also notice the shift from the hypertext paradigm to the application platform paradigm in the Web.

People were being shown deus ex machina in supposedly sci-fi movies and series for many years.

Only there it was always meant as 1 in a billion event, as a miracle.

Here a lot of people want to streamline miracles, while even one hasn’t been produced yet.

It’s the difference between Tolkien’s dwarves and Disney’s gnomes.

Azeri terrorist state bombed Stepanakert with white phosphorus and napalm with no consequences.

BTW, Russia has already used white phosphorus against civilian targets in this war, if I am not mistaken.

Israel is, of course, using those in Gaza.

I’d say legality has long lost its meaning in international relations. Not that it ever had any in this particular regard.

I’ve read that even not using expansive (those that expand, not those that cost more monies) bullets was not result of any humanism, but of the military logic that a soldier wounded by a conventional bullet stops being a combatant and becomes a logistical burden, while a soldier dead from a gruesome wound just stops being a combatant, possibly helping to motivate his comrades in arms.

As far as I am concerned, Azerbaijan and Turkey are Muslim and Israel is Jewish, so the most harmful terrorists are not Christian.

Islamists have committed a genocide against Yazidis and Assyrians just a few years ago. Islamists are also committing crimes against Christians in a few places in Africa you’ve never heard about.

Christianity, when it’s not European, is a much more humane religion than Islam. Should be the reason why European colonial powers were so eager to rely on Muslims in India and Africa, again.

Hindu terror is a thing. Last time I heard it was against Christians though, just recently. They also have a rather harsh regime in Kashmir, but that’s mirrored on the Pakistani side, so a draw between Hindus and Muslims.

Zionism is not a religion.

If it’s acceptable, then a wildcard ban of undetected protocols and the “bad” ones from among the detected is possible. China-style.

That is, everything is possible.

Sometimes. Though the enemies are arguably Nazis too in the example that came to my head.

Also, it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all

Yes, if banning protocols is acceptable for you.