That's not how I meant it when 10 years ago talking about regulations being a bad thing.

I meant starting with copyright =\

"AI tool".

I live in Russia and I'm pissed that they are making its gang in power look almost competent in comparison.

I would say the future is in pooling resources.

Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there's a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

But I'm still thinking how can that even work. What I'm dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a "store" request and then just take it offline), or it won't work.

And global cryptographic identities.

Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.

Honestly even in the late 90s it was going down. I don't think DEC or Amiga or something else cool you can remember have anything to do with the Silicon Valley.

After the original Intel and other hardware things fame, it's a place that mostly collected parasites living off the dotcom bubble and then profanation and oligopolization of tech. The least important part - the companies making suddenly popular user applications and websites. Their main effect was negative - they reduced diversity, competition and redundancy in that.

In any case ... "AI startups".

I'm so morally prepared to dance when that bubble finally bursts. A lot of today's rattling of sabers depends on the promise of AI workers, AI drones, AI everything so that a crime would involve only a few real humans.

Not really, there's an OR logical element present in our world.

Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible.

And the "80%" and "20%" solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators).

Nobody does that because the "80% solution" producer wants to capture you, they don't want alternatives, they want power, and it's a honeypot.

It's up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn't it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it's much more important.

As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings ... you get the idea.

Technology is developed by people to fulfill their goals, more interest - more power - more developed technology.

Hence big tech is where it is, and meshnets-p2p-cipherpunk is where it is.

SpaceX does launches and Starlink does satellite internet.

I think all the Musk hate here misses that moment - SpaceX does what it's intended to do which is amazingly cool all by itself, Tesla made electric cars more popular, and Starlink made satellite internet more popular.

These are good.

Musk yes, but there are quite a few Ukrainian servicemen not happy, I think.

Authority is the right word, nothing in this is about actual products or traditional economic value.

It's feudal (or crook) impression economy. That "AI" is liked by people who can afford to continuously waste money on it. Such schedules are liked by the same people. They are the "Silicon Valley elite" or whatever.

I've read once a description by Russia's ambassador to Persia during Qajars how this historically worked.

So - Qajar Persian court, they've received, say, 2 (I don't remember, maybe 6) modern (for that moment) Russian cannons as a gift. What do they do with the cannons? The cannons stay with the court and are shot for fun at an empty ground with no aim, while the whole court and the monarch moan "ja-a-a-n" with every shot.

It's the same. The oligopolization of tech has made these people so much money and connections with other such people who have money, that they don't care about results at all. It's all shared impressions of what they "already have". They don't have to "run to stay on the same place". They don't have to compete - they collectively own search, social media, what we use instead of pen and paper, everything.

Or a more traditional example (I might have gotten the years wrong, but I think the idea doesn't suffer) - a bunch of knights in XV-century tournament armor are not a very good army compared to cuirassed musketeers with a wagenburg and actual discipline, but the societies are built the way that those real soldiers are very rare, expensive and present only in select important areas during real honest-to-god war. While on their tournament the gentry may pretend it's still XII century and they are competing in useful things.

Oh. I want a droideka bodyguard.

I don't believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.

It's not about for-profit or not for-profit, it's about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.

Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.

So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.

And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into "money buys right", because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.

The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It's not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It's an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I'm pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.

One can even say that this is a market dynamic.

So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.

The problem is

1. in a too complex set of laws (honestly I'd suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),

2. in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,

3. in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,

4. in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,

5. in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,

6. in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,

7. in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.

So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.

LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.

Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn't fine is the idea of mining.

And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.

But what's important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can't take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.

But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform's decision to do a kind of business?

That's where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

No fucking way, but mah direct democracy ...

So. Switzerland doesn't really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense. It's still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise. There are many cases where the "direct" part is optional and requires interested people to assemble signatures yadda-yadda. Not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal. That aside, its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing. Which means that for some issues it will always drift shitward.

It also has separation of 3 kinds of government by degree of locality, but not separation of the "an entity ensuring food safety can't regulate telecommunications" or "an entity regulating police labor safety can't regulate riot police acceptable action" kinds.

(Which is why I usually refer to my preference for a kind of "direct democracy" as a revised one-level Soviet system with mandatory rotation, plenty of places and sortition to state worker roles, despite that not having very good connotations.)