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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • If we do military comparisons, an air carrier is no good for a country without global logistics in place. A fighter jet is no good for a country all whose possible takeoff sites are under fire control. A big-big naval cannon is no good if it’s not mounted on a ship, limited by terrain and can be just walked around.

    Some weapons give clear advantage to one of the sides, but none to another.

    Maybe these tools are good for building scrapers that can structure unstructured data. Turning Facebook or Reddit into something NNTP-accessable, for example. Or making XMPP and Matrix transports to services that don’t have stable/open APIs, purely using webpages. For returning interoperability.

    They are using generally same UI approaches, modern horrible ones, so one can have a few stages of training, first to recognize which actions are available from the UI and which processes and APIs they invoke, and then train for association of that with a typical NNTP or XMPP or Matrix set. Like - list of contacts, status of a contact, message arrived, send message, upload something. Or for NNTP - list available groups, post something, fetch posts. Associating names with Facebook identifiers. That being divided at least into passing authentication and then the actual service.

    That can be a good thing. Would probably work like shit, like something from the Expanse or even old cyberpunk.






  • No. Everything is still closed and not interoperable.

    I’ve just read about Google Wave.

    I think we need a global low-latency (no waiting an hour for a message to propagate) alternative to Usenet. And there should be two separate layers - unique article (or message) identifiers and the transport (be it lots of news servers exchanging articles as the main layer, or as an auxiliary level users exchanging them p2p with some way to verify an identifier and the fact that it was posted in some specific group by some specific person at some specific time). And cryptographic identities. And cryptographic alternative to DNS inside that - with name-to-identifier records signed and verifiable via a chain to some known name authority, not querying a service.

    An article can contain many things, it can be a hypertext page. It can, maybe, contain some header allowing to build articles into hierarchies with such a naming service providing paths. And navigate those with a browser. So you’d have a system friendly to mobile devices, to privacy, to economy of resources, to preserving information, to indexing and scraping.

    But I think I’ve missed something technical preventing this from being created in my thoughts.


  • There’s a particular kind of autistic people which is worse.

    My dad who behaved as a normal person, even loved to disprove anti-scientific claims and expose freakery and all that, except he had that inferiority complex and thought foreigners exist to give him the big child candy and say absolute truths, and he also thought autism is like demon possession. I mean, people usually are not who they pretend to be, but he seemed to really like discussing interesting mathematical problems at some point, I was a kid and he didn’t try well enough to explain what he was talking about, though. But I expected him at least to talk to me first in such a situation.

    So a bad person with a very foreign second name (not really, just the real second name is kinda famous, I suppose, the events also happened about some time after I called famous bearers of that second name bitches) said to him a few kind words, maybe even literally gave him candy, told him he’s very smart and his family is abusing him when, eh, criticizing his intelligence, and also told him I’m autistic (he didn’t even try actually learning what that is, just was terribly afraid of it and certain he’s not), and that moron started running around secretly “curing” me, yelling every morning probably to scare away the possessing demon or whatever, trying to force me eat a lot of weird food, and never directly talking to me. I hope he wasn’t “talking to me” via a fortuneteller or a medium. Fucking idiot.

    Or my old friend who again ignored me, I’m sure it’s for some occult reason too. He’d routinely stuff bullshit names into roleplaying and worldbuilding from history freakery where Aryans built Egyptian pyramids a century between a nuclear war after which 16 century Europe emerged, or something like that. Doing that covertly, not telling where did he take that crap from. Every time someone would discuss actual analogies from actual history, looking suppressed-hostile and trying to stuff something again into the conversation.

    Both felt like someone covertly putting pieces of shit into your meal and being certain they are right so everything is fine.

    OK. This was completely offtopic, but at the same time maybe not.






  • They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?

    There’s a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.

    A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they’d download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.

    TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.

    The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn’t exist outside of them.

    And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn’t bother.


  • An analogy:

    Stalin took over USSR in 20s by pressuring specific councils (“soviets”), because a council could vote to recall its representative to a council of next level any time, and that would cause a chain reaction for that council and so on. So every representative of the upper level could be removed by pressuring\persuading only the initial council they were delegated from, and one wouldn’t have to wait for any election or such. Eventually one could get a jackpot combination by removing unpleasant representatives through pressure.

    So with email, changing mail servers is not such a good solution, because one could still pressure a registry to unregister the domain name, a hoster to stop hosting it, an ISP to do something else …

    Maybe cryptographic identities should be used for users and addresses and even name registries (using hex strings as addresses is inconvenient, I can’t even remember phone numbers), while storage and service should be separated from that. Like in NOSTR.