thomastjeffery

What we have failed to explore so far is an internet designed at the expense of copyright/rent-seeking.

Netflix doesn't need hardware attestation for bandwidth. It needs it as a chip to bargain with media corporations (including its own studios). It's been trivial to stream a torrent in 4K from the moment you got a fast enough link to your ISP.

If we design a system to efficiently copy data instead of trying to draw borders around it, then we won't have to have bots copying the same data over and over to make sure every island is thoroughly explored.

In other words: communication requires empathy.

They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.

Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.

National Socialist was a lie at the time. The meaning of socialism has not changed. Labels are assertions, not prescriptions. The inconsistency is truth, not ideology.

Objects are not real, because reality is not objects. Reality is not each of the objects fit together, it's the complete undivided universe. We use objects to tell specific stories about that universe, not the other way around.

We can't tell a story about our sensory experience without first drawing arbitrary distinctions to divide it, and objectifying those distinctions. The very notion of a percussive sound is dependent on our arbitrary differentiation of that pattern as separate from other sound experiences. That boundary isn't discovered, it's optimized. The fact that we can categorize so many different instances of sound as "sharp" isn't because sharpness was already an inherent object to discover: it's because our notion of "sharp" has been optimized to match many instances of a consistent pattern. We eventually use the same word for sharp flavor, because that relative similarity in experience is the implication we are communicating in the first place.

A sharp object will always make a sharp sound. This is an objectively true implication: that same object won't suddenly make a dull sound, because sound is physically shaped by the objects it moves through. The mistake is to assume this objectivity extends to the very definition of those objects. We could just as easily tell a story about a blarp object, where "blarp" means sharp and blue. That boundary is perfectly valid as an object in a story: it's just sub-optimal, because the experience of blue is irrelevant to the experience of sharpness. Every time we compare blarp objects with others, we are wasting effort, carrying the baggage of redundant blueness. We do this all the time, and we don't like it. Language will never be perfectly efficient, because there are too many subjects involved to relate them all precisely; and too much commitment to familiarity to update the language quickly.

The real problem is that we just aren't using package managers. We should be using package managers. Package managers are really really good.

I'm not voluntarily sharing my license plate number. I'm legally required to display it.

All that means is that the ends (and not the means) are the determining factor.

A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.

Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Then tell them about ADHD. The main problem is that most people have no idea what it is, or how effective treatment can be. ADHD is one of the most poorly named and broadly misunderstood conditions ever.

NAT didn't save us from insecure networking. It gave insecure networking an excuse that was just good enough to satisfy the masses.

This is worse for everyone in so many ways:

1. Forwarding ports suddenly makes you insecure, because you already were.

2. You have to fuck with your router config to even do that, and risk breaking something else along the way. Nobody should have to bother, because port forwarding shouldn't exist in the first place.

3. Many ISPs make it difficult or impossible to configure your firewall, let alone reserve a static public IP.

4. It's an eternal problem that isolates itself from any true solution. Any actually good UPnP implementation would just be stuck behind your NAT and firewall.

The entire premise "as long as you can control it" is the core issue, and the fundamental reason why NAT is the original sin. Without NAT, there wouldn't be anything to get control of.

The consequences are so much more significant than people seem to realize.

Because of NAT, hierarchy (centralized servers) is the foundational design pattern of the internet, and anyone who wants any semblance of anarchy (decentralized networks) must use a workaround that is itself hierarchical and costly. We are all interconnected, but only a wealthy few can truly speak fist.

You are confusing collaboration with cooperation.

Most people aren't interested in cooperating. The neat thing about collaboration is that work can be shared without cooperation. Free software is inherently anarchist. Sure, there are several successful cooperative organizations, but they all benefit primarily from the collaboration they do with everyone else, and vice versa.

The problem is that we have fuzzy data and concrete semantics, when what we really want is concrete data and fuzzy semantics.

What we really need is a new system of reason, where each expression implies meaning, and each meaning has implications; but where those implications don't have to be reducible to computable binary logic.

The problem with LLMs is that they are ignorant to their own implications. What follows from a prompt is not any system of reason: it's just a vague sense of familiarity. Even when we have them stumble through the topology of a logical deduction, they can only act out that logic as a vain performance.

Natural language is a system of relative subjects, each with subjective implications relative to the story. So far in computing, we have nothing remotely like that.

Sure, but if you count undo as a partial game over (which is heavily implied), it's better to just be able to see what the word is and move on.

Ironic to see an article lamenting the loss of public utilities from JSTOR.