Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 26

In his natural state, man is a slave to his needs and must toil to satisfy them. True liberty is to be free of toil, but toil can not be avoided, and if one man is free of it, another man must do it in his place.

Greatness is conceived in the minds of the few, but born of the toil of the many.

If the few cannot compel the many to toil for them, greatness is no longer possible, and there is no civilisation.

Liberty is and always has been the prerogative of the ruling class.

— Me

In his natural state, man is a slave to his needs and must toil to satisfy them. True liberty is to be free of toil, but toil can not be avoided, and if one man is free of it, another man must do it in his place.

Greatness is conceived in the minds of the few, but born of the toil of the many.

If the few cannot compel the many to toil for them, greatness is no longer possible, and there is no civilisation.

Liberty is and always has been the prerogative of the ruling class.

In societies where everyone did have the equivalent of cheese puffs and Netflix, such as the Patrician class of ancient Rome, they needed slaves to do the actual work. That was their version of gathering men and making them work in order to actually accomplish things. Every civilisation has some means of making the many do the bidding of the few. Societies that lack such means of controlling people are usually not developed at all, and are typically tribes, not civilisations.

Let me pick what I just said apart:

If you want to accomplish something larger than yourself, you're going to need assistance. Most people aren't going to be interested, so you'll need to bribe them. They'd rather be doing something else, but they need your money, so they're stuck working for you.

If you gave everyone cheese puffs and Netflix, and didn't force them work, the vast majority wouldn't lift a finger.

Large projects would rarely happen. Who'd bother to do the work? No one.

To nurture a man, natural resources must unite. To nurture greatness, men must unite.

One man's quest for greatness is another man's grievous toil.

Ergo, there is no greatness without misery.

(This isn't a quote. I'm stating these things.)

To nurture a man, natural resources must unite. To nurture greatness, men must unite.

One man's quest for greatness is another man's grievous toil.

Ergo, there is no greatness without misery.

@bithive Such a new system shouldn't harbour illusions about being a perfect fit for the whole world, because it can never be. We just need a system that nurtures our most cherished virtues and takes into account what we've learned about mass psychology in the past 300 years or so.

@bithive The fundamental idea is flawed. Know how Facebook basically goes bankrupt if you remove the bad bits? I think democracy is like that.

We already know it's based on deception (all politicians lie), that it doesn't fix anything if you introduce it to dysfunctional states (see Africa, South America), and that countries can prosper without it (see China).

Something better needs to replace it. I don't know what, except that it shouldn't be easily fooled or derailed.

If democracy relies on disseminating a particular narrative to the population through mass media, and this narrative is easily subverted by social media propaganda, doesn't that just mean that democracy has a vulnerability?

When the MD5 hashing algorithm was discovered to be flawed, we didn't sweep it under the carpet while playing whack-a-mole with the hackers. We replaced it with something that (to our best knowledge) wasn't flawed.

When the Gutenberg press was introduced, the establishment were up in arms about it, because they could no longer control the flow of information.

When social media was introduced, the establishment were up in arms about it, because they could no longer control the flow of information.

When the establishment says that these new political movements are dangerous and blame the Internet for their rise, aren't they a bit like the Medieval establishment complaining about the printing press?

@clacke @badrihippo @njoseph No concerted effort was ever made to fix it, and people want to send confidential email, so how do you make that easy to do without having to convince the entire Internet of your new idea? Well...

@clacke @badrihippo @njoseph But... This is happening because the Internet community has failed spectacularly in making encrypted email accessible.

You can encrypt an email, but no mechanism was ever devised for handling the public keys of email accounts.

If you're an email client wanting to deliver an email to an account, how do you get the public key of the user you want to send email to?

The only way of doing that is that they email you the key and tell you how to use it.

@clacke @badrihippo @njoseph Ooh, this basically breaks email...

@yogthos https://xkcd.com/2021/

@wistahe If you could state your goal in terms of what a constellation of systems should accomplish, what's left for the compiler to do is figure out the glue code.

@wistahe Perhaps the this discomfort stems from the very fact that it straddles the 4th quadrant. Integration between systems is what most software actually does.

@wistahe Another thing that occurs to me about this is my constant bother with the fact that crossing the boundary between SQL databases and programs is so clumsy and unnatural. They tried to "fix" that problem with NoSQL databases, but that turned out to be a bad idea. What interests me is that this lies at the exact intersection that the missing 4th quadrant does.

@wistahe I hadn't thought of it in terms of quadrants before, but the idea of giving a computer a goal and skipping the "how" has been on my mind before.

What surprises me is that only this 4th quadrant would require an AI but the 3 others don't. We have "execute mechanism" languages like C and "evaluate consequent" languages like SQL, yet somehow, "execute consequent" requires an AI.

@wistahe 2. When we write tests, we are essentially describing our goals. It's just that without a 4th quadrant language, we are also forced to describe how to get there.