Notices by Caleb James DeLisle (cjd@mastodon.social)

@cwebber @doesntgolf
BTW this is a great primer on object capabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL5o4PFuxTY

@cwebber @aral @ekaitz_zarraga @Shamar
In some way, it's a wonderful time to be alive, because we don't HAVE to get our protocols accepted by the W3C before we can use them. It wasn't always like this.

Playing card trivia:
Did you know that the 4 suits of cards come from the 4 forms of power ?
* Diamonds -> Merchant (capitalist) class
* Hearts -> The clergy, controlling the hearts of the people
* Spades -> Spade = sword, the power of overt politics, military & the king
* Clubs -> The power of the people, with primitive weapons (clubs) still able to project influence

The Ace was added in France to commemorate the revolutionary who overthrew the king...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/dec/04/books-advent-calendar-4-four-card-suits

(Without the faintest hint of irony) "Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China."

"The memo identifies at least 215 employees who appear to have been tasked with working full-time on Dragonfly, a number it says is “larger than many Google projects.” It says that source code associated with the project dates back to May 2017"

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/

I cannot accept to carte-banche dismiss an entire demographic. Even if their solutions are evil & horrible, the problems which brought them to the streets are still real. Secondly, to simply dismiss them offers them no alternative to the racist solutions their leaders promote.

In 2008 the economic system broke down, elites saved themselves and put the pain on the common people, triggering a new populism.

I fear the "migrant crisis" may have been engineered to redirect this popular anger.

I don't know how this should be fixed, but I have 1 comment:

It's almost certainly not going to be any sweeping change like "end capitalism". Big sweeping changes are also a compelling narrative (Plato, Corbusier, Marx, Lenin, Nyerere, ...), and also something which has never been shown to work in the past and is usually viciously harmful. More likely it will be some tiny boring little regulatory tweak.

9/end

Happy pull-day in #cjdns land, new UDP interface with auto-peering based on UDP broadcast thanks to madafoo, patches to libuv, make sure to rebuild fully. Will probably get some breaking changes before releasing to master...

@h Personally I'm super excited about the future right now. e.g.

What about uberizing a corporation ? Why do you need explicit manager roles if you can make a bug tracker which allows tenders, bids, contracts and payment of credits... Let people elect their bosses or work independent. Can it then be run democratically ?

Is a prediction market effectively a superintelligence ?
When the singularity comes, maybe it's just going to be the derivatives market...

etc...

Prediction: EU leaders have committed a grave strategic error for which they will pay dearly.

Past few weeks:
* Italy voted, elected right wing anti-EU Northern League and leftist anti-EU 5 Star Movement got majority, so they need to propose a government...
* Documents leaked showing plan to demand 180bn€ loan forgiveness from EU, markets drop.
* Northern and M5S promise they won't really do that
1/

@Angle Personally I'm impressed with the VAT-like proposal the Repubs were pushing 2 years ago. It's stalled because "too complicated" (probably a fair judgement). Key problem with US IMO is not having any protections against getting dumped on by artificially cheap goods from sweatshop economies.

Not ready to make 10 year predictions but indeed stars aren't aligned for UBI right now.

@Wolf480pl
Static typing is fundimentally a form of static assertion, which I totally support, but I think the programmer should decide what classes if bugs they wish to assert against.

There is another argument for static typing, that we have greater power over the asm that our code will generate. I have mixed feelings about this, on the one hand "never take away power from the programmer" on the other hand letting a jit decide after some profiling is probably better.

@ajroach42 @rysiek An alternative view is that we should not fight against DRM and censorship, because if DRM means more people go to tpb, that throws a rock in the eye of capitalist knowledge-selling. If Chinese people cannot reach twitter because of censorship, they may use Mastodon where the discourse is neither controlled by China nor the USA.

Conspiracy theory:
Bitcoin is actually a Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Art piece representing the ecological horror and indefensible inequities of capitalism.

I think the tragedy of that memo is that he's essentially right, and Zuckerberg is right to "think twice about hiring anyone over 30".

Large corporations are better off only hiring young, ambitious men with poor work/life balance and lack of empathy.

There will never be diversity in major corporations, because their very structure is pathological.

@zbrdge yeah, but not just.
I have actually stopped paying attention to "news" in general because after a lot of mildly stressful "obsessing" about presidents and laws and wars, I realized at some moment that not once have I had some real thing happen in my life and been happy to have known in advance about it thanks to the news.

Since I quit, I have read philosophy, had long conversations with excellent people, eaten delicious food slowly, and pondered how humans might be better to eachother.

@jeffcliff I disagree with that analysis. We know that trust networks are extremely powerful, why for example the Italian government still cannot wrestle control of many of it's cities away from the mafia.

Also why hawala allows one to move cash from any city in Russia to any other city.

I think Twitter has simply failed as an experiment because it tried to create an Authoritarian High Modernist state without acknowledging that humans need community.

@strypey @natecull @pnathan despite what I said, I also agree with you. Civilization has been a massive net benefit. Standardisation and also centralization have overall been massively beneficial to us, perhaps the most beneficial, next to taming game theoretical problems.
However I still think we must concern ourselves with fragility and remember that what makes us more efficient also makes us more fragile.