I’m more about separation of addressing data and data model from addressing services and service model for storing and processing it, to make those uniform, because in uniformity lies efficiency and redundancy and ability to switch service models, and uniformity inside proprietary services is already achieved, so in this case uniformity works for the people.

I mean, that’s probably what you meant, I’m being this specific to fight my own distractions and fuzziness of thought.

Well, in the Soviet example everything was government.

And governments seem to be so excited by the prospects of this “AI” so it’s pretty clear that it’s still their desire most of all.

EDIT: On telegraph and Panama you are right (btw, it’s bloody weird that where it sounds like canal in my language it’s usually channel in English, but in the particular case of Panama it’s not), but they might perceive this as a similarly important direction. Remember how in 20s and 30s “colonization of space” was dreamed about with new settlements supporting new power bases, mining for resources and growing on Mars and Venus, FTL travel to Sirius, all that. There are some very cool things in Soviet stagnation - those pictures of the future lived longer than in the West against scientific knowledge. So, back to the subject, - “AI” they want to reach is the thing that will allow to generate knowledge and designs like a production line makes chocolate bars. If that is made, the value of intelligent individuals will be tremendously reduced, or so they think. At least of the individuals on the “autistic” side, but not on the “psychopathic” side, because the latter will run things. It’s literally a “quantity vs quality” evolutionary battle inside human kinds of diversity, all the distractions around us and the legal mechanisms being fuzzied and undone also fit here. So - for the record, I think quality is on our side even if I’m distracted right now, and sheer quantity thrown at the task doesn’t solve complexity of such magnitude, it’s a fundamental problem.

Middle-East involves plenty of mountainous areas, and the reason many of those are arid is because water, ahem, flows down.

Also in a flat dry desert one can replace pumping water up with raising heavy things up. I think. More wear though.

You mean when the bubble bursts and there are lots of people who worked on this available on the job market?

I’d expect them to be big data specialists, mostly knowledgeable in Python and matrix operations, narrow optimizations needed there, and not very competitive for other typical tech specialties.

They’ll just have to become data analysts, assistants in labs working on things like genome analysis, and so on. Perhaps medical RnD will get a boost due to all the willing slaves, LOL.

They were smart, those oiled fish-eating goatfuckers. So maybe yes, that - and also sortition and ostracism.

Exactly, it’s a tool to whitewash decisions. A machine that seemingly does not exactly what it should do. A way to shake off responsibility.

And that it won’t ever work right is its best trait for this purpose. They’ll be able to blame every transgression or wrong where they are caught on an error in the system, and get away with the rest.

At least unless it’s legally equated to using Tarot cards for making decisions affecting lives. That should disqualify the fiend further as a completely inadequate human being, not absolve them of responsibility.

Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.

In this particular case - I don’t think it’s more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.

It’s an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there’s a need to compensate. Both are wrong.

I can imagine one - maintaining adversarial interop with proprietary systems. Like a self-adjusting connector for Facebook for some multi-protocol chat client. Or if there’s going to be a Usenet-like system with global identities of users and posts, a mapping of Facebook to that. Siloed services don’t expose identifiers and are not indexed, but that’s with our current possibilities. People do use them and do know with whom they are interacting, so it’s possible to make an AI-assisted scraper that would expose Facebook like a newsgroup to that.

Ah. Profitable. I dunno.

Their kind never leaves the chat, it’s a professional habit

Nah, a logical OR in their favor is not how democracy should work.

Keep them informed, of course they care about your opinion, especially seeing how anyplace else in the world where such things were introduced there were successful revolutions and people doing that ended up in jail. Oops.

Battlefield 1942 for me.

Fook, I was going to write it almost in the same words

Frugal tech idea and degrowth are more capitalist than a handful of monopolies owning you in every orifice and billing you for it.

If by “capitalism” we don’t mean paleo-industrialism of XIX-century aristocrats with monocles and child labor. If we do mean the “free market with protections for property, rights, safety and anti-monopoly regulations yadda-yadda” moderate-normal-classical model.

because, like the paper money, crypto doesn’t have inherent tangible value

That’s wrong, “owning a number” is tangible value. That’s also why there are no (working) offline cryptocurrencies, double spending is a problem.

If by “works like the second” you mean that it doesn’t have physical form, then yeah, that’s in the name.

which, btw, still relied on a very centralized government existing anyway

A few of them, different ones, each making their own coins. So no.

because you can’t hold or do anything with 0s and 1s, nor can you physically keep it around.

Yeah, that’s a problem, but “fucking Chinese coins” in their value also were worth more than the metals they were made from. Sometimes those metals were not very meaningful for Europeans.

And using a mix of non-uniform coins for transactions was a thing for much of history in Europe too.

In any case, in absolutes of course nothing is like any other thing. If your argument fits under that, then don’t bother, it’s boring and useless.

In relatives - you can have a “half-offline” cryptocurrency, where you don’t need all the network (or good enough majority of it) to be accessible, just one partition (or even just portion) of it, to make a transaction. In theory. This can even seem like a “partitioned blockchain”, LOL. A tree of blockchains.

There are so many cryptocurrencies so honestly I don’t know if such has been made, but it would be useful.

Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.

Yes, I’ve remembered my old idea of something like an automated digital barter connected to storage space and computation provided on demand for tokens (every provider an issuer), or something else confirmed by escrow or whatever, after learning that in China 200 years ago people used non-uniform money, that is, all kinds of coins, some literally ancient still in circulation, and somehow that worked.

That wouldn’t be as convenient as uniform money as a universal equivalent, but wouldn’t have that particular kind of problem, which value manipulation via such globally meaningful action. Simply because there’d be no single variable to manipulate.

Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.

Naaaah, it’s still in the wrong paradigm, just a taste of the better world.

Like Hanseatic league and Hussites and Cossacks were not quite the revolution you’d want, and the same with Dutchies, but at some point angry Frenchies decided it’s time to show how it’s done, and around the same general period of time some unrefined colonials decided they are tired of tea.

Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.

While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.

And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.

They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.

So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.