nitin-pai

The atomic and space 'races' were advertised to confer decisive geopolitical advantages on the countries that possessed them. Clearly that didn't happen. The Soviets got their bomb four years after the US, and similarly the US caught up with the Soviets in space. Neither enjoyed a decisive advantage.

More importantly, their 'race' didn't prevent others from developing their own bombs and space capabilities.

For a moment I thought this was about Manzikert, Tonsure, Shriek and Finch...of Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris trilogy.

I have a simple hack to achieve most of the advantages of the Daylight Computer: set the display of your computer, tablet or smartphone to greyscale. Voila!

Promite is better than Vegemite.

We create the future we imagine: so it is important to imagine the future we wish to create.

A lot of the confusion and anxiety will melt away if we distinguish the terms “optimal” and “desirable”.

The most desirable amount of fraud, corruption or tax evasion is zero.

In the real world we don’t get what we desire. The closest we can came is to the optimal amount, where the marginal cost has to equal the marginal benefit.

Github says the Mac app is available but the website only says coming soon. The binary is not available for download. Disappointing.

Thoughts are somewhat like electric current: prefers lower resistance paths to the ground.

Twitter succeeded because it is the least resistance path to an audience. Blogs in comparison are kiloohms of resistance.

What happened to technorati?

There is no advantage in doing this. Typing words fully and correctly, with correct spelling and grammar, is a skill worth preserving.

Mastodon (more correctly, the Fediverse) is far more suited for interest-based communities than Twitter is.

With communities getting onto their own servers (journa.host, econtwitter.net) the quality of network effects is increasing.

Twitter/X will end up as a place to share stuff that riles people up.

There is no bigotry in the post and the references to monasteries are not even disparaging.

An earlier thread on why an everything app is bad for liberal democracy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33151774

Julian Dibbell outlines how the ancient Greeks used tech to appoint officials, establish identification, make decisions and enforce rules.

A good reminder to use tools that allow you to keep the data locally.

I’ve been using miniflux, and it’s quite cool. David Winer’s Feedland is nifty too.

I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media.

I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.

Xi Jinping has reversed all the main features of Deng Xiaoping’s policies. Chasing away your biggest wealth creator, biggest movie star, tennis player etc is a great way to hurt the future prospects of your country.

For every Jack Ma who’s left, there are a thousand lesser known entrepreneurs who’ve shipped out, and a hundred thousand folks who’ve moved their money out/sent their kids abroad.

It’s not a twilight of neoliberalism. It’s the twilight of China’s rise.

The alternative to The Economist is a well curated collection of RSS feeds. Identify a set of intelligent blogs/columnists who post regularly, put their feeds into an OPML file, and you have a great alternative.

Added bonus: you can have X and anti-X perspectives for most values of X.

The problem with moderation so far has been the lack of business models that allow new market participants to enter. Big social media companies can engage big IT services companies who will hire thousands of contract workers to do the stuff. But that’s about all there is right now.

A market for content moderation services is a good idea. Players can sell these services both to Big Tech as well as to Fediverse instances and forum moderators etc.

But there is a challenge. The idea of a federated social media model means each instance gets to determine what is acceptable and what is not, and a lot of these decisions involve judgement calls, and neither AI nor context-removed human operators can get it right.

Whatever the merits of reinstating Trump’s account, making policy decisions using a Twitter poll is one of the worst ways to go about it.

“Protocols, not platforms” is the way to go, as Mike Masnick lays out.[1]

What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse.

[1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

There is nothing unusual in this.

The market for highly skilled people is global and people will prefer to work in places with higher wages, better living conditions and quality of life.

English education and familiarity with democratic political system makes the US, Britain, Singapore, Australia and other countries relatively more attractive than other countries at the same income level.

The risk of a catalytic nuclear war is yet another reason to push for a global no-first use treaty.

If minds and algorithms start from a non-first use standpoint (as against anticipating surprise attack), things can be a little more secure than otherwise.

We live another day. Then another. Then another…

Obsidian is among the best note-taking apps out there today. Backlinks make it more useful than other note taking apps, and this helps me uncover connections even if I don’t use the graph feature that much.

One plugin I am wish will arrive soon is Google Calendar integration.

Yes, your take is reasonable going by what’s in the article alone.

It does not cite Musk’s expressed desire for Twitter to emulate WeChat. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-ch...

The internet is not an everything ‘app’ in the sense that it’s built/controlled by one firm. The reason the internet is good for liberal democracy is that it’s (declining) openness creates very low barriers for entry, free innovation undermines market power and architecture limits state power.

Stuff that changes that nature of the internet presents the danger to liberal democracy.

The Calibre Sync app for iOS is pretty good.

Integration with Google Meet

The idea has potential.

It will appeal to people who have to do a lot of reading, writing and thinking; and who are currently distracted by a lot of applications and features on their all-purpose devices.

Theoretically, you can turn off the Wi-Fi, put the writing app in focus mode, turn off notifications and avoid googling and looking at email and twitter. In practice, it is nearly impossible to do so. Which is why there are so many focus apps, pomodoro timers etc. It takes a lot of will power to avoid distractions.

Unlike a Kindle this thing can be used to key in text.

It certainly has a niche. What we don’t know is how big that niche is, and whether it will cause others to adopt non-distractive devices.