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.

Unfortunately, my goto starter word is 4 green letters.

It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.

Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.

It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.

Seems to be designed for hyprland?

Most people here are missing the point.

Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.

What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.

The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.

> Which creates some bizarre incentives, minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.

Only if you set aside the passage of time.

I disagree. Harness is a pretty great word, and it doesn't already have another familiar meaning.

They are not incorrect. They don't even hold a position in the first place.

An LLM continues the prompt it is given. What is more likely to come after a question? An answer, not an "oh sorry I'm not sure". Sure, you could make the latter more likely, but then the model would be unusable. Larger models simply contain more answers, more ways to stumble into them, and a granular enough geography to stay on the trail.

It's not a theory. It's literally what they market and sell.

It might be their intended use (from a police department's perspective), but it's certainly not their intended function.

Flock collects these images, and uses them to train statistical models, and sells those models to police departments as a one-click crime solving solution.

That means that their primary function is to passively aggregate driver behavior into an automated judgement system, where the entire judicial system (designed to check and balance itself) is laundered away. Flock cameras exist to fundamentally replace police work, not to assist with it.

> Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons.

Disgusting copy. We all know that's not their primary function.

The problem is much bigger than that.

Their goal is to find a "good fit", not to find a good engineer. That's why their software is so incredibly disfunctional: it's just a reflection of their workplace culture.

That's another useful perspective on the same thing I'm talking about.

Your speech doesn't just fail to stay with you, it's implications hang over you. What you have said is treated structurally like a magical incantation: directly relevant to reality itself, no matter how little sense comes out of that relationship. This is the vain objectivity I'm talking about: everything you say is interpreted as if you meant to state an objective fact.

Context is a fundamental feature of communication. Objectivity just means factoring as much context as we can out of the interpreter, and into the expression. It's a useful tradeoff, but it has limitations. At some point, there must be subjective interpretation. Without it, you are just talking to a brick wall.

> the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor.

> I think this is exactly your point

Yes, it is.

Another useful word would be "direct", or maybe "concrete". A metaphor allows us to get right to the point, instead of going up the ladder of abstraction. Alternatively, we can use well-defined abstractions, like formal mathematics, to be precise in an abstract way.

I tried to lay it out, but I'm (ironically) using objectively defined abstractions to do so...

Metaphor is what allows a story's implications to be taken out of an expression, and placed into the interpreter itself. An interpreter that arbitrarily decides what an expression can mean does so by bringing its own implications. This way, instead of forcing an expression to articulate those implications, the expression can imply them instead. The interpreter fills in the gap.

If we formalize a story's implications, that means we create a decided interpreter: a collection of assumptions that impose a specific perspective on the reader. This is how programming languages work: any expression has a clearly defined meaning, because it will only be given to that language's interpreter. The disadvantage is that you cannot write ambiguous expressions, because ambiguity would require the potential for more than one perspective, which would require more than one interpreter.

My idea is to create many ad-hoc interpreters, so that any of them can be chosen to interpret a given expression. This way, the chosen perspective is computable, while the expression can be ambiguous and metaphorical. The only "hard" problem left is the selection of interpreter, which I expect to be manageable.

> It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective.

I was saying the opposite. The core feature of an LLM is that it is subjective. The implications of a written expression (prompt) are not well-defined objective truth, but instead a vague probability. We can compute the probability, but that doesn't ever intersect with logical reduction or arithmetic; so the implications we get are just vague guesses on the progression of the story. With enough examples and training, the LLM can guess correct arithmetic answers, but critically, it does not actually perform the arithmetic that verifies them.