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.

Yes, but with modern technologies where easily done. TLS, markdown-like markup, MIME, prompts for input.

Meshtastic, Briar.

Buddy, you’re not a normal person and nothing in this conversation says I’m a racist.

You’re an idiot.

as with most of the things people complain about with AI, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s capitalism. This is done intentionally in search of profits.

So in our hypothetical people’s republic of united Earth your personal LLM assistant is not going to assist you in suicide, and isn’t even going to send a notification someplace that you have such thoughts, which is certainly not going to affect your reliability rating, chances to find a decent job, accommodations (less value - less need to keep you in order) and so on? Or, in case of meth, just about that, which means you’re fired and at best put to a rehab, how efficient it’ll be, - well, how efficient does it have to be? In case you have no leverage and a bureaucratic machine does.

There are options other than “capitalism” and “happy”.

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.

No it doesn’t. People have all kinds of perceptions of words. Get used to it, nobody is going to follow your whim.

A simple Web-like hypertext system without styles and scripts. The protocol can be implemented in two days by a complete idiot (I have my own Gemini viewer, I may not be terribly proud of it, but I like it).

One can technically put a trojan into your UEFI firmware. And from the description the law doesn’t specify which kinds of trojans it allows.

And - a hint - it’s called trojan because you don’t know you have a trojan when you have a trojan.

Reason one - both were kinda German, reason two - both were kinda fascist, reason three - you don’t say “no” when there’s no such variant in the poll.

The interior minister Gerhard Karner, described it as a “special day for security.”

This might be a Hollywood association with German accent, but feels like a really ominous quote. Like that sadistic guy in round eyeglasses in the Indiana Jones movie.

I’ve used it as an argument for libertarianism initially, because direct democracy is kinda impractical (thought me back then, LOL), but having grown up a bit I see the need for big militaries and in general synchronous pooling of resources, which libertarian models are notoriously not very good at.

But right now things just as impractical as direct democracy are implemented everywhere, so times have changed.

Well, it is one big process.

Hard to trace the power which allowed for all those slow processes of subversion to happen, but a lot of it stems ultimately from the USSR’s breakup and those who managed to make profit on it.

Western countries’ MIC’s which no more had to prepare for real war, so same big funding, but less accountability. Western politicians making profit on reducing their militaries - it’s a profitable process of selling properties and scrapping tech and such. Western advisors in ex-USSR helping their new mafia elites. Western businesses who first managed to secure some agreements to do business in ex-USSR.

Then - the tech sector, via plenty of qualified labor from ex-USSR moving to USA and other western countries. Cheap fossil fuels sold by Russia to EU countries, which became a major factor in their economies in the 90s and 00s.

Politicians in this were very notably not complacent, just looking out for themselves and noticing opportunities for themselves.

Also a lot happened just due to technical progress and lack of macro-level competition. Soviet system notably had deadlocks because interested parties couldn’t agree to one countrywide system. Suppose USSR somehow managed to survive till now, with its collegial and totalitarian-bureaucratic, but not mafia-style, government. Then total surveillance being introduced in the West now and long ago in China wouldn’t be successfully implemented in the USSR, for the similar reasons EU countries want to have their own surveillance, but not US surveillance over their citizens. In USSR it would be between ministries and factions not willing to be controlled by others. So in USSR there’d likely be some status quo.

I mean, it’s purely a hypothesis, it already imploded and there’s nothing more to say about this. Just - such things as now would sometimes happen during the Cold War too, but having a big totalitarian state as a counterweight helped a lot. Like an example of what will happen if this is allowed, and like an alternative (if we are going to have totalitarianism, then let’s at least have the red workers-and-peasants kind), and like a real threat in case of weakening of western nations.

So one can imagine that USSR’s breakup did lead in many ways to what we have now. At the same time had it not happened, then maybe on my side of the screen everything would already be surveilled (or maybe it is).

A few stolen elections in a row were approved by US politicians and various European politicians almost unanimously, because of “supporting Yeltsin against reaction”, and “if not this imperfect democracy, then Commies or neo-Nazis”, and “but we’re having a reboot of relations”, and then with almost open realpoliticking shit about how Putin is convenient to do business with, and if there’s a change of regime, it won’t be as easy.

So I would argue about root causes a lot. Especially since the root cause would be Western interference during USSR’s breakup, first aimed at preserving USSR, then after that failing aimed at preserving Russia as 1) some sort of superpower, 2) authoritarian regime led by Yeltsin’s crowd.

It doesn’t even matter that they likely didn’t know what they were doing, likely led by Tom Clancy books style idiotic ideas of the dangers and chances in that process, and the main “threat” perceived was some “radical reactionary takeover” leading to someone launching nukes just for the sake of it. It even reads idiotic, but such opinions were said officially, however nuts it was.

EDIT: And also there’s the subject of Ukraine’s nukes. If someone didn’t know, it’s not Russia that pressured Ukraine to get rid of its nukes in favor of Russia. It’s USA. Convenient to have one hegemon in a region, with whom you can deal, except that hegemon might eventually accept the idea that they are the hegemon.

Früher war mehr Lametta?