Ppl work hard to make sure they remain different for 99.9% of non-technical people (eg. banning anonimous cryptocurrency)... once this is done, you become and outlier by using different tools than average people, and special means of surveilance can be deployed against you personally at much lower cost...
Ofc this is bad, but the bigger purpose is always "power over the proles".
You can let most people have most of their privacy as long as you don't touch the "power distrubution tools" (money) - eg. if messaging is private, but money is on a blockchain where all wallets are mandatory to have an associated human identity, it doesn't matter that some sketchy transactions happen on the edges. Bitcoin would be targeted too if it were used to eg. pay wages and fund companies on a large scale.
Probably Tornado Cash enabled some activity that was large scale enough to not be considered just "on the fringes" anymore...
> then the development doesn't seem to be finished
It's never finished, that's the point, if you want to keep growing the a part of you must separate a bit and drag itself towards the better possible future, then later drag the other lump of you either gently or kicking and screaming. But this "non integration" seems to be the "engine for growth". Even our society as a whole embraces a similar mechanism to "force growth".
You can have integration and comfort, but... you'll need to oursource the growth and suffering that comes with it (think of the billionaines chillin' and vibin' while striving engineers and tormented artists do the real work towards the betterment of humanity). That's kind of the sad truth, some need to be non-integrated and under some amount of suffering for the wheels to keep turning.
meh, strive for CLARITY instead: figure out what really needs most to be done, understand more about what you're doing, do less but have a larger impact!
I only care about makind sure that all essential and valuable human characteristics, perspective, thought patterns and values get carried on to whatever the next thing is :) Extinction of bio-humans can be perfectly fine if it happens without information loss imo.
EDIT+: Counterintuitively, it might be more benefficial to have way more people in the (maybe short) era before the passing of bio-humans, to increase the probability that as many as possible of the valuable human ideas get passed on to our AGI descendents! If AGI is finally achieved by eg. "three middle aged white guys surviving some apocalypse in some bunker", then that AGI will only have and carry on the values and mindsets of those "three middle aged white guys"!!! Ironically, "unification under one umbrella of AGI research efforts" like eg. OpenAI folks try to do increase the likelihood the "three middle aged white guys fathering a narrow-minded AGI", instead of encouraging a diversified competition landscape...
We seem to be handling the upcoming birth of AGI just as well as we "handled" this pandemic...
"Handling contraception" is almost zero cost (so can even be done in bad economie where stuff like child support can't work) and is about choice, not forcing anyone to do anything!
If you want to play the "contraception is eugenics" card, have fun with whatever ultra-cristian uneducated mid-american audience you find for that...
It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.
Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.
...bc (1) educated != intelligent, and (2) intelligence is highly multidimensional, maybe the "dumb" people are the ones more intelligent in the dimension of intelligence requiring to "figure out they should opt out".
Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.
> populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids
That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..
> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates
Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".
> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.
We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".
We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...
- most people have a stupid bias towards "doing something, anything, doesn't matter if it doens't work"
- politicians and "thought leaders" and "experts" amplify this bias to bewildering extents of stupidity (mostly for selfish reasons, is something goes wrong and they "did nothing" they destroyed, if they do something wrong but it was "the established best thing to do at the time" they can just say "oops, we were wrong, but now we've learned from it, we all learn from our mistakes and grow")
- so we get the shitshow we have/had!
And doing some simple experiments to establish faster that eg. masks work was only very very late done - "not a priority to do stupid pseudo-science pseudo-experiments now, let our scientists focus on the important things".
Our effor to "control" (lockdown) or "prioritize" (oh no, there won't be any masks left for healthcare workers if everyone buys them) or "efficientize" ("let's not have thousands of independent vaccines and do wasteful overlapping studies") or "be ethical" (oh now, forget that we have ~100k pople offering themselves as volunteers for proper but faster vaccines testing, we can't just put them at risk to accelerate the process) turned everything to shit.
It's kind of obvious that if we want antifragility towards pandemic we need less-coordinated responses, more divergent thinking and more organically-organized common sense approaches even when the evidence for them is still lacking.
...instead we picked the technocratic-authoritarian playbook and our plan for a potential future even worse pandemic is to double down harder on the same path (wtf).
...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children! Give people guranteed free life-time education from daycare to university + some standard of free universal healthcare (sure, you'll have to pay for your antiaging, but not for a broken leg!) and more people will enjoy having more children. Maybe engineer the world so that people who choose to "chill t f out" can still enjoy both wealth and security because we do generate surplus value no matter what some people want to make you think. Just prevent some people from overconsuming at the same time that we prevent other from overproducing and give social climbing advantages to less competitive and workaholic people.
One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!
Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...
It's... unpredictably far away! We suck so bad at estimating these kinds of things, that whether it's tomorrow or 500 years from now, I'm convinced we'll be totally surprised, unprepared, and our nor even sincere effort to stear things down a good path (eg. OpenAI and such...) will be either worthless or detrimental!
We should simply pursue "organic growth" eg. grow as much people as we can care for and educate properly. Unfortunately our elites seem really hell bent of keeping the social landscape hyperconpetitive so the resources we have don't really get distributed... and as a consequence of course (rational) pople have fewer children! Also there's an intellectual war fought on "traditional values" that enabled stuff like extended famimlies to exist and make child rearing at least bearable by sharing the load of caring for the nasty little critters.
There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the leaders (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got it a bit more right, but it's probably just circus.
Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.).
Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby?
As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...
He's a would-be / soon-to-be immigrant. After settling in the destination country he should ofc get his affairs 100% legal, and maybe change work fields (inside software it's easy). And if he wants good life in a bad country (some people are all for this, I don't get it, but whatever, has its perks, though it might be shorter), then working and earning as much as possible outside of society's legal fiancial system is seriously 100% the best advice! Sure, there's some extra skills he'll have to learn, get the bribing and personal security parts right with methods that work in your geographical region, and one must have some "exit plan" (eg. "buy a large farm when reaching 50") to not do this forever, but it's seriously the only advice.
People who've lived their whole adult life in "safe and civilized bouble" countries will ofc see in in reverse, but outside of the "safe zones" we currently live in, this planet is a nasty place and you're competing with nasty people, so properly taking context in consideration is the only way to take this serious and give people useful actionable life advice!
TL/DR: It's a naive "sour grapes" type argument that doesn't take any kind of costs/tradeoffs into consideration...
Proper DRY at scale requires types that make sense and are easy to think about (you have to invent and document them even in dynamic langs ...that's why Typescript's a thing and so sucessful). You can't have DRY that doesn't slow you down and cause bugs without proper f types!
Eg. a sane solution to the authors' problem when the requirement for split pizza came would be:
- rename make_pizza(toppings: dict) to make_pizza_part(topings: dict)
- implement a new make_pizza(topping: list[dict]) calling make_pizza_part(toppings: dict) - and here you've change the type (important!), so you'll not miss any unchanged all calls to it, your tools will yell at you (ideally at build/compile/commit), or at worst at runtime but with an easy to interpret even from logs error
DRY is fine if done in the context of proper software engineering practices and tools.
Now being non-sloppy and following solid practices has a cost, and you might want to avoid it sometimes - in those cases do less DRY rather than crappy DRY!
(Whole languages are built around the OP's philosophy, eg. Go, but they are explicitly engineered to lower cost and defects in large corporate orgs! Randomly choosing to follow this in a project with 1-3 people of adequate skills and limited scope will just unnecessarily make that project have 4x the code, 4x the bugs, and 4x the cost for zero benefit.)
...learn about crypto and try to work remotely getting paid in it - unfortunately you'll likely have to work on cryptocurrencies and smart-contracts, but it beats COBOL ;) After you've saved enough, gtfo your country and get asylum anywhere it's not sanctioned (say you're a gay satanist foodie passioned about pork sushi etc.).
Not condoning tax evasion, but some countries deserve it.
Tor + (~secure) VPN, but most things like pirating and pr0n DON'T require 'real' security!
You want privacy mainly and that's orthogonal to security.
If privacy is not enough and you need secrecy... well, just use your botnet as a VPN and from that get to Tor! (You do own a botnet in this case, that's what you need the secrecy for :P ...otherwise you'd have specialists hired for this at your disposal, or you'd be the specialist providing it to someone else).
...most IPS in most contries are just OK with piracy ...use proper VPNs for stuff that needs real security, enjoy your entertainment in peace (sure, if you're into weird kinds of pr0n). Most ppl who occasionally pirate also pay for content and have Netflix substrictions and stuff anyway (most artists do get payed - or at least some company gets paid for their work...), and those who don't would just pirate anyway, just switch ISP, so nothing gained by this.
(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)
You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!
ONLY private persons should own patents, and it should be illegal even for employers or institutions (academic, research) to own patents of people employed to do research. At most companies and istitutions should be allowed to add a clause of "perpetual-free-usage of any patents of employees resulting from direct work" - but an employee or group-of-employees holdig a patent should still be able to license it to other companies too. If businesses are hurt, that's GOOD, most should not exist as coagulated entities.
We're not gonna have proper freedom preserving capitalism ultil we properly decentralize: we all work like swarms of 1-person-companies / solopreneurs contracting between eachother. (No, not the gig-economy, in that distopia we're all still slaves that can't band together to fight the masters.) Legislation will automatically have to be refacored to make this work. With some exceptions, only human individuals should hold most property, not companies and not institutions. Groups/collectives only when the group members directly worked together and know eachother.
And Intellectual Property would just "click in" in in such context. IP sounds hellish and disfunctional because our own practically techno-communist society (yeah, even USA is practically "communist" nowadays in a way - newsflash: "the reds" have won! even the f symbolism is there, "the red pill" is the good one now... all's backwards) is messed up. It makes perfect sense in a hyper-decentralized hyper-individualistic REALLY democratic and REALLY capitalist society.
Ofc this is bad, but the bigger purpose is always "power over the proles".
You can let most people have most of their privacy as long as you don't touch the "power distrubution tools" (money) - eg. if messaging is private, but money is on a blockchain where all wallets are mandatory to have an associated human identity, it doesn't matter that some sketchy transactions happen on the edges. Bitcoin would be targeted too if it were used to eg. pay wages and fund companies on a large scale.
Probably Tornado Cash enabled some activity that was large scale enough to not be considered just "on the fringes" anymore...