Ignoring the actual situation as I don't care to go into that right now, just talking about the mechanisms working with here. I did have access accidentally to buy cheap social stuff. Not that it would be hard to run it myself, just wouldn't be worth the effort to make it run well for controllably long time.
But anyway, i didn't do anything with it, but i always thought, how do easy it would be for a competent, young, informed government, to realize counteracting the digital influence of foreignn governments is much more important than whatever else they prioritise. Exaggerated, maybe, but it should be at least top 3 or whatever exact position in ones priority list. Because especially: it's so easy, to spend a few thousand euros to hire some really competent people who might just pay some shady social account broker, now even with the use LLMs , much more scalably & effectively, to counteract and do even better stuff than what they do.
But then, remembering bernays, i am happy they are incompetent. The day they reach competency with the toolset that is yet in infancy, i will regret not having tried to control who is running this. On the other hand, you just can't risk doing this. It will lose your control eventually. And without being a conspiracy theorists, it won't be long until more pips (people in power) will notice the ease of influence- and propaganda (in bernays understanding, the one who rebranded it as public relations), through these tools.
Luckily, i've never been in a knife fight. Though i've heard, that with an unskilled fighter, you have pretty bad chances of not getting hurt. But a skilled one is a death sentence.
Of course i don't want to be attacked by a knife. And i don't want to take some other unskilled street gangster and train him. Of course, some people get humbled if introduced to power. But many corrupt. And those hungry for power, are rarely those, who should have it. This could be an hour long discussion. But just look around the people you know well. Maybe yourself in certain situations or relationships. Every humans has the potential.
Unfortunately this statement will, in spite of what you identified correctly, likely do its job and divert attention from the fundamental issues we are facing with a technology that has already spread further than anyone can control. From enterprise too lay man. The whole world of computing was not built ever expecting software capabilities like this to ever exist.
I am not saying it's like a nuclear bomb. Rather like the first guns brought into fights the others were perfectly prepared for ti fight with swords and didn't even know yet, about this fascinating invention called a gun. Sounds interesting. Let me inspect it. Oh wow, that's interesting technology. What happens if i push that thing back? Will it re... oops...
Thank god that we have honourable people like altman, zuckerberg, musk. Imagine how bad all this would turn within the next few years, if major decisions were made by self-serving, delusional, greedy egomaniacs...
Of course currently let's first hope those wars and all the tension in societies all over the world, in war or peace, won't explode into something really, really bad. Looking at history, i fear we see how social tension on large scale over time... not saying it's not obvious to almost everyone. So well, let's just keep hoping. Maybe throwing blackbox AI tech into the mix, would surprise and change course of history. Actually, while i am thinking about it, i think i just changed my opinion into the opposite position, lol. Honestly, if it's 50/50 that this will lead to the worst possible outcome intensified, it's still better than just checking boxes following the "humans slowly stumbling into near-extinction experiences 101" handbook. Because just according to that, we're lucky if we're off by 10 years. There must be a big change in humanity and how the world is currently constructed, for all this leading to anything other than what we should expect from history. If we kept all nations busy with huge technological issues, that made all of their personal lifes so complicated, turn every elitists luxury into a burden, busy to defend what they own, while they can't realize, that normal life has changed so much, they now are the ones, frozen in life. They would have no time for conflict.
This sounds totally logical. In any other scenario, it would be pretty insane what we are all doing and entertaining (including me, top10 hypocrite).
I fear it's too late to turn ship, yet we still can jump ship.
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Especially because now thinking about the thoughts that just went through my head, maybe (technological) disruptions are actually disrupting. But not a status quo of an economic model.
But a pretty clear loop of human nature and "humans in societies".
And the more often we disrupt this loop, the more time we get before it's ready to start over again.
And now we have something that has the potential to change all fundamentals so much, that all the major conditions inside this loops iteration become meaningless. The environment changes so much, the state of the checkboxes gets emptied. Cache invalidated. Indices are gone.
Oh, i know how dumb this sounds. I am not even trying to claim anything. I didn't even think about it before, this is just a note of the words that i typed, almost on autopilot. No idea if i believe a part of this could be real. But even thought, just as a mere fictional story, it already entertained me.
"I phrase can this words a way not make sense. seems! but point across still!"
AI can turn it into a pseudo-poem or a 4 pages document. Or it can just fix the grammar. But it doesn't really change the point of the sentence– nor does it fix the actual issue with it.
Similar for code: There are codebases with lots of smells and really dirty parts, yet, that are still better than methodically clean ones that just don't "get to the point".
I am so sick of all the AI bloat. People were able to hide their incapability behind unnecessarily complex frameworks or obscuring it through "clean code" concepts. Now LLMs give those uninspired people the option to invest even less of what makes worthy software and hide it in more abstraction.
why not just agree on a release date?
while i enjoy circumventing moneyfences, i understand the wallmakers do not. i think this would be an easy deal, if someone just laid it on the table.
Very interesting. I have been working on something quite some time, where something like this would play a very crucial role, but i never got around to really thinking about how to implement everything. And as I have still a lot of work to do on my project, that would utilize something like freenet, i am very eager to dive into your work. Just wanted to write this as some form as appreciation for your work.
I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?
Great work it seems, so far. I will yet have to really look through it all. Congratulations on this.
Also, usually, as soon as they realize they have a not-total-shit product, they immediately start to screw it up completely. So if bing ends up being better actually, it won't be long until they replace every good part of it with something ridiculous. I don't know how microsoft does it, but they are so incredibly good at that.
I don't know what happened in my brain but i expected a piece about points as in keeping scores. Maybe about how we evolved from binary results (alive/dead in early human competitions) to more complex systems. I'd say humans played games long before being able to count. Of course competition is inherent to human nature. But i'd say, without getting into any philosophical debate, a certain amount of compassion and empathy is as well. Which must have resulted in early ideas of fairness. Especially when respect and status seem to be crucial to society.
So, how and when did points come into play?
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Well, ok. I stop procrastinating for now (i hope). I hate my brain.