> Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert!
I hear ya but I wonder how that reflects on Open source software which was the GP request created by LLM let's say. Yes I know it can have bugs but its free of cost and you can own it and modify it with source code availability and run it on your own hardware
There really isn't much of a difference in terms of hardware/electricity just because of these Open source projects
But probably some for LLM's so its a little tricky but I feel like open source projects/ running far with ideas gets incentivized
Atleast I feel like its one of the more acceptable uses of LLM in so far. Its better because you are open sourcing it for others to run. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their freedom but you built it for yourself or running with an idea which couldn't have existed if you didn't know the details on implementations or would have taken months or years for 0 gains when now you can do it in less time
It significantly improves to see which ideas would be beneficial or not and I feel like if AI is so worrying then if an idea is good and it can be tested, it can always be rewritten or documented heavily by a human. In fact there are even job posts about slop janitor on linkedin lol
> Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?
Yes but also its far from happening and would require a real shake up in all things and its just a dream right now. i agree with ya but its not gonna happen or not something one can change, trust me I tried.
This requires system wide change that one person is very unlikely to bring but I wish you best in your endeavour
But what I can do on a more individualistic freedom level is create open source projects via LLM's if there is a concept I don't know of and then open sourcing it for the general public and if even one to two people find it useful, its all good and I am always experimenting.
But in the context of softwares, the landfill argument doesn't fit exactly well (well, sure someone can argue that storage on say, github might take more drives but the scale would be very cheaper than say landfill filled with physical things as well
> Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.
This problem actually runs deep and is systemic. I am genuinely not sure how one can do it when the basis of wealth derives from what exactly? The growth of stock markets which people call bubbles or the US debt crisis which is fueling up in recent years to basically fuel the consumerism spree itself. I am not sure.
If you were to make people wealthy, they might still buy cheapest of cheapest crap just at a 10x more magnitude in many cases (or atleast that's what I observed US to do with how many people buy and sell usually very simple saas tools at times)
Some people are praising the monarchy chants or similar which doesn't feel really good
I genuinely hope that this dictatorship ends and instead of monarchy, pure form of democracy is established and worked for the people with pure freedom.
I genuinely hope Iran the best of luck figuring out the protests and fighting for their rights and I hope that democracy can be established in Iran and rules like the burka can be lessened and internet freedom and other things can be established as well and hope that they can figure out the water crisis and financial crisis as well for the new govt.
> Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
In fact, Social medias can make the co-ordination of protests and other information rather quickly. Its one of the few benefits of social medias. Social media with all its flaws still helps protests
Kashmir has such a bloody history with its kashmiri pandits and wars and even recent events that really shock its nation.
Kashmir has been the most unstable part of India and Article 370 although with flaws wanted to give Kashmir the stability it deserves but Kashmir had even its own flags and state etc. and thats why it got really messy and why the internet used to be shut down
Kashmir still requires people to specifically get a sim just for Kashmir. But you can get any large carrier to do such. There are even ways of generating e-sim and such, but there is genuinely lots of concerns and complaints in doing so and its very time consuming in a way but internet access has stabilized for the most part, you just require a special sim verification again to do such or perhaps buying a new sim specifically for kashmir but you can port the number as well but as I said, its really time consuming but possible to even do this without entering kashmir itself
My ex was iranian and we frequently talked about iran and you are so wrong.
She had frequent black outs with complete electricity downage for many hours a day and she was in a major city
One of the largest problems is that Iran's average income is so poor and the rising inflation and rising prices.
They didn't even have a battery or something which could store electricity while it came because the batteries were so expensive that one of them cost like 1 month of salary of average iranian.
Things were really tough, she told me about the education system and she had to recently move to govt school and she said that there were just not any books available.
She really disliked the regime. She was liberal and I asked her about hijab and she said that she was forced to wear in schools and that the only contacts that they usually did was with their brothers. The society is extremely strict to a point of no return.
The average Iranian person either barely scrapes by or was/is actively being suffered by authoritarian brutality from the ground reality of extremist islamist radicalism that their govt put them on.
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here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works
Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?
Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.
Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.
There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
> Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?
Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?
There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well
In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/
Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
I hate the guy but I will genuinely let it pass if this means that we outside people can know what the fuck is actually happening at ground level in Iran and starlink adds even a 0.1% contribution to it.
I hate Elon a lot. but I will hold my grudge some other day if that means that starlink can help outside world to know more and raise internal resistance and support.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes team, turns out that the world is really short and I was reading an forbes article sent to me by someone in here and Ima quote it
The protests inspired the U.S. Treasury and State Departments to provide an exception to sanctions for communications services, and three days later, Musk turned on Starlink service in Iran.
“It requires the use of terminals in-country, which I suspect the government will not support, but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work,” he said at the time. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to a comment request.
So tldr: US made special exception considering the protests (the protests are of the "People had taken to the streets over the police killing of 22-year-old Mahsa"
If black market's the only reason that activism/journalism/outside contact is even possible in the country
It doesn't seem much of a plan (very sadly, I wish there was) which could be uncensored that much, some other comment pointed this point too but if black market's the case, then they would just hide whoever is using this
They would also most likely be very less in amount, journalists etc.
But the average person, they are stuck without proper internet
I thought that there are materials which can build starlink and the only thing then you need is just subscription or something
It's just sad to see that black market is the only way.
Russia's trying to censor some shit too by having outside ipv4 or something (dont know what its called) blocked and basically made a large intranet
But people could still buy vps and make it work somehow
So iran and russia are similar in that sense and this kinda puts things more into balance but I am sure that % of true believers/doing for self interest might vary or something
How are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work?
And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place?
This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
I hear ya but I wonder how that reflects on Open source software which was the GP request created by LLM let's say. Yes I know it can have bugs but its free of cost and you can own it and modify it with source code availability and run it on your own hardware
There really isn't much of a difference in terms of hardware/electricity just because of these Open source projects
But probably some for LLM's so its a little tricky but I feel like open source projects/ running far with ideas gets incentivized
Atleast I feel like its one of the more acceptable uses of LLM in so far. Its better because you are open sourcing it for others to run. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their freedom but you built it for yourself or running with an idea which couldn't have existed if you didn't know the details on implementations or would have taken months or years for 0 gains when now you can do it in less time
It significantly improves to see which ideas would be beneficial or not and I feel like if AI is so worrying then if an idea is good and it can be tested, it can always be rewritten or documented heavily by a human. In fact there are even job posts about slop janitor on linkedin lol
> Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?
Yes but also its far from happening and would require a real shake up in all things and its just a dream right now. i agree with ya but its not gonna happen or not something one can change, trust me I tried.
This requires system wide change that one person is very unlikely to bring but I wish you best in your endeavour
But what I can do on a more individualistic freedom level is create open source projects via LLM's if there is a concept I don't know of and then open sourcing it for the general public and if even one to two people find it useful, its all good and I am always experimenting.