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Comment 486 seemed magically advanced in the mid 1990s. (Score 2) 107

My first Linux installation was Redhat 3.03 on a 16MHz 386/SX system in mid-1995. For those of you without an AARP card, that's a 32 bit CPU with a 16 bit bus, which Intel released to cannibalize the market for the 286, which did not have a memory management unit. That means no swapping, you run out of ram, it was game over.

I think the 486/25 that replaced the 386/SX arrived in ... 1996 ... and it had an astonishing *eight megabytes* of memory. I had kept a one megabyte LIM/EMS 4.0 physical memory card from my 286 when I got the 386/SX, and that actually mattered with Windows 3.x. I put it in the 486, but given that vast eight megabyte expanse of dram it didn't last long.

Then in late 1997 my employer went bankrupt and as part of the dissolution I brought home the dual Pentium 133 system with 32 megabytes of ram. I remember all my IRC friends were so jealous of that monster ...

Comment Like 16th Century Americas (Score 1) 116

Just a bit more than five hundred years ago Cortes & Co. arrived in the Americas. They were riding horses, wearing steel armor, wielding firearms, and spreading diseases for which the natives of the western hemisphere had no defenses. When two previously unconnected networks of similar entities encounter each other, there is conflict, and one "giant component" emerges. The natives that are left are perhaps 1% of their former number and in general they subsist at the edges of a transplanted European society.

AI has reached the point where it's hard to tell meat from machine and the internet is now having that same experience. These attempts to create human only networking are going to crush the life out of existing social media KPIs, and I think it'll be good for the Fediverse. Bot operators don't want to manually work their way through archipelagos of tiny spaces that do NOT want them. There's a political repression angle to the identity verification as well - if you want to manipulate the masses, gotta herd 'em into a space where you can DO that. Ten thousand digital islands are frightful when you have clear memories of being able to operate in a few globally flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter.

I've done computational social sciences stuff with a heavy conflict component. The day Musk took over Twitter was the equivalent of the Titanic bumping that iceberg. The sinking took about six months and I'm glad I made it to a life boat. But the really frightful thing here?

The same dynamics that apply to these social sites today are coming for white collar jobs and this isn't going to be measured in decades, it's going to happen in at most a few quarters. I hope my health care startup is about to get funded, because the alternatives for me are pretty grim. As for the vast majority of people who don't have a computer science background and the autistic focus superpower? I imagine what they feel is akin to the mood in Tenochtitlan in the early 1520s.

Comment Re:Meal Team Six: The Keyboard Warrior Chronicles. (Score 1) 188

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

Comment Re:Meal Team Six: The Keyboard Warrior Chronicles. (Score 4, Insightful) 188

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

Comment Re:Meal Team Six: The Keyboard Warrior Chronicles. (Score 5, Insightful) 188

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

Comment Re:Where does the data live? (Score 4, Informative) 26

Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

Submission + - New Freenet Network Launches With River Group Chat (freenet.org)

Sanity writes: Freenet’s new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.

Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.

Comment Unsurprising (Score 3, Informative) 49

There is nothing at all surprising about this, you have to look at what AI fluent operators can DO with frontier LLMs.

I have a health care startup that has been enabled by Anthropic's AI. The $100/month I pay for Claude Max gets me the full time equivalent of a really smart (but completely unseasoned) developer, and a half time MBA research assistant. I spend time every day trying to figure out how to employ the 40% of my weekly allocation that currently goes unused.

Clawdbot and its successors are sketchy AF, but I did just give Claude Code the run of a one liter HP EliteDesk with a Proxmox cloud install. No way would I trust it with production systems, but for exploring new stuff it'll get the job done, so long as I stand over it.

If you're any sort of knowledge worker and you can't tell a similar story to this, your career is pretty much cooked.

Comment Startup economics (Score 1) 112

Right now I run with a $100/month Anthropic Max subscription, and the net effect is that I have a really smart (but completely unseasoned) Ph.D. in computer science who works for me full time, and a very organized generalist MBA research assistant that's roughly half time. There are a couple of gratis services in that mix — Exa and Perplexity, that I will start paying for in April. Overall this $200-ish monthly expense would cost me around a quarter million annually if I had to hire humans to replace it. And I won't get someone who matches the 16x7 focus I bring to getting my startup moving.

We are about to hit a hard haves/have nots boundary on this stuff. I've already accepted that AI access is like a turn of the century professional cell phone bill and by summer it's going to match the cost of the sort of luxury sedan an enterprise sales wiz would select. Come next fall I think the choices will be pretty stark - be ready for an inference bill similar in size to the rent on the cute SoMa studio I'm sitting in as I write this, or ... the price of failure is just too ugly to contemplate.

Comment Look up "human shields" (Score 1) 255

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

Comment Comparing your accent to claimed residence history (Score 1) 255

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

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