Don't put China and North Korea into the same basket. Both claim to be communist, neither one is.

North Korea is a nightmarish totalitarian regime with hereditary succession. China is a state capitalism regime which can hardly be described as totalitarian anymore - there is a convergence in totalitarianism right now, between China and western states, where China becomes (slightly) less totalitarian and western states (with USA as a sad example) become more and more totalitarian.

The difference with western capitalism is how the elite is organized: in China, is organized as the "Communist Party" (with nothing communist in it), where the political power keeps the economic power under control (and reaping the benefits of course).

In the West, the elite is organized as a more complicated system of entanglement between economic and political power, and in some cases engulfs even Mafia-like power structures.

In both systems, if you don't have any power or money (who are interchangeable, like mater and energy in physics) you are fucked.

As for the Chinese not knowing anything about the outside world, maybe this is true for people living in remote rural places, but this is true for any country. There are millions of Chinese students and immigrants all over the world. Millions of Chinese tourists travel around the world (I see many of them in Athens). I even have a friend married to a Chinese who came in Greece as a student. Do you really believe that all these people are permitted to travel just because they are loyal members of the Communist Party?

I believe that as long as a Chinese citizen is not questioning the regime, is free to do as he/she likes. Much like non political people in western states, who are just minding their own work. But in China, and even in most western states, if you are marked as a "dissident", you are in trouble.

Isn't what Port Authority Firefox plugin does?

"Blocks websites from using javascript to port scan your computer/network and dynamically blocks all LexisNexis endpoints from running their invasive data collection scripts. "

In my case, the DMARC reports from MS mail services are always marked as spam by Spamassassin because:

BASE64_LENGTH_79_INF BODY: base64 encoded email part uses line length greater than 79 characters
MIME_BASE64_TEXT RAW: Message text disguised using base64 encoding
FORGED_SPF_HELO

This doesn't happen with any other provider (Gmail's reports are fine).

So, replacing today's deterministic compilers with non-deterministic, hallucinating compilers while having to learn new programming languages with undocumented, fuzzy syntax?

We are becoming Elois, but without the gardens. The question is who will be the Morlocks.

I misparsed that as RSCS messaging... :-)

In Greece, sociology and two more social science classes have been cancelled in schools since 2020, because, as a minister of the far-right government said in TV, "sociology turns our kids to communists!"

Sociology has been replaced by... Latin!

Of course, the religious indoctrination lesson is still mandatory for 2 hours every week for seven out of twelve grades.

LLMs look to me like just another layer of abstraction, another compiler that outputs code to be compiled. Prompts, framework, libraries, code, binary.

But this time it's non-deterministic and unpredictable. Imagine writing a program in C and then having to check the correctness of the binary (as machine code, not the functionality) after every compilation. And every compilation would yield a different binary for the same code. It's silly.

Best case scenario, using LLMs as a glorified search engine. But with all the crap on the Internet that it's used to train the models, I prefer to do the searching myself.

> You're wildly overestimating the complexity.

> Exactly, pretty sure I built one (from a short set of instructions) when I was 8.

I know how simple it is, I built one too when I was a kid (in the 70s). I connected it to the auxiliary port of a portable turntable (the ones where the speaker was the lid) and tuned to a classical music station playing some solo flute piece. I still remember that as the most beautiful music I ever heard.

But these days I feel that kids don't care about such things. Most adults below 40 also never cared about learning "nerdy" stuff like this. I really hope that I'm wrong, but I think that when you say "average person", you really mean "average geek".

> given how simple it is for the average person to construct an AM receiver from the most basic electronic components.

You are very optimistic about the abilities of the average person, aren't you? :-) We aren't in the 70's anymore.

Any benefits must be important enough to offset the huge damage of the extreme resource consumption. Are the services of an emergency holographic doctor enough to offset the environmental damage caused by the energy consumption of the computing and other systems needed to sustain it?

> They need a handful of engineers to keep it all running. Just a handful. Then a few sex slaves. Maybe if you keep sucking up to them you can be one of those lucky engineers, or one of the sex slaves...

Don't forget the cops/soldiers. They will need lots of them to deal with the insurrections, at least in the first years.

> Advancements in Manufacturing lead to reducing to a 5 Day / 40 Hour work week about 100 years ago

No, the social movements and especially the workers' movement led to to this. If the wealthy and the powerful were not a bit afraid, you would still be working 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.

It seems that you haven't used Slackware for a long time. It's much easier to install and maintain now, with slackpkg+ with the extra binary packages repositories, sbopkg for compiling applications (and their dependencies) from source or creating Slackware packages from pre-existing binaries for other distros and a very vivid support community in linuxquestions.org.

I'm using Slackware since the "hard" days, since 1997. It still just works as always and it is so much easier now that I got bored. So, I decided to try FreeBSD in a secondary pc, just for the challenge. I was disappointed. Even FreeBSD installs very easily these days (with raid and full disk encryption) and "just works".