Journal Journal: After 19 years I have come to the conclusion that LinkedIn was a waste of time. 1
I had my suspicions, but I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. So for any of you out there wondering how this journal worked out, Web 2.0 is garbage.
https://slashdot.org/journal/161630/web-20-business-networking-is-it-useful-at-all
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.
Comment Re:2023 (Score 1) 26
Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Submission + - New Freenet Network Launches With River Group Chat (freenet.org)
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.
Submission + - Hacker Dressed as the Pink Ranger Takes Down White Supremacist Websites Live (gizmodo.com)
Comment Re:You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score 1) 72
I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.
Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.
All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.
Comment I don't think he's far off. (Score 2) 129
Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.
No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.
If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.
Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.
Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.
Comment This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score 4, Insightful) 141
If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.
I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.
Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.
I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.
Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.
If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.
Comment Re:China (Score 1) 278
Why?
That's just how the world works son. It may not align with you're particular view of what is rational, but rivalry and prestige have greater power than your worldview. And they always will.
Comment Re:What about Netherlands? (Score 1) 61
Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.
Comment Re:What about Netherlands? (Score 2) 61
Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.
In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.
If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.
What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?
Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.
Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 14
Ahh found the 2b2t player.
Comment This is such a weird thread (Score 3, Insightful) 91
I've been a
This site started off as somewhat libertarian anarchy. The old adage of, "We just move packets, any inspection of content is irrelevant" Granted, there is some content that is truly horrible, reprehensible, with IRL victims, but at the time of 1mbps internet connections it was deemed, "Too much overhead" for deep packet inspection.
Yet here we are close to 30 years later. 3 letter agencies routinely install their servers in ISP's to do just that. Speaking of ISP's, what ever happened to the 1000's we used to have? Seems like the choices either died out or were bought up. Internet is no longer an ala-cart option of free thought and speech, but rather the bourgeoisie hidden microphone installed on every computer, every phone, designed to listen to your every thought and whim. Even as I type this now, I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere, who is not
We used to keep our thoughts and politics private. I never remember my parents, or my parents friends, or my friends parents talking about politics as much as we do now. It just seems like this thirst has been created in the collective consciousness that we have to share. Why? So a bunch of people we never met, or cared about prior to this, our facebook "friends" or our instagram "followers" can shower us with clicking a graphic of a thumb pointed up? The pavlovian response generated I guess in some ways can trace its roots back to here. It's to late for Karma, but if I had *just* commented when this article was hot, I'd be refreshing this comment to see if it got up or down votes.
I hope we can break free from this as a society.
Comment Re:The train fad won't last (Score 1) 140
It's almost like you're a bot that didn't read my comment.
You said:
>Gas was cheap
I said: personal autonomous electric air travel
You said:
> Furthermore you have to figure in the cost of your labor in operating the vehicle
And I said: Cars too will also see improvements in AI and self-driving.
Like I said, the future will be personal AI driven autonomous electric vehicles. Have you seen how cheap Chinese EV's are?