In this case it’s more like graciously providing lube to your victim.

It’s just a race. Perhaps you don’t need the biggest and newest available thing, but you also will subconsciously discard what’s “less” than what you already have or what’s normal as obsolete. This creates an engine for a race, where good faith players can’t compete.

Like with web browsers, a hypertext networked system even with advanced formatting, executable content and sandboxing can be so simple, that there’d be hundreds of independent implementations. But if you always race the de-facto standards with the speed you the monopolist group can maintain, and good faith competitors can’t, then you’ll always be the “best”.

The Matrix movie actually talks about that, with its “there’s no spoon” moment. It’s not a usual market game, it’s a meta-market game. And most people don’t understand the rules of the meta layer, being sitting ducks there.

Nobody can compete with the industry leaders on their field. And unlike with steel or gasoline or even embedded electronics production, there’s no relativity in the field at all. But the new possible fields are endless. Everyone can discover new pastures here, because it’s not discovery, it’s conception. But since that’s counterintuitive, and the network effects work on psychology too, most people are not trying.

It’s a bit like military logic, there were Western “controlled escalation” doctrines, because slow gradual escalation works in favor of the side with most resources, thus the West, and the Soviet “scientific-technical revolution” doctrines, which despite sounding stupid is a correct name, when you’re the second in the race, your best chance lies in being unpredictable, unreasonable and changing the rules. One of the reasons Soviet doctrines gained such a crappy reputation as compared to Western ones is that, well, they are kinda similar to preventively going all out guns-a-blazing before you are forced to fight by the enemy’s rules, which requires willpower from those making the decisions (and also capability to, well, do anything scientific and technical, LOL), and which means you prepare for some sort of general battle (that be nuclear war, or short highly concentrated offensives, such stuff) at the expense of “aggressive negotiations” scenarios. So - in our time anyone trying to heal the Silicon Valley’s effects is playing USSR and can only expect anything good from breaking rules.

How high detail if 300 dpi is already almost impossible to separate into dots for a human eye?

I agree, unfortunately things only keep existing when there’s balance between their sides in power.

Such balance is - those benefiting from copyright have a lot to offer and threaten to those making copyright, and the other way around.

It’s all military logic now. 50 years ago it could have been solved by a popular movement, now any movement really threatening copyright will have its figures murdered left and right.

My dad around 1993 designed a cipher better than RC4 (I know it’s not a high mark now, but it kinda was then) at the time, which passed audit by a relevant service.

My dad around 2003 still was intelligent enough, he’d explain me and my sister some interesting mathematical problems and notice similarities to them and interesting things in real life.

My dad around 2005 was promoted to a management position and was already becoming kinda dumber.

My dad around 2010 was a fucking idiot, you’d think he’s mentally impaired.

My dad around 2015 apparently went to a fortuneteller to “heal me from autism”.

So yeah. I think it’s a bit similar to what happens to elderly people when they retire. Everything should be trained, and also real tasks give you feeling of life, giving orders and going to endless could-be-an-email meetings makes you both dumb and depressed.

Don’t take it literally.

I mean, USA would probably have a better society were it carpet-bombed and then rebuilt. Or at least were it to experience a big war on its territory. Like, despite their flaws, many of the EU countries, and many others. Many of your problems are from misunderstanding dignity and strength ; war teaches you to respect the weak and to understand that it’s a sacrifice to be strong. Unfortunately that means a lot of murder, and to do a lot of murder, you pay with ever more murder. So I don’t want for that to happen, but at the same time I’m not sure if there’s even any other way to teach these things.

You know, for those of us who are not Americans, such statements sound completely devoid of empathy, as if something could only worry you if it “were the future for America”. And it really seems a pattern. It’s as if any crime were only real for you all there if it were somehow directed against America. I’m not even talking about being tone deaf, it’s just really strange how Americans think.

As if anybody in the Silicon Valley worried about privacy and human rights.

It’s funny how one immigrant country is “securing homeland” from another immigrant country. At some point in the late XIX century US, Argentina, Brazil seemed similarly attractive directions for the “give me your tired …” thing.

I had two books called “anthology of romantic and adventure”, pretty much only centered around sea travel, it had both poetry of a fascist Russian white movement member who was a submariner and “Tamango” by Merimee and Vysotsky’s songs and Poe’s short horror stories and Melville’s “Benito Sereno” racist story, in general a pretty equal mix of radical views of life, honestly, both the good and the bad ones.

So - it’s mostly rather old stuff, as you might guess, and the image of all those overseas colonized lands is somehow similar and blended. Now you wouldn’t think that there’s much similarity between USA and Brazil and Argentina, LOL.

OK, I just got carried away. Perhaps that moment when your whole country started feeling “settled” is when the bad things started accumulating (other than lynchings of blacks and lobotomies of autists, I mean). And started feeling less of a union and more of one country.

EDIT: Forgot South Africa.

It’s as if we lived in a very silent storm. (Thinking of that moment with Putin and Xi caught discussing how today one can live till 150 ; I don’t think Trump will last that much, but someone else from their crowd - easily.)

I prefer disagreeing on philosophy and agreeing on perception of mass murder, than the other way around.

I can assure you as someone from Silicon Valley that there is literally no single headline that can possibly convey the pure evil that is Peter Thiel. He literally believes that …

Fuck, you spoiled my plan to drop a nuke there.

Copyright in general is about suppressing and abusing competition, there’s a little bit of difference now that the old Victorian-style copyright laws lasted as long as the author, more or less, and every legal action was taken through a court, not like these letters of happiness.

It’s funny how we seem similar to the pre-WWI mood of “everything has been invented, abolish patents”, I wonder if the “pre-WWI” part is too going to rhyme. Hope that not, of course, but most of the innovation seems to be in direct or indirect warfare (all of big tech is honestly that). And there’s one nation whose elites seem to make weird destructive moves. And which is on the down trajectory in its GDP relative to the world for the last 50 years. And which has the world’s biggest military spending.

After all, humans need a reminder that for the plethora of technologies that seem like a favorable to them weapon unseen before, there are also similarly many technologies that may be unfavorable to them weapons unseen before.

Nazi Germany used radio and encryption and maneuverability and wonderful air force to achieve successes, then the other sides used radars and computers and mass modular production and MLRS’es.

Perhaps the current rotting of copyright and patent system is because the elites think they don’t need more natural peaceful development. Global bloodletting usually heals that kind of ideas. Some things can only be learned on your own experience.

Yes. An AI alternative to LOIC is desperately needed, for every humanist with a computer to run and to attack the enemy with streams and streams of textual and visual garbage.

Junior devs and sysadmins who do not much very useful stuff yet, but get some basic experience. And people whose main required traits are human voice and following script.

Transient processes are a thing, one can have plenty of middle and senior devs and sysadmins, with the economy not producing new ones anymore. So the employers are hiring those, and replacing juniors with AI. Whether that works I’m not sure.

So at some point the AI bubble will be over (at least in dev and sysadmin and such work), but there will be fewer developers, and there might eventually be a situation where there are fewer qualified developers in the economy overall. Which would give centralized corporate things a market advantage over smaller non-corporate things, due to cost of development growing after the fall happening now.

While for some not very qualified jobs humans won’t be needed anymore - while that “AI” is expensive, it might really be, even after the bubble crash, more affordable than hiring a human (in a western country) for a bullshit job - except in everything I’ve read those bullshit jobs were treated as social responsibility to teach work ethic to growing generations, that weird mix of individualist and working class themes in books describing pre-Depression USA. Yes, individualism is important and being self-reliant is important, but even that protestant ethic wasn’t about capitalism more than it was about dignity and hard work.

I think Silicon Valley is consciously playing Asimov’s Foundation with our planet (seeding technologies affecting humanity’s development by some schedule with expected global results), except where Asimov’s Foundation was about preserving knowledge and civilization, they are moving in the opposite direction. That is, they may not understand it. They may think they are building that sci-fi empire the Foundation begins with. But in actuality they are breaking concrete and steel things that work and replace them with paper huts kinda resembling something that would work better. Metaphorically.

They don’t understand what an empire is, neither the “mandate of heaven” kind nor the “unity of civilization” kind (heck, even the Soviet covertly Christian “building the city of sun” kind, like in Vysotsky’s song - “… но сады сторожат и стреляют без промаха в лоб”). You don’t build an empire by burning libraries and poisoning discourses, you also don’t build an empire by making every its citizen uncertain whether they are a free man or a slave (it’s a common misconception to start an attempt at an empire from points where previous empires failed ; that state is usually expected to fail again for the same reasons).

Why is it that in the rest of the world American propaganda was efficient in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and stopped being efficient in our time? They didn’t have that “sophisticated methodology” then, they have it now

China has its own problems.

Not really. The best US propaganda has always been looking strong, rich and real, if too glossy. Also being too different (it doesn’t stop to surprise me how people speaking English can be so different from British people that honestly I, living in Russia, feel more similar to the latter than Americans are ; and nobody notices that from culture and arts, it takes being exposed to many real Americans to see that this is not just in movies), thus seeming some magical other world where the impossible is possible.

(Plus a bit of the legacy of “give me your tired …” and “the new world” seeming like a place for those fleeing tyranny, like some new normal free life out there, even if not perfect ; it’s fascinating how this image hasn’t been true for more than 50 years, yet it lives on in books which much of the humanity still reads, and is perceived like real. This stopped being true when my grandma was younger than I am now.)

Also the lame anti-US propaganda had an effect of people subjected to it being ready to believe anything opposing it. Like much of Soviet propaganda about the West was honestly true, but it took another 20 years for the majority of ex-Soviet people to understand that, after they understood that Western propaganda about USSR was true as well.

While the arts working like that are a short period which coincided with a short explosion of the level of life in the West (followed by it falling again), decaying of the second world, loss of faith into any kind of bright future and socialism, thus turning to the past (things like “the American dream”, memory of times when USA was half the world GDP, trying to find good and nice in the stereotypical, demonized in the past, images).

And - important - the Internet, where the famous “network effect” works, and what is the network effect? The network effect means that the one starting something gets all the sprouts. 1 man creates a network and invites 99 people, each with their own culture, but in the network the culture of that 1 man will dominate, because they will come to that one man.

The conclusion is the same, though, poisoning the Internet with slop means slowly killing it. And slop is the opposite of what made the USA seem strong. It was “real” vs “fake”.

Soviet industries were “fake” - lots of stuff broken fresh from the factory, requiring some tinkering to make it work ; Soviet computers were “fake” - other than the previous point, rare and expensive, and a household didn’t have one ; Soviet economy was “fake” - imitating a real one with “funds” and “wooden” rubles, while having deficits ; Soviet politics were “fake” - one party, and in any democratic procedure if you’d diverge from the commonly accepted line, you’d have social problems (reminds you of anything?) ; Soviet ideology was “fake” - look, we’ve been building space communism for 30 years, and the result is that we have ICBMs and “Pravda” newspapers and canned “sea cabbage” in stores and Lenin worship, but don’t have normal toilet paper, sausages and jeans, and notably - no space communism ; and even Soviet culture was “fake” - those sour tones, that stoneface acting, that boredom, while there in the West they have rock-n-roll and action movies and magazines with naked women.

And the USA most of all seemed “how a superpower should really be”, except look at it now. It still is stronger, but it’s undergoing a similar transformation as the USSR, and the problem is that USA’s civilization offering was that it’s immune to that. And the USSR was internationalist, while the USA’s even official offering is “we are your masters and better than you, fuck you little bitch, and if you behave very well you might immigrate here in the future”. Somehow Soviet people thought USA was internationalist too, but the Internet broke that for most of the planet.

And it didn’t colonize Mars. And it didn’t unite the humanity in one republic with everyone equal in rights. And it didn’t fix war, hunger and barbarism. So just like USSR’s promise of space communism expiring, USA’s promise of space liberal capitalism expires now.

Basically USA’s elites were not content with the amount of power they had over their country and the world, and decided to expand it (via the Internet), thus removing their main strength.

Lastly propaganda campaigns is something that was best done with the old kind of connectivity, when they only had to influence the adversarial regimes (Soviet elites, for example), and those regimes would then influence their own population ; in the USSR the rosy picture of the USA was most of all produced by its elites trying to copy the USA or to get a piece of it in the form of jeans etc. The people who are going to design\train\direct the tools for these campaigns simply can’t understand all the complexity of another culture, to influence people living in it. They are deliberately choosing a far more complex task, when the easier one yielded good enough results. In the hope of achieving some sort of world domination by a shortcut instead of, well, fixing their economy and doing it the old-fashioned way.

You’re being deliberately obtuse.

I’m being patient, trying to help you understand. Not accepting bare statements is not being obtuse.

Imagine saying this about Ukraine pre-invasion.

This comparison is delusional. USSR was already ruined by 1989. The question was only where to go from there. You are comparing some of its systems conclusively crashing to a war.

What happened in 1991 is that there was narrow balance on the consensus on a new union treaty, but the GKChP coup attempt (real or not) shattered that balance, allowing leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to sign its dissolution just so, and nobody protested.

They didn’t have the mandate for that, but the Soviet society in general was shaken by those few days of tanks on the streets and jammers being turned on first in a few years. Nobody wanted a totalitarian state back (after “glasnost” policy).

So - before the coup attempt most of the union voted for its preservation (meaning a new union treaty, leaving things as they are wasn’t an option, simply because nothing worked). After the coup you’d be hard pressed to find anyone supporting its preservation.

Before the coup and during it the center also soiled its pants by trying to solve all ethnic conflicts with similar elegance (enraging locals, committing some crimes against civilians, then fucking right off) - them stopping the pogroms in Baku was probably the only bright spot (it’s officially a day of mourning for Azeris, they call it the Black September, and western politicians too mourn those poor looters raping and burning Armenians all over the city, and condemn Soviet troops ; BTW, I mentioned Lebed before - he was the commander of that force).

So in 1991 Yeltsin was a hero (unfortunately).

Now between 1991 and 1993 the “shock therapy” and privatization happened, conducted in such a way that by 1993 like half of the populace thought that it’s been enough. The other half kinda thought the same, but was more frightened of something like united communist and neo-Nazi reaction, thus supporting Yeltsin.

It has to be clarified that in the crisis of 1993 the parliament really did consist of mostly communists and neo-Nazis, a really weird hybrid. While Yeltsin’s supporters seemed “normal”, and just for some liberal democracy.

The constitutional court ruled that both presidential and parliament snap elections must be held, thus rotating both parties of the crisis, but then Yeltsin, as you’ve mentioned, shelled the parliament building and had his way.

And like since 1993 to the 1996 election there was outrage over such a resolution of it all, and the 1996 election saw first widespread use in Russia of USA-style political campaigning, and there were protests, and and many people thought the election was stolen and Zyuganov actually won, but Zyuganov removed himself from that debate, so it was Yeltsin’s victory in the end.

Then, yeah, that clan sort of cemented their rule (and power in media) enough to successfully present Putin, well, as the second best thing after communists winning instead of Yeltsin in 1996, playing on resentment, and thus he won his only real election.

The reason I’ve described all this is to explain that it was a gradual process, not some immediate apocalypse. And yes, in 1991 it went the wrong way, and in 1993 again the wrong way. But in the 1989 it didn’t, and, say, when they talk about looting and ruin of Soviet industries - that too was happening gradually. Many of those actually stopped existing in the 00s, surviving 90s and even functioning well enough.

And about level of life - I don’t think you realize how much higher it became in the 00s in Russia as compared to both 90s and Soviet 80s.

You definitely got fed a load.

You didn’t yet specify where.

Boris Yeltsin had to shell Parliament into submission to prevent himself from being removed.

Correct, that happened in year 1993, which is the reason for me having it as a separation point.

A year later, Russians were in Chechnya doing what Americans would repeat in Iraq ten years later.

No. First Chechen war was a failure with many human losses, newspapers and TV (including state channels) and associations of soldiers’ mothers and such were howling both at the operation itself and at the losses, and it ended with Khasavyurt accord signed by general Lebed on Russia’s behalf (he was quite popular, BTW, and held pacifist enough views, being himself a participant of the war in Afghanistan ; later became a politician and died in a helicopter crash).

If anything, First Chechen war showed that Russian society does still have some spine.

And the Second Chechen war happened after a few people (one can say politicians) visible since late 80s were killed, and power balance changed.

That doesn’t change the fact that censorship existed in the USSR, freedom of movement inside the country was limited, and political parties other than the CPSU didn’t exist. While roughly between 1989 and 2012 Russian society had freedom of thought at least.

Like, what on earth do you think Interior Ministry Order 870 was in response to?

It’s year 2002, when Putin still hasn’t destroyed his (oligarchic, and honestly now those people don’t seem much nicer) opposition, and federal troops in the Northern Caucasus were in some regards similar to an occupying force. I think it was in response to that, but also, as you might have noticed, these people don’t need formalities to get something done.

I don’t know what you’re trying to say. If you are somehow imagining USSR before breakup as something like the USA of today, just communist, I’m afraid it was not. It was a country almost entirely living in “safe poverty”, where you wouldn’t generally starve, but other than that it was pretty depressive. I mean, you should watch some Soviet movie classics, even the more cheerful kind will educate you on that.

The 90s were a failure of trying to fix that thing when it stopped working. Yes, it was a catastrophe, but the USSR before it wasn’t some heaven on earth or even a good place to live. Take Chikatilo (the serial murderer) - one suspect before him was tortured for admission of guilt and executed.