I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.

Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.

It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.

You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.

Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.

I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.

OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.

It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.

That’s prosody and emotional language. Actually imitating these is what American movies often try to do, even if sometimes for comedy component and not well.

(And don’t ask me about imitating music, one would think music theory is something movie composers all study, yet they usually don’t bother to even look up some basics, like modes commonly used in Russian music, and the resulting soundtracks sound like some sound salad.)

These actually express the same set of feelings all humans have, not really different between Japanese, Somalian and Russian people. Except, of course, for semantic connections and references.

What I’m talking about is level above, of what’s being said in said languages.

When an American is bullshitting his superiors, he’s telling them different things than a Russian when bullshitting his own superiors. When an American is making a presentation to persuade someone of something, he’s also using different means. When an American boss is talking to people below him in hierarchy, he’s also using different means. American bosses derive their social authority through different means than Russian bosses. American prestige and Russian prestige are different. American and Russian perceptions of what looks strong are different. And some of these things are opposites, say, in American perception simplifying the matter at hand for easier comprehension by the listener is a sign of professionalism, in Russian perception it’s as if you were asking to be treated as a clown.

They show Soviet ministries’ officials as some “politicians” or “golden boys” doing their own thing and either oblivious to the matter at hand or treating it as outside their responsibility to understand, even if understanding. But that’s clearly American dynamic. First, in general narrower expertise is more normal for Americans and wider expertise is more normal for ex-Soviet people, culturally, and an ex-Soviet man would at least pretend to have knowledge of everything close to their job. Second, Soviet ministries’ officials would make careers in the areas of economy their ministries were responsible for, or, in other words, the ministry was the area of economy. A Soviet ministry official wouldn’t ask a professor about details of the task at hand, it would be the other way around, the former would be the one having more practice, and the latter would provide theory. The “politician” or the “golden boy” types wouldn’t be anywhere near ministries, they would be diplomats or somewhere in some party things or even special services or journalism. And, of course, by the time someone became a ministry official, they’d be far older than that guy in a suit in the movie. Third, the portrayal of Legasov is almost a caricature for ex-Soviet people, they portrayed him kinda similar to Sakharov, but Sakharov behaved still stronger and simpler, first, and Sakharov had made that funny bomb before becoming a dissident, second, to make that image respectable. Real-life Legasov behaved, well, like a normal Soviet man. And he wasn’t a dissenter.

There are many such things, if they had just looked at some footage with the people the characters were meant to portray, or followed real events more closely, they’d have a good shot for free, without understanding such nuance. But they decided to make up a plot with some message, around just a few events, and that plot turned out something completely American.

That was also the situation with asking about stuff on the town square before the internet and even newspapers and radio. And after that too.

Was being solved by library classification techniques, catalogues, encyclopedia.

Bill Gates, however one might hate him, really likes those things and says useful things on them. In general I think he’s hated more than he should. I mean, OK, shouldn’t have used monopoly practices, then he wouldn’t be.

We’ve had like two decades of machines doing that job well enough for us on a limited amount of pathways and subjects, degrading the results, and we’ve gotten used to expectation that it’ll always work.

Search engines (not all of them, but what end users call that) are not sustainable. In general, automated search, solving end user goals, in the open spaces of objects and tokens and associations.

Web directories and web catalogues were. But where with phone books people knew that some things stop being reachable and the person on the other side is too in the real world, and they might die or change address and phone number next day, - with the Internet people have gotten used to some permanence and easiness which don’t really exist.

So - this is all just the life cycle of the global intercommunication, I think the problem will solve itself.

We hate what those companies are doing because that stops being useful for us. When the Internet is only useful for b2b visit card exchanges and digital marketplaces, it’s not the Internet anymore, it’s Commercenet. When it’s enough of a Commercenet, it’ll be the natural incentive for a big enough amount of people to make and use a different system, which won’t turn into Commercenet in the same way, because the Commercenet already exists and attracts its own users. It will probably turn into something else, like Socialnet or Ragenet or Idiocracynet, but then there will be future other iterations of the same process.

It’s the way evolution optimizes, for humans we can think Internet’s architecture is good enough for everyone, but in the nature it’s better for some uses than the other ones. There are different species of cats on the planet, sometimes coexisting in the same spaces. It’ll be the same way.

One can also expect similar developments from portable computers and portable communicators, usually the same thing.

I mean, if we are taking this outside of the social context, surely they are using AI. A hydraulic integrator is AI. A mechanical calculator with drum registers is AI (I think the person who created one of the more popular producers of those in the 50s was an Auschwitz survivor, talk about weirdly chosen area of business, - though maybe he saw personal calculators as the opposite of big machines usable for bad stuff).

Of course they are using AI.

They might even be using ML in correct ways here.

I mean, again - philosophically you can’t trust laws you infer from data on sufficiently complex processes, which is why Monte-Carlo method should be used in modeling and human brain in design. These things might be used to speed up design, but making correct constraints for that will probably take more effort than just using humans all the way.

That movie gave me uncanny valley feeling all the time, they’ve managed to make some of the shots look very Soviet, but each and every social interaction felt so thickly American that it’s completely alien to anyone even from Western Europe, not even talking about ex-USSR.

Actually a feeling similar to looking at AI slop …

And the main characters’ personalities are all wrong. And the social dynamic leading up to the situation. And the bullshit component - American bullshit and Soviet bullshit are two completely different languages. You should compare something American on “real army life” to Russian movies like “Little green elephant” and “DMB”. The difference will be similarly radical, even bigger perhaps.

Looking at real tapes with Legasov talking to liquidators and such is eerie too, those moments with him saying with smiles that “like with everything, it might be good in smaller amounts”. But it’s entirely different.

Wii classic controller was very nice.

and sticking a finger to law enforcement

No. They are just doing it differently - they have proprietary p2p networks and such doing obscure shit. They are similar to Telegram in that. Good to their users as much as they need that to maintain balance of interests.

There were such very, very bad people, called German National-Socialists. One thing commonly correctly said is that their party’s influential figures were very intelligent, very different from their regular stormtrooper idiots and modern neo-Nazi idiots.

So - this effect of intercommunication is what they had in mind when building their ideology. They also used terms from electrical engineering to describe their policies. We literally live in the world where National-Socialism won, because what the Internet is was the main component of their imagined system. Except, of course, for the racist and genocidal parts, but that happens too, just silently. Such a world encourages these things.

It’s worked so perfectly that we have “natural” and “grassroots” movements organizing using that architecture, structure and logic. If there’s not going to be some new technological and social revolution, undoing this, then the trajectory is obvious.

It’s not a “situation”, it’s normal, it’s common sense that when, say, you plant something to a bigger pot and said something’s roots occupy the space they are given, you are unlikely to successfully move it to a smaller pot.

Or, say, when you’ve got an addiction, - your brain has neural pathways or something grown accustomed for the stimuli you regularly give it, - and then suddenly withdraw on it, say, 3 blocks of sugar every day, but then a day without sugar at all, you are going to have a bad migraine. Or if you are an alcoholic, you might feel bad enough to start breaking things around you.

All the mid-XX century science fiction treated imaginary systems like our Internet as something that grows and dies and is never relied upon as the communication system. Similarly with things developed with such as a given. Similarly with anything that can be compared to a system of roots.

Yes, of course, if you ruin it all every 10 years, like kicking an ant hive, having such complex tall projects might not be an option, but do we really need that, or were Amiga Workbench and Windows 3.11 generally good enough?

We are a tower of Babel civilization, that can’t try new things because of being terribly afraid of losing all the legacy of one humongous root system. This is an illusion, everything requires maintenance, and keeping that ziggurath from crumbling sucks same or maybe bigger resources to maintain it than rebuilding a completely new one every decade, metaphorically. Except the latter would allow us to feel creators with free minds, and also avoid the problem in the post, and the former is perpetual intellectual humiliation.

It’s technically a Czech invention, the word is “defenestration”.

Dunno, my perception of Nordic countries has always been that they have (of course, they’re human) corruption, they have organized crime and they have all kinds of social rot, but they also have no reservations in admitting having those or barriers at discussing and trying to help those, which was the reason for nicer things in their societies. Though inside that perception Denmark has always been the worst.

Still, it’s all dynamics, and of course thinking you’re set causes failures.

Russian money laundering is honestly not as big a problem as the degree of penetration of Russian state secret agents, which both inside Russia and outside is beyond what you’d reasonably expect. If you think a 13 years old girl can’t be an agent, you’re wrong. If you think such agents can’t be a common enough thing, you’re wrong. If you think it’s limited to Russian/ex-USSR nationals and their relatives, you’re wrong.

And that’s the state of affairs during late USSR, these services haven’t become less professional, the world since then was changing fast enough to sharpen them, but also in ways where they always had the resources to survive hardship and learn.

I don’t know what the supreme goals of what one can call Russia’s deep state are, and whether I would consider them something good or bad, but I’m sure western reactions to their actions are all 10-20 years late.

Humanity is progressing all the time one way or another. Also corporation is a word with far wider meaning than often used, a university is a corporation, a security service is a corporation, a military is a corporation with plenty of subcorporations with their own esprit de corps, and even a network of friends playing DND is a corporation, not even talking about religious sects.

And all these corporations function, in regards to cronyism and and quid-pro-quo and silent erosion of mechanisms aimed at transparency and resilience, in absolutely the same way.

So - even in this interpretation there were people agreeing with you, which are now called “not proper communism”, who have ruined all the corporations they could find, have built their own one corporation aimed at first taking power and then fixing the world, it has diverged in a few directions, fostering under their umbrella a few other corporations along the way, and in the end result the territories which those people controlled are still pretty corporate. Except with very peculiar backbones of their organized crime, with traits of a religious sect, which can be traced back to those revolutionaries. There are even a few secret services which have been abolished or merged into other secret services, but in fact still function and their members elect their leaders. It’s scary, ironic, even beautiful, and honestly I respect those people who can keep a tradition even if membership in their structure has nothing to do with money and power anymore.

But you should notice how when trying to build a social mechanism to impose your will upon the world, like, for example, to kill all corporations, you are building a corporation.

I’ve used more words than needed to say this.

and the robots are going to be plentiful because once enough of the process of making a robot becomes automated, the cost of it will go to zero.

That’s wrong, new layers of generalization do you know what? They make the thing cheaper or more expensive depending on the balance between the buyer and the seller, which is changed. Nothing more.

And suppose you’re the all-powerful and simultaneously benevolent seller, as a thought experiment. The thing becomes cheaper or more expensive based on its applicability to tasks and your ability to generalize that.

It’s a big matter, manual labor and trades are the part of economies least affected by centralized control and computerization. With software development you can’t replace people with chatbots. But with repeating manual tasks like replacing a window or painting a wall - possible. I mean, no, I don’t think that’s possible either, too many small complications. I don’t know what Elon is on again, of course you need some substances to keep you going in this world when you’re autistic, none of us will judge him for that.

Anyway, your direction of thought is kaboom idiotic, see, you’re as valuable as you’re needed, everything else is driven by that. I mentioned autistic people, well, most people not autistic don’t even notice how rules of dignity and morality they start applying only the layer above their basic one, of social hierarchy and power and alliances. Elon is known to be autistic and there’s a trillion in the title, so he really might believe what he’s selling, but those of us without trillions or even measly billions should know better.

So - robots fulfilling demand mean people not being in demand. That sucks.

I think they are more conscious than to be driven by small margins (another example of such underestimation is Lenin’s “they’ll sell us the rope we’ll use to hang them”).

It’s like boiling frogs - a very slow process of attracting users, slowly killing competition and diversity, slowly making the ecosystem more and more controlled, then slowly making “neutral” systems not neutral anymore (like those features of Chrome making security exceptions for Google services found a few years ago), and slowly desensitizing people to leaps of faith they do trusting Google (and other companies), while the trust accumulates into total control.