I want that Web to die, die, die.

Gemini is a step in the right direction, but the new Web should be both non-extensible by design and transparently allow distributed storage, distributed untrusted computation, and separation of the concepts of a site and a machine that serves it. In other words, serverless, where websites and services and even web applications are identified cryptographically, and anybody can contribute their computing power (or storage) to a site\service\application, out of desire to help or for money. With smart contracts, ghost keys and other buzzwords I have no real idea about.

And fuck Microsoft.

They should make second dominant subject to such laws too.

And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from … something.

I think the quote that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a bit older, and said about all the lessons of history before it.

Somehow humanity doesn’t like the wisest rules out there. And prefers to read Palanick and talk about post-modernism instead of looking at the root.

It’s not snake oil. It is a way to brute force some problems which it wasn’t possible to brute force before.

And also it’s very useful for mass surveillance and war.

Tell me honestly, are you a bot or do you sincerely believe this shit and based on which qualification and experience?

Gunpowder, electricity, combustion engines, universal electronic computers, rocketry, lasers, plastics - none of these made any dramatic changes. It was all slow iterative process of fuzzy transitions and evolution.

While these made pretty fundamental impacts. Sam Altman’s company is using fuckloads of data to calculate some predictive coefficients, and the rest of its product can be done by students.

It’s just real-life power controllers trying their muscles at bending the tech industry with usual means - capturing resources and using them to assert control. There were no such resources in the beginning, and then datasets turned into something like oil.

Generally in computing (when a computer is a universal machine) everyone able to program can do a lot of things. This makes the equality there kinda inconvenient for real life bosses who can call airstrikes and deal in oil tankers.

There was the smart and slow way of killing that via slow oligopolization, but everyone can see how that doesn’t work well. Some people slowly move to better things, and some were fine with TV telling them how to live, they don’t even need Internet. All these technologies are still kinda modular and even transparent. And despite what many people think, both idealistic left and idealistic right build technologies for the same ultimate goal, so Fediverse is good and Nostr is good and everything that functions is good.

So - that works, but human societies are actually developing some kind of immunity to centralized bot-poisoned platforms.

To keep the stability of today’s elites (I’d say these are by now pretty international), you need something qualitatively different. A machine that is almost universal in solving tasks, but doesn’t give the user transparency. That’s their “AI”. And those enormous datasets and computing power are the biggest advantage of that kind of people over us. So they are using that advantage. That’s the kind of solution that they can do and we can’t.

Simultaneously to that there’s a lot of AI hype being raised to try and replace normal computing with something reliant on those centralized supply chains. Hardware production was more distributed before the last couple of decades. Now there are a few well-controllable centers. They simply want to do the same with consumer software. Because if the consumers don’t need something, they won’t have that something when they see a need.

All these aside, today’s kinds of mass surveillance can’t be done with (EDIT:without) something like that “AI”. There simply won’t be enough people to have sufficient control.

So - there are a few notable traits of this approach converging on the same interest.

It’s basically a project to conserve elites. The new generation of thieves and bureaucrats wants to become the new aristocracy.

… and reduce emissions by wasting the rest. But due to negative selection leading into that upper class they won’t be able to manage the planet further despite thinking that they can and will die of hunger eventually.

By the way, this is what we call free market.

It just pains me to see, remember Chinese websites and software around 2007-2008?

Everybody (aware) looked at that with terror.

Now it’s the same everywhere.

Could they please retire modern Windows UI design?

Those contrasting color squares are not the zen those designers think. UI layout being different in paradigm for every application is not the productivity improvement they think. Using titlebars for something other than titles and control buttons is not optimization. Those buttons being some scratches on the screen barely visible is crap from any PoV I can imagine.

And somebody should explain to them that a good design for a billboard, a good design for a glossy magazine, a good design for a shop front, a good design for an office, a good design for a videogame, a good design for a movie and a good design for a workstation are all mutually incompatible in vast majority of cases.

And again about zen, simplicity, air and all that. I understand they think they are very smart and understanding of aesthetics. But zen would be having clean window borders and clearly visible control elements, for starters. And buttons not being just color squares. And in general solutions being subordinate to functional goals of the UI being usable. Industrial ergonomics are zen.

EDIT: I know it’s offtopic, not interested - keep walking

Yes, I do think that.

I agree, this particular trait of today’s tech industry in this particular case works in our favor.

For other political and social factors - not so much.

If that happens, they are going to see a lot of things seemingly from the past connected to union activity though.

Not just strike breakers being hired (some of tech work is not that demanding in expertise, think typical Hindu web devs), but also actual spies, saboteurs, hitmen being involved, propaganda attacks, possibly legal attempts to bust unions and use of force. And, of course, crucial positions in union bureaucracy becoming attractive for organized crime (which likely has very few of people associated with it ever convicted, as in mostly invisible until it’s too late).

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Just the more adult level of the game. Considering that the tech industry is at the core of our civilization now, and considering its profits, this can get as historic as battle of the Blair mountain.

Power kills people, only they keep walking and talking after that

A-and all that money is basically scammed out of hype over something that won’t be the thing people think it will be, because that would be a magic wand for everything.

When they mean artificial intelligence, they mean some kind of self-designing civilization, except it does their bidding. Goethe’s Zauberlehrling comes to mind.

And a lot of money does find a way to do things, just like a lot of effort applied does find a way to break something. Except the curves are not linear, and no amount of effort and money has allowed us to settle Mars yet.

Seamonkey is still kinda alive.

That said, GOG releases is the most common kind on torrent trackers where there are any.

So - there is virtue to commercial concerns, but not in the way that assropes customers.

It’s really good news that there’s another company behind Wayland now.

RH frankly directs it against people using “marginal” setups and applications, thus less influenced by it, and not for some ambitious goal.

Valve tend to be well-meaning guys. Anyway, in this case it’s in their business interest to be well-meaning.

I do see why a lot of devs would ask for systemd-init: to just bundle 1 kind of service instead of a gazillion

How would that work? There were N init systems with one “main” one, now there are N+1 init systems with one “main” one, just different.

Anyway, init systems for developers being problematic seem for me a nonexistent problem. Writing a systemd unit takes less time than writing this comment with tea and buckwheat with milk as a distraction. Writing a sysvinit script takes something like that too. Same with BSD inits. Same with openrc.

While combined they take some time, packagers can do that. And even if they can’t, time spent trying to persuade others that systemd makes things easier is orders of magnitude bigger than time spent writing service scripts\templates\units.

For a company that is a monopoly - you should logically be able to, monopolies are not allowed to have biases (shouldn’t exist in the first place though).

For a company that says it’s a search engine but in fact meddles with recommendations - you should logically be able to, they are calling themselves not what they are in fact.

Both would mean putting all the big tech top management into jail, though. So no chance.