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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • It’s fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

    You need both.

    Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

    Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it’s too primitive):

    The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

    The identities should be “federated”, as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed “delete” records, and users would then not replicate “deleted” information.

    This way even when “an instance goes down” (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

    One can even make “an instance” inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

    One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what’s described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

    Dynamic websites are possible too - but I’m not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

    I’m actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

    This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.



  • Ableism is when you exclude disorders which don’t have to be excluded, that is, which don’t negatively affect one’s capabilities in some particular role.

    Disallowing blind people to drive cars is not ableism, unless there is a solid technology to convey to them all the necessary information with good enough latency.

    So - for roles of judges and other responsibilities to make principled decisions, autistic people are generally better than “normal” people. Because they choose in favor of principle in “conflict of interest” situations usually, which is also why there are no autistic people in politics.

    For roles requiring unbiased thinking, autistic people and people with ADHD are generally better than “normal” people. Due to former’s alienation from society (which is the most notable source of bias) and latter’s ability to grasp wider contexts.

    For roles where pessimism is required, most people with disorders causing alienation are better than “normal” people, other things being equal. Simply because seeing the society break from its blind zones is a useful experience.

    But that doesn’t mean not allowing an autistic person to command a fire squad is ableism.

    Or that an ADHD person probably being a very bad bookkeeper is an ableist thought.

    While assuming that someone is unfit to fulfill a social\decision-making role because they physically stink is ableist. He can have one of plenty non-mental conditions causing that. It’s simply impractical to take showers every hour.

    While saying that him being a narcissist kinda disqualifies him is not ableist. And he definitely is a narcissist with dementia.

    It’s just that both Obama and Harris and Biden behave very similarly to real people with ASPD whom I’ve met. See, ASPD is such a funny thing that people having it don’t behave weirdly. They actually are very sane and glossy in appearances, or at least normal. Except for morals and empathy.







  • They have a few legacy things working in their favor. Hardware compatibility is one, but seems to be a thing of the past now when people don’t care. Application compatibility is another, and that is with Windows, not with NT.

    And they don’t have to change the core parts, because NT is fine. Windows is not, it’s a heap of legacy, but it’s not realistically replaceable.

    Unless they develop from scratch a new subsystem, like Embrasures or Walls or Bars, and gradually deprecate Windows. Doesn’t seem very realistic too, but if they still were a software company and not a malware company, they’d probably start doing this sometime about now.







  • Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.

    What if you lose a job because of the way you voted?

    In some sense that’d be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who’d do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.

    If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.

    There’s another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it’d be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it’d be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.

    And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.

    EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.

    It’s a huge problem in today’s world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who’s considered the victim and the good guy and who’s the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.

    Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.

    And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who “testified” before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I’m not mistaken.

    So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.