Except the USA too makes small drones. It’s asymmetric, shields are temporarily useless, as if your adversary were no longer shooting arrows or soft lead musket rounds, using rifles with fast piercing rounds instead (I know there were shields against rifle rounds in WWI, just didn’t work well enough, because those were too heavy).

Sometimes empires crash because of such tendencies, but we are talking about the empire which is propelling them, so - no. They’ll just start clearing trade routes with their own cheap autonomous weapons, probably.

Might be genocide involved. Or perhaps with modern precision that won’t even be required.

That’s bad, but good, at least not in every metric this reduces inequality of real power.

Almost that ancap dream of ancaps 3d-printing small drones keeping the statists in line, a peer-to-peer revolution, so to say, a smoothie anarchist rebellion, to abolish the cryptocurrencies’ Sound Toll.

I know that always seemed fake and childish (I liked the idea, but still), except looking how that really can eventually start happening with propagation of such power, I’m not sure it is.

The description you are replying to is more fundamental.

Already doing it. Such things being openly marketed and discussed in news mean only that they are commonplace for all the governments having the money.

Notice how Web’s popularity and stagnation coincided with stagnation of politics. It seems to be natural, but there is the undercurrent, I think, of civil societies having become more predictable and invisibly regulated.

Well, I mean, in the initial stage the ground was ours, and then it was theirs, and then it was ours again, and then the somewhat longer period of it being theirs started and it is still so. Things change. Not always for worse. People sometimes feel as if the last flip of the coin were the last flip of the coin, period. That’s usually wrong.

They are smart walking into that. They want exactly that. It’s you for whom it’s a dystopia.

Honestly I no longer hope for propagation of such abilities to create feedbacks negating them.

Seems to be too much power on the side of centralizing them and using them to build perfect totalitarianism with no laws, because administrative rule doesn’t require laws, just decisions. Laws are required in systems with some power balance depending on common agreement.

At the same time there’s the much slower feedback loop of societies built that way degrading in the span of decades and societies preserving some competitiveness of will progressing. Except this will work as very slow evolutionary selection between shades of the former, because the latter won’t survive the initial stage.

I’ve just realized what this family of technologies is - it’s an attack at capitalism.

That word is hated here, but it’s generally a good thing, with one condition.

When things marketed are something possible to supply an instruction for and to teach the customers basics of telling good stuff from bad stuff, sort of good lightbulbs versus bad lightbulbs, good radio receiver versus bad one, not very deep knowledge, but high school understanding of electricity, mechanics, chemistry, stuff like that.

So most of all it’s a family of technologies good for generating “something” that looks plausible for a person about things they themselves don’t do. Meaning - deceiving laymen.

So, for the commie types, it’s partially good news - it’s their part of history finally, and partially bad news - cause the flood wall they were trying to break because they thought it spoiled the view is being finally broken from the other side by a stream of sewage.

Just a random passing thought.

Sue them.

I mean, should if you can defend your rights. Anyway, posted from Moscow, Russia, so I’m stopping.

Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.

Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.

Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.

More oligopolies than cartels, but zaibatsu are a common stereotype as something culturally normal for Japan, yes.

Of what I’ve read about Japan, a cartel being considered something bad in the society is an improvement.

Ah, yes, the bigger the company, the more willing to save something negligible on tools its business depends upon.

Honestly that’s why I wish more of FOSS were hobbyist like AROS, Haiku and such. FOSS projects shouldn’t be too readily usable by businesses, that allows bullshit shops with arrogant pigeon management to keep existing without building proper processes.

I mean, there’s some equilibrium here probably, but with what projects get from businesses bigger than nation-states using their work, - we’re far from it.

At the same time there are things like Java, PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx and so on. I don’t know.

It just seems sometimes that FOSS breaks market mechanisms in favor of big businesses not giving back to the rest of economy, which seems the opposite of its intuitively and emotionally perceived goal.

But maybe archivers are not it. Not a fan of the idea of having a set of 10 different archivers all often needed, like people did in the 90s. OK, I was a baby in the 90s. Many people didn’t have PCs in the 90s.

But can we just go back to weak connectivity (say, asynchronous message exchange of everyone to everyone via BT ; global cryptographic identities and message ids, sort of a global p2p cryptographically contracted Usenet), a zoo of common operating systems and hardware platforms, evolution, competition, geekiness, interesting things.

Efficiency of processes is different in every situation, including long-standing ones, like one area having plenty of seawater and some other area having just lots of sand, some places being moderate-temperatured and some like central Siberia with hot summers and cold winters, things like that.

Meaning that one can’t say that gas cars are “better for the planet” or “worse for the planet” than EVs. Period.

This study is true for some set of conditions, but it’s pretty clear that people referring to it will use it outside of the scope.

There are better arguments than unprovable claims. Say, EVs use “universalized” energy, that is, can be charged from the grid, while gas cars require different kinds of gas depending on the specific engine and regulatory requirements. EVs have electric machines in them, pretty similar to those in electric trains or whatever else, but that’s not as important as less wear and more universality. EVs in theory should require less maintenance, but since these are usually new fancy cool things, their electronic components might have the common downsides of all new cars. Fire hazards are different between them. On the other side, gasoline can be stored more easily.

I mean, one would think civilization can exist without choosing just one.

If it took Russia so long with far smaller military budget, for USA it would take an existential war, so abundance of funds is sort of a defense social contract. Things cost 5x what they could, but they get designed, produced, procured, maintained and combined into a system.

Unless there’s some political struggle where the old military industry supports one side and the other needs a new military.

I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.

That aside - my point is that this was expected.

And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.

WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.

Why not, WWI and WWII and things around them outdid all the scary stuff people were predicting just fine.

WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.

And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.

There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.

Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.

It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.

In that light I’m glad I never played that, living in Moscow near an internal troops division. Doesn’t matter, though, someone has.

Plus, it’s disgusting and should be illegal anywhere that it isn’t just in general. It’s weird that you’re defending it like it’s diet coke or something.

“It’s disgusting” is not quite the right argument for making something illegal.

And that “you’re defending” presupposition should honestly be your last claim in any group of people before being shown the door.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Quoting myself.

I “honestly think” each case is unique. Just like with everything else.

CP is harmful due to normalizing the thing, useful due to redirecting some of the energy people with that pathology have away from, you know, real children.