psiconaut

jokes aside, and perhaps romantizicing noisy channels, but the fact that communication was not guaranteed maybe made it more appealing (thinking 56k modems or long-wave radio).

But still, not all blocks are born equal. That's a bit of beating around the bush to avoid going one level up in the abstraction of information controls. There's a thin line between content moderation at the platform level and mandatory hijacking of the DNS system via legal means.

If you squint, they are just a different configuration in the phase space of distributed technical systems, corporations operating in nation-states, and national laws.

(I agree with you about authoritarianism in a political sense, but I'm trying to look at the informational "water" in which we're swimming in).

You say "banned", but that is not quite the same as "censored". Just try and search, you will see the US "bans" and China or Iran "censor". Perhaps one regime's "censorship" is experienced as "lawfully banned" from within the context of their legal and cultural system.

And no, I don't see why would I keep my edgy observations to myself. That would be self-censorship :)

What I mean is: maybe it's not about protecting "their" humans (from what, exactly?), but protecting "their" corporations. Which is a very different goal.

Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

I just found out there's a rust port: https://github.com/microsoft/rusty-radamsa

To be honest, I see a continuum between using spellchecker, grammarly, or anything that comes above. You seed the intention, and you get an improved result - by means of huge datasets.

In a way, the hollywood machinery has been doing A/B testing on the likelihood to get a human brain hooked on the way to tell a story - structurally, there are not so many different stories. This only removes the need to have monkeys at the typing machine.

And yes, I'm being slightly sarcastic. But only a tiny bit. That way you can be sure it's a human writing this.

It is my impression that, at least on the topic of climate modelling, climate change denialism (which, frankly, is less and less common among educated population) was sustained by the rhetoric about models not being certain about linking anthropic change and its effects.

So at least here I see that better understanding (accuracy/reliability) about the climate system (which the azimuth group claims to have contributed to, if I remember correctly) might have a direct effect on, at least, social perception of the uncertainty surrounding science...

All this to say: some social attractors are way more attractive than others (that's why they are "dark" patterns). Only physical constrains will do the trick, I'm afraid.

It's a G2 event (moderate). G5 is the highest.

I wonder if some of the nerdiest corners of the internet from nowadays do not make the exciting 90s pale in comparison (all this looks like aspects of a potential renaissance).

As hobbies, they all sound amazing. Even though, or perhaps due to their apparent futility. "Secession from the broadcast" and "the knowledge" come to mind. A possibility, among many others.

For sure it all depends on how you define "basic needs", and how do you divide "work time" from "leisure time".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#%22W...

At some moment I've heard of more recent studies about the myth of the increase in leisure time, but I don't manage to find any good reference now. In any case, I suspect Graeber had a point.

First time I hear the expression, but it might be key to unlock any action.

So yeah, maybe not everyone, but the reward matrix in this game makes very difficult to ignore all of them.

Today, many people are experiencing very unlikely events, unknown to them and to previous generations. While you cannot experience a trend, you do modulate your perception about what an improbable likelihood feels like. That, I feel, is very powerful to nuance certain varieties of skepticism.

I think people don't vote (or buy, or move) based on documented trends, standard deviations or moving averages, but on subjective perception of what future will be like. That is, inter-subjective bets, updated from day to day.

I guess very few people in certain countries would have bet that they would lose their homes to a summer flood or fire.

that said, I honestly have a bad time trying to figure out if there's such a thing as "too alarmist" re. claims like "one third of projected population by 2070 will live in a nearly unlivable earth" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

His well known position (many years of pando) makes me think "yeah, right, just what we need: another conspiracy that convinces people that there's no alternative and therefore any effort to step away from silos does no good to them". Sigh.

The layperson only slightly interested in privacy does not want (or need) mathematical proofs: they operate by trust. Chains of trust in people, friends, activists, journalists or self-proclaimed "experts" that recommend tools or dissuade them from sharing too many data in the places where everybody of a certain age has to be to socialize. So this kind of gray insinuations, with big logical jumps and with zero consistent evidence (other than the US has an interest in promoting encryption and is pouring money on that horse too, probably orders of magnitude less than it pours in big monopolistic, closed source and privacy-mining tech companies) does more damage than good to the public it pretends to inform.

But hey, I guess that's the pitch from which he manages to make a living, and it must have his public, which I might not totally be getting.

Has anyone read his book by the way? Does he develop his "most of open source crypto project work for the CIA" in some interesting or novel way? Something that gets my attention is how he sells himself as unveiling the "secret" military history of the internet, when all that I read from him is public knowledge. I guess the wistleblower myth is quite attractive, even for him.