NaibofTabr

Punitive measures might feel emotionally satisfying in the moment, but what they actually incentivize is hiding the corruption and exploitation better (avoiding getting caught, rather than avoiding the bad activity in the first place). Also, while an angry mob might have a taste for violence and actually perform it for a little while, it doesn’t last and it’s not a basis for a stable government or economy.

If you want long-term stability you have to organize a system so that it incentivizes the behaviors that you want, even more than it disincentivizes the behaviors that you don’t want.

I’m not sure what that looks like in this context, in a practical sense. But ultimately the problem is that everything in our society rewards the hoarding of wealth. This is not just a problem with capitalism - every communist or supposedly socialist society ever established also rewarded hoarding of wealth.

For things to be different, actually different, a different value system with a fundamentally different reward structure needs to be established, and it needs to be competitive long-term with the current system in order to exist alongside it and/or eventually replace it.

Like I said I don’t really know what that looks like in practice. The only example I can think of is the “gift economy” described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, in which the participants in every exchange always seek to give more than they get (essentially the reverse of normal behavior).

Heh, so ALSA has kind of been the audio architecture for Linux distros since forever.

Pulse Audio was supposed to modernize audio for Linux and ultimately replace ALSA.

But last time I installed Linux on my desktop, I couldn’t get audio output from my motherboard’s TOSLINK S/PDIF port no matter which settings I changed in the GUI, uninstalled/reinstalled drivers and codecs and whatnot, etc.

Nothing made any difference until I eventually found some forum post which suggested using ALSAmixer to check the settings for various audio channels. ALSAmixer is not typically installed by default and not commonly used anymore, but it was the only tool that could unmute the digital audio output channel that served the TOSLINK port - that functionality was not present anywhere else in any of the configuration options. Pulse appeared to be in control of the system audio hardware, but in reality it was just sitting on top of and still relying on ALSA to handle the back end. Also, whoever set ALSA to mute some audio channels by default on a clean install… wtf dude, that shit just makes people think their hardware isn’t properly supported and they have a driver issue.

The point being, ALSA was supposed to be deprecated years ago and all of the old audio issues resolved and modernized with a new architecture, but… I’ll believe it when I see it, when whatever the new thing is actually proves itself to be an all-singing, all-dancing audio architecture. I’ve seen this rodeo before, and last time I checked it was still a clownshow.

you can’t really bomb a supply chain

Fuck yeah you can, hence my example of bombing ball bearing factories.

Train lines are also a classic bombing target. Fuel production/refining/storage/transport, any kind of logistics hub, shipyards, airstrips, warehouses… all things that are difficult to hide because there’s always activity around them. Flatten them and the dependent supply chain grinds to a halt.

China and Russia both trade heavily with Iran and don’t care about embargoes.

Right now a bunch of countries have operational nuclear weapons (and this ends in 1998). No one has used one in warfare since 1945 - right now there’s basically a fragile truce on nuclear war. Putin threatened to use one but even he didn’t actually pull that trigger.

If someone does… then I expect everyone does.

Supply chain. Drones are complicated pieces of equipment, they can’t possibly be manufacturing all of the components locally.

During WWII the Allies brought the German tank corps to a halt by bombing ball bearing factories.

Which is why anyone who voluntarily gives up the opportunity to vote is a fool, and anyone who encourages other people not to vote is malicious.

If voting truly had no impact, the GOP would not work so hard to prevent people from doing it.

OK, you’re right, in a purely ethical world.

But why would the economy change its behavior on a broad scale? What practical incentives would you use to adjust it?

Ah yes, the beforetimes, how could I forget.

Uh huh uh huh uh huh… call me when ALSAmixer is no longer needed to unmute the TOSLINK output on a new install because who the fuck knows why it’s muted by default in ALSA and that setting is not surfaced anywhere in the UI.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Humans spent thousands of years without rulers.

orly? which thousands?

It just means no rulers, but that’s not how it works

…anywhere in reality.

Er, and you think ARM is somehow not involved?

European far-right has received Russian financing for decades. Probably US too.

The NRA was a funding conduit between the Kremlin and the GOP:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals

Sort of.

In 2017 China passed a law requiring Chinese user data to be held within the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-privacy-censorship.html

Following that, Apple paid for a local data center which is managed by a Chinese company. Functionally this means that the PRC has access to all of the data stored there, because the government exerts direct control over Chinese companies, especially anything related to data collection and storage. Most likely, the PRC is able to access Apple users’ iCloud data if it resides in the China-based data center.

In response to a 2017 Chinese law, Apple agreed to move its Chinese customers’ data to China and onto computers owned and run by a Chinese state-owned company.

Chinese government workers physically control and operate the data center. Apple agreed to store the digital keys that unlock its Chinese customers’ information in those data centers. And Apple abandoned the encryption technology it uses in other data centers after China wouldn’t allow it.

Independent security experts and Apple engineers said Apple’s concessions would make it nearly impossible for the company to stop Chinese authorities from gaining access to the emails, photos, contacts, calendars and location data of Apple’s Chinese customers.

This is not really different from what’s been happening with other countries requiring their citizens’ data to be held within their borders, and the UK has similarly forced Apple to withdraw the Advanced Data Protection for iCloud users: https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

[…] British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised.

is this the great replacement I keep hearing about?

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

The fact is AI can make as-good or better art than most “artists” because most “art” is just cookie-cutter shit for morons.

This is an obvious misstatement. If you actually believe this then you’re not qualified to have opinions on art in general.

“AI” (in this context meaning generative algorithms, because there is no intelligence) can no more “make art” than it can think, or care.

It’s no surprise public opinion is these tools are trash when the free models are unable to answer simple questions

The tools are trash not because they are unreliable but because they are actively destroying human society and culture. They are destroying art, science, journalism, open source software, the internet at large, and the environment we all live in. It wouldn’t matter if the generative models were accurate, they would still be garbage.

The fact that they are unreliable just serves to highlight what a colossally destructive waste of time and resources this entire exercise has been.