mamborambo

There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.

There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.

Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.

In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.

I fully agree that physical aspects of libraries cannot be fully replicated with databases and searches.

Discovery indeed comes in many forms, sometimes by proximity, other times by serendipity, size of the book, even what sits on the recently returned racks.

In a similar sense, I mourn the death of printed phone books and yellow pages. And printed encyclopedia, dictionaries and atlases.

The loss of the physical formats removed forever, extremely interesting aspects of browsing and learning from these sources.

Japan is a unique world all to itself. Read up on how houses and streets are numbered and you will arrive at a similar chaos!

The Reddit situation reminds me a lot of the China situation:

"A major player, having built a near dominant position in the global flow chain, starts misbehaving. The entire world tries to de-risk by finding or bootstrapping alternatives."

A decade ago probably nobody thinks there is any chance China-derisking is doable, but from today's vantage point it is becoming more and more likely.

In the same way, there appears no easy alternative to Reddit right now, but never say never. Having planted the seed of distrust, an exodus from Reddit can happen anytime the critical mass is achieved.

Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.

Last year my Samsung S20+ suffered the notorious "green vertical lines" and then soon after the "white out screens" (a pandemic-level hardware failure wave that has been widely reported), rendering it impossible to see clearly what is on the screen, even though everything else was still working.

Luckily because I was playing with scrcpy, I immediately knew it was my solution.

By using scrcpy to connect to a PC, I could still unlock the screen with my pattern or thumbprint, and when the app asks for passwords it is still possible to use the onscreen keyboard.

The only feeling being hurt is Xi Jinping's.

Two interesting points raised:

1) Can a metaverse "digital twin" really successfully preserve a nation's culture and civilization? Beyond just 3d maps and museum artefacts, this goal also needs to preserve languages, ethnic practices, food, music, literature, and a million other aspects of the civilization. Currently Hong Kong faces a similar dilemma of losing its distinct identity pre-1997, because of runaway CCP political-righteousness, and spawns a few efforts to digitally twin itself on the metaverse, but progress is extremely slow and unfocused.

2) Can a sovereign nation that loses its territory and hence becomes diasporic, still function as a government through the metaverse? Can it still collect taxes, issue passport, run embassies, defence, police, operate central bank, and license companies and industries? If yes, then it can solve a lot of the statelessness and displaced people problems of the world, where refugees live in a state of limbo without access to legal protection or right to make their own living.

No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc.

How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?

The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time.

The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.

The consumer's dependence on "legit-sounding domain name", a green SSL key, and recognizable corporate logos and website layout as the "proof" of authenticity is passe.

In this era of online ubiquity there should be another layer of opt-in validation, ring of trust, p2p feedback and rating, that can all be plugged into the consumer web experience.

Although the rise of walled gardens was the biggest headwind to more people maintaining their personal websites, I think there is also a lot of issues arising from the underlying technologies of website building relative to the neophytes.

Imagine what an aspiring content creator (writer, photographer, artist, musician etc) needs to master and navigate in order to get his own social network website up: domain names, ssl, html css javascript, image editing, comments, categories and tags, rss, pings, moderating, email, mail lists, analytics, pagerank, seo, search, translate, etc. Each with different backends, different logins, different degree of tech knowledge required.

As walled gardens like FB and Myspace grew in capabilities, why didn't the blog platforms and website builders grow their design to simplify the onboarding as well? This is probably the result of venture money sucking all the best engineering talents away from the open source and free platforms..

I remember distinctly, in early 2000 trying to help a friend to create his own web site to be a museum of his life's work of writing. After trying to teach him all the underlying web infrastructures and technologies, he came to the conclusion he should just hire a web consultant.

Walled gardens simplified the chores of posting online, and they do a very good job for millions of non-techies. Without this huge step, we would have lost even more creative output from the past 20 years.

I see a parallel between Google's pseudo-customer service and totalitarian country's social order system. Both are theoretically based on clear terms and rules, but during execution can be completely opaque and non-intuitive. If you end up as the condemned party, you have no recourse to clear yourself, as the power is unbalanced and your elimination from their user base is just a minor issue. Invariably the users are driven to seek out backdoors and relationships and even unusual channels to resolve.

The fact is these types of information services are utilities, and they cannot be considered just a free market choice to use or provide service.

Super impressed. Amateurs can and do play their parts in science --- there are numerous discoveries made in astronomy, mathematics, and definitely in computer applied sciences that sprang from the minds of amateurs.

Given all the political posturing, hacktivism, war hacking, as a result of the war in Ukraine, there is suddenly a great deal of uncertainty in the digital and economic infrastructure if our world.

While I applaud some degree of non-military pressure to help end the war, I think there should be certain areas that are off-limit to such tactics.

These include: basic telecom and internet access, basic payment and disbursement systems, basic transportation, basic identity and profiles, etc.

There is a large movement towards distributed statehood/citizenship built on the view that people should treat the government as a service or utility and not overlord. Cue micronations, charter cities, e-residency, and tax havens schemes. The fascinating idea that people can renegotiate and redefine their relationship with the land, the government, and the economy of that state, is a very 21st century concept, but one that is progressing rapidly on the back of Internet, global shipping, digital nomads, borderless visa areas, cryptocurrency, and metaverse.

When this idea has developed to maturity, it is not inconceivable that states can be virtual, territoryless, and still represents a sizeable demography, collects tax and manages assets, and provides laws and order for that group.

A very good read, and indeed "mise-en-place" is a skill / philosophy / system which can greatly assist knowledge workers if they apply it. Most chefs learn how when they apprentice under a master chef, and adopt or copy what they do. These skills are seldom learned by reading a book or from an essay, because they need to become habits to be effective.0p

The evidence is overwhelming, but the world is addicted to cheap Chinese products so we all looked the other way. But the buck should stop now.

This is a common dilemma in social media. Does "liking" a post mean you agree with it? Does "angry face" mean you disagree? What about "laughing face", "shocked face"? It is dangerous to read legal responsibilities into an action which is probably meaningless.

Although the rebranding is probably unnecessary, it is still a good move if the company has ambition beyond fund transfer --- perhaps into alternative financial services, non-bank assets, or other types of nomadic fund application. I have to agree there are too many geographical restrictions in today's financial systems, and if their strong brand position can help to loosen those grips a little, more power to them.

In most financial systems, there has to be a "banker" to make the market, i.e. they have to close the deals when the aggregate buy/sell deals end in surplus or deficits. So Paypal has to close the ending position -- at least that is my understanding.

This reminds me of the recent news about Lets Encrypt expiring one of their root certificate and warning that old Android systems may not be able to validate SSL if they were not updated. We have increasing moved our world into an interconnected web of trusts and taken out failsafes and overrides, so we are very much entering an age of brittle systems --- one in which the vulnerability of one key subsystem (Google, Facebook, Apple, a key SSL validation cert etc) can escalate towards disabling the entire world, when you cannot get your TV to turn on, car to start, power grid to switch on. What are we doing to prevent that?

It appears the built-in time expiry period in the trust relationships between various organisations and clients will increasing become a weak point in the world in the future. Whether these moving parts are in trust only for three months, three years or more is not the issue, it is the fact that periodic resync and retrust needs to happen, means that it may result in a cascadable failure of our infrastructure in the future. Say if a nuclear disaster / earthquake take down one city, will it lead to paralysis of servers and services across the world? Perhaps it is time to start auditing the Internet and identify the weak points.

The reality is that autocracy exists everywhere not just at the state level. A private property, private company, within a family, even a military organisation. Pieces of CCP "technology" used for surveillance, recognition, tracking, scoring, analyzing, censoring, etc can become saleable to the right customers, and since China is searching for its own export niche.

Sounds like a repeat of the case that Paypal blocked an artist's account for having the word Iran inside her full name https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24359821

Perhaps it is time for the IRS to take a great leap forward and start thinking beyond its territorial power to collect revenue -- and start thinking about the post-millenia reality of nomads, transnationals, solopreneurs, cloud-based operators, and globalized utility models of work, and work out a new equitable model of taxation.

But in Hong Kong's case, a number of Telegram chat room operators have been prosecuted by the police for anti-government activities. If TG is really secure then this shouldn't have happened.

Jimmy Lai is one of the most inspiring democrat activist of HK. With his wealth, he could have arranged a refuge and left HK months ago, instead of staying and being exposed to the increasingly beligerant CCP/Hong Kong bootlickers.

A sad day for HK. I hope the world does not let him be detained indefinitely, like what has happened to Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.

As a HKer I am at the stage of my life when I suddenly realise how much geopolitics influence the course of our lives, and yes I would love to find a forum where smart and informed people have their discussions about the world's events. Should the world's affairs be left in the hands of only politcians? But most of them are so awfully dumb and self-serving! And why do ordinary citizens get no representation in world bodies like UN and WHO? The knowledge, understanding and application of politics and human rights apply to each and every person (even sentient being) on earth, yet most of us pursue spend our time only on economic or entertainment and not about the collective course of our species.