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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • Well, in those memories you wouldn’t have to go to any market, you’d just see a few tables along the way in busy places on your way anywhere. Maybe even smaller shops (usually illegal construction alongside bigger buildings or even just in the middle of something supposed to be a square).

    BTW, about illegal construction - frankly I’m nostalgic of all that. Because yeah, those cheap plastic things were illegal and were all demolished. Instead we now have supposedly legal heavy, tasteless, threatening “shopping centers” here and there, miraculously making the space feel more constrained than those old things would, all belonging to the right people, with nice shiny perfectly legal businesses inside.

    It’s somehow relaxing to get someplace backwater sometimes and see towns looking that old way. Though the town I’m thinking about looked differently back then, and I liked it more, but what will you do.

    A-and frankly there were plenty of situations where it was perfectly legal (as possible in the Russian 90s), but “the permit was issued by mistake, no compensation is in order, free the building for demolition by tomorrow” for a 20 years old building solves any problem.





  • russia has been the #1 source of firmware jailbreaks and torrents for industrial software for 20+ years. Their government is so awful that their people had to figure out how to work around the world hating them.

    These two sentences are unconnected. It’s just that in the 90s and early 00s in Russia incomes were still not very high to buy software, copyright protection wasn’t really enforced, copyright violation being a thing was hard to explain to many people, and lots of things wouldn’t be officially sold. Say, localized versions of video games often wouldn’t exist.

    In my childhood I remember that pirate disks were norm and official ones a curiosity, something very cool and unusual. Then official versions (including localized ones from 1C) started becoming more common, as would buying disks in book stores etc, and not in underground crossings or near subway entrances.

    There were even companies which technically sold pirate disks, but they could have become official localizers or vendors or whatever. It probably didn’t even occur to them to try and become such.




  • While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate “<T> revolution” from “<T> normal development” for a reason.

    I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It’s not all cultures.

    That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.






  • Yes, but then eventually you’ll have to ban half the usual ads if applying the principle consistently, or it’ll be no good otherwise, cause they’ll manage to weasel out.

    Social media are just what happens when a few gigantic non-transparent organizations get the usual Goebbels powers plus the ability to match people with content, people with people, people with groups as they see fit.

    It’s both a legal and a technical problem. The legal part is about making this no-no. The technical part is by having truly decentralized asynchronous social media. Federation, like with ActivityPub, is insufficient, it has to be homogenous. I mean, I’d like it to use ActivityPub-connected servers as authentication providers and for contact directory, but not the rest.

    EDIT: I think freenet.org , as in Locutus and not old Freenet we all love, is aimed at this exactly.


  • Even less so now, after they insisted on showing the world just how incompetent their military is.

    Which, for example, the Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish militaries still haven’t.

    Do you realize that a military that doesn’t do a certain kind of activity (like mass warfare) loses capability for it over time? That’s truer for the Russian military with all the corruption, but there’s a little problem, - it has had 2 years with lots of learning.

    There were widespread myths about Israeli military professionalism, but in the last few months they’ve shown the reality to be worse than expected too.

    and the response from the west would be swift. At least I hope and assume so.

    Yeah, see, there’s an element of “what if we feed him <country name> and expect him to eventually choke on it”. International law and allied obligations seem to have become fuzzier concepts in the last decade or so.

    Seems a really weird action to invade a Nordic country still. Their policy seems to be about bullying ex-Soviet states to remain authoritarian shitholes.




  • I’m libertarian, I’m against this. I’m also against blockchain scams.

    My ideas on digital currencies and something like artificial intelligence are simply an extension of the usual ancap\panarchy ideas. It’s actually a very good test for any libertarian you meet - they’ll usually agree that a “meta-society” consisting of voluntary exterritorial jurisdictions (which can be anything from crack-smoking ancap tribes to solarpunk communes), with some overarching security system to protect those jurisdictions from being ignored by somebody well-armed, is good, then you just have to ask why the systems they like for currencies and this are clearly manifestations of a different ideology.




  • I can’t blame people for not wasting energy on a child that needs a lot more structure, support and training.

    Nah. Just different choices in all of these. I have ADHD. Most of the problems are not about trying to achieve the same things as others do, but trying to achieve them the same way others do. After solving that there are still downsides, but these are not qualitative.

    It takes very little to notice which things don’t work and don’t try them again. A parent who doesn’t care about this is a bad parent, and an educator who ignores this is simply malicious. At least in my experience people would very easily change their approaches.

    Including very traditional-minded people and those denying the condition itself (“you don’t have a disorder, you just need to do things your own way” is ignorant, but really better than using others’ conditions to attack them, and I’ve heard this really often ; definitely better than “oh, it’s so sad, I really hope everything will be good with you, I really like your imagination and hope you’ll give it more attention, but it seems you won’t change, we are too different, don’t write me anymore”, said in 20x the amount of words, in relationships).

    Those who wouldn’t were either insulted by some perceived lack of respect and tried to prove that I’m stupid, needless to say that lack of respect became genuine then (like a few school teachers and university professors, but not all of them ; or peers of the “dumb and uninventive, but proud of being capable of stealing something” kind), or ignorant idiots of the Soviet generation afraid of anything connected to mental health (like my dad, what’s even dumber I’m confident he was autistic too).

    With such carelessness or lack of awareness, I cannot blame someone for not thinking and just running away. If someone is seemingly shortsighted, unreliable or uncaring, why stay with them? Or starting a relationship with them with no certainty things will improve? It’s wrong to believe you can change or fix someone, it is foolish to try when you don’t.

    Humans have invented words to discuss all those things. If it’s about spending possibly the rest of your life alongside someone, being reluctant to talk is just strange. Yes, if the other person thinks they know better and this shouldn’t be discussed in detail, then no chance.

    Unless that other person is too autistic, ha-ha. Then that particular kind of problems one can just write off.