This is one of those perennial headlines like “World’s Oldest Person Dies.”

Are we in a simulation ? Controlled by some tech companies and political parties ?

A simulation will always consume more energy than a real-life situation at the same level of granularity. So the answer is almost certainly no. This is real life. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, because yeah, it sucks.

software code is quite literally language made manifest

Not natural language in any meaningful way. Not even close.

Also, I’m not at all convinced about the whole caste analysis, since historically there has been huge variation in the details of what one caste does and another doesn’t, even if you can find enough parallels that you can label them as military, priestly or mercantile.

In addition, even if you buy the caste analysis, those called tech bros are really just members of the owner caste who happen to own tech-intensive businesses. Though even that is hard to make stick, since almost all kinds of businesses are now tech-intensive. And if you look at a tech bro such as Musk, much of his portfolio isn’t pure-play tech. Cars, for example. Tech is an intrinsic component in nearly all enterprises, just as the phone or written word used to be. “Phone-intensive” only made sense to characterize early adopters when phones were emerging. But at some point in the adoption curve, it becomes essentially everyone, and no longer has meaning. The same could be said now for tech.

The more meaningful distinction now is between those who make money by doing things, versus those who make money by owning things. The latter have disproportionate power right now, and it’s become toxic to the rest of us.

Yeah, first-mover advantage is a thing.

It’s entirely possible to produce a centrally-controlled implementation of a decentralized protocol. Just control both sides of the interface.

Decentralized protocols are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a lock-in-free experience.

You can say “cronies.”

In other words, a massive handout of taxpayer money to the tech bros for nothing worthwhile.

As my former mother-in-law would say, “May he live long and suffer every minute of it.”

I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.

That’s going right into /dev/null as soon as I detect it-- both user and content.

and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore

I was thinking along the same lines for different reasons. For multi-hop trust delegations, I’d really want a way to see what I’m seeing through the composition of all those blocklists. And once I’ve seen that, a “flatten into my own blocklist” command might be interesting: I want a snapshot of how A through B through C would look, and I’d like to mash it down into my own list so I can manage it there.

If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?

Merge conflict alerts, just like version-control systems use? Allowing an order of precedence would be another way, but I think it’d get messy fast.

I don’t believe the transitive principle of trust that you cite is all that workable, unless it can be done at a finer granularity.

In my own case, I (A) trust B and C. But B doesn’t trust C, for reasons that have conditioned my relationships with both B and C so that I can still trust them. The reason for that is that trust is multifactorial: A can trust B for some things, not others. So what we’re trying to model is an ontological relation, not just a directed acyclic graph.

Based on that, the best we can probably achieve is being able to set the degrees of separation of delegated trust (maybe 2 hops and that’s all in my case), and add the ability to subclass or otherwise tweak someone else’s blocklist (say, B’s a fine person but habitually forwards Joe Rogan crap that I find to be nothing but vexatious noise), or C despises my favorite band but is otherwise quite sound, etc.

Even ostriches aren’t actually stupid enough to do that.

Most civilized countries know that there is more than one way to implement capitalism, and the current US way is a catastrophic shit show.

Public provision of services is not socialism, it’s just common sense. The first mass state pension system was rolled out by that crusty reactionary Bismarck. Every rightwing country still has fire departments and (mostly) public road systems too. Not doing it that way is just stupidity, not ideology.

What is socialism is when people doing the work have control of the means of production. Control, not a token share. One example is cooperatives. By this definition (which goes back to Karl Marx), neither the USSR nor Communist China were socialist, they were totalitarian state capitalist entitites. China still is, though less incompetent than under Mao. And this isn’t some revisionist point of view. Rosa Luxemburg and other contemporaries saw it happening at the onset.

Even Karl Marx noted capitalism’s dynamism and ability to cause change. In my own case, I went from poverty to modest wealth in a capitalist system, and I know many others who had similar experiences. I’m also aware that it empowers sociopaths, causes corruption, of its tendency to degenerate to oligopoly, and its failure to adequately address externalities.

And there are many, many variants of capitalism. The one now prevalent in the US is one of the more lethal strains. Improperly regulated capitalism such as that is a nightmare. Properly regulated, many of its negative features can be mitigated. I could stand living in a social democracy until a better alternative is piloted and proven.

There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?

Internet security and internet privacy are only incompatible goals when combined with incompetency and shit user-exerience design.

He’s also a habitual liar.

If so, it didn’t work. It made him look dimwitted and easily swayed.

Both of which, he is.

AI doesn’t realize anything. And if it’s trained on human artifacts, it echoes human biases and error.