France has a tech sector?
Aesthetically I like reading technical texts in French.
(Contrary to the stereotype, romantic texts not so much, that’s where English is better ; and despite trying my best, I still haven’t found a way to like Dutch ; neutral on German.)
But the point is - has anything big lifted off in France in the last 20 years or so?
I’m not talking about quite a few particular people whose names should be in history books. I’m talking about companies and systems.
Facts are facts, and nothing a human says is a fact, it’s a projection of a fact upon their conscience, at best.
And those doing the “fact checking” are humans, so they are checking if something is fact in their own opinion or organization’s policy, at best.
These are truisms.
There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.
This is wrong. People like to pick “their” side in power games between mighty adversaries, and to think that when one of the sides is more lucky, it’s them who’s winning. But no, it’s not them. If somebody’s “checking facts” for you and you like it, you’ve already lost. Same thing, of course, if you trust some “community evaluations” or that there’s truth that can be learned so cheaply, by going online and reading something.
That’s called “diversification of investments”. And what Apple and other companies today are doing is called “putting all resources onto one critical point” (or “milking the golden cow till it’s dead”, I guess).
Good strategy is to do both. Finding a critical point gives you advantage, but things change and oligopolies gained by past successes don’t last forever.
With Android - not cool. With some SBC like RPi in such a box - very cool.
It’s not the most functional for everyone with every balance of power possible. It’s the optimal for casual (dumb) usage with surveillance economy, ads and content consumption, but not production, and when that content is mostly not text.
Idiocracy machine.
A bendy screen is useless IMHO. Even a flip phone with two screens is better.
Steve Apple isn’t the only one to blame for it, Apple just used to great success a few cultural cliches about future technology.
Still, unifying the control device and the display device is very stupid. I understand something with a normal screen for displaying information and a touchscreen for displaying controls.
Screens were still breakable by idiots.
EDIT: I had one such phone, liked it. An idiot at school broke that screen. It was a girl, so can’t even be too angry.
Too small.
I’d want a “tablet” looking like an A4 rollable metal sheet with a screen on one side (projected at that, so no calamity at that sheet will break it), a fat part on the side with the actual hardware and a few hercon buttons (so that they’d live longer too), a battery that lasts a month and that hardware shouldn’t be too powerful. Very limited in fact - like Star Wars datapads are. I, ahem, only think about this because I want a Star Wars datapad.
My mom has some weird combination of disorders, hard to determine since she becomes aggressive when advised to visit a psychiatrist. I suppose it’s just NPD though. Point is - she makes technical things up and acts insulted when I explain it’s nonsense, and doesn’t learn. Thus she’s so bad with tech that I wouldn’t give her an Android phone simply because she won’t be able to use it.
So - she still asks from time to time if she can use her old Nokia.
From time to time - because that small unimportant thing about cell standards being phased out, that I blabber, she doesn’t even try to catch.
Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I’d prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.
A government … only in theory does. Like a church represents God, because humans are too dumb to understand him directly.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Both sides of this fight prefer it being called such, so that one seems against misinformation, and the other seems against censorship, but they are not really different in this dimension. They are different in strategy and structure and interests, but neither is good for the average person.
That could have been a Linux\FreeBSD\OpenBSD\NetBSD\Haiku.… install event. Combined with raising awareness about Gemini web and some (I dunno which) ways to create decentralized platforms (not self-contradictory) for all kinds of speech, political organization included.
But, of course, one can’t solve social problems with only technical means.
I personally think they could replace the “centralized” part with the “relay” part. Seems technically possible with their protocol. Their center plays mostly the relay role. So it would be a bit similar to Usenet, or to NOSTR, or even maybe to something like old Freenet.
But yes, there are good arguments that making it decentralized would slow down necessary changes and fixes.
The “centralized” part is not a problem with their protocol and it’s well explained.
The 3rd-party clients thing … I agree with, but one can find justifications for that too. They probably don’t want people to use it for filesharing with uuencode and base64. Or even for VPNs, like they did with Tox when it seemed to have a future.
The phone number thing sucks, but there’s a need to defend against bot registrations somehow.
The desktop app sucks absolutely and conclusively. If there were a library one can use to make a Pidgin plugin, it would be a godly gift.
So one Chinese spying platform is worse than other Chinese spying platforms.
I mean, it’s interesting in the sense of something big being really honestly banned in USA.
That seems to have been a part of Russian, Iranian, Turkish etc Internet experience.
But I still want back the days where we’d talk about programs and services, not platforms.
There’s a program you can use to communicate to other people, it, of course, communicates to a service, but the protocol is small and already reverse-engineered, and you can use a hex editor to change the hostname or addresses it communicates with, even if hardcoded. Nostalgic ICQ sounds.
Or - there’s a service you can use to find pages and files. There are hundreds of such, you can host one yourself. You’ll have to dig through a lot of things you don’t need and build your queries carefully, but there’s no platform playing with your life. Just the Internet, and one of thousands of machines scraping it. Yep, it’s big and most things there you don’t need.
Or - there’s a program you can use to have nice online communities. I didn’t even know that Hotline and KDX existed when I was a kid. But if I knew, I would be even happier than it was in fact. No platform. Someone hosts a Hotline server.
There was also such a program that allowed you to navigate hypertext pages leading to other pages leading to other. And there were services which would serve such pages over the Internet to you and many others, and accept changes. People who think today’s Web is in anything nicer than that Web - they simply don’t remember how it was then. It can’t be really felt by looking at archives of old personal pages and such, of course those look weak, they are a specter of the past. You need to go over web rings and read recent updates, by real people for real people, visit guest books and web chats and forums, see that world alive. Unfortunately I also remember how I wanted to be able to make that even more alive - via technical means. Like trying to live in a video game. That was a mistake many people made, apparently, and ruined the real miracle by pursuing that dream.
I won’t even try. It’s not something I want machine to do, I want someone’s opinion to go into how a book is narrated.
I had somewhere Asimov’s Foundation audiobooks, in Russian, recorded somewhere around 1991, and I don’t think a machine can do that.
I’ve just thought that LLMs are good for two opposite kinds of people:
The obvious, psychopaths or people behaving like them, who think they’ll distort the concept of truth and possessing such technologies will make their approach to society easier.
The people like me, who know that no random message written or picture drawn can be trusted anyway, so it’s better to overload the humanity with fakes so that it learned this simple truth.
I think both are right to some extent. Still it won’t work the exact way they want.
It’s like when Bolsheviks, when fighting illiteracy, basically conditioned people literate in first generation to think that everything officially printed is true, even that something being officially printed is identical to true, and that the religious darkness and ignorance is to doubt that. Like - blind belief is science and knowledge, and skepticism is darkness and ignorance. What could go wrong.
And then in Stalin’s years there were shortened evening education courses for workers. Where, well, they’d learn how to calculate something in some specialty, but without depth and context.
So you’d get a lot of engineers capable of really building and operating things and believing they could build and operate even more complex things (like spaceships eventually, or some planet-wide railway system, or whatever), but not understanding the context, the philosophy of science even. What’s worse is that they’d think they understand that well, because they’d have “scientific communism” about materialism and dialectics in their education.
So, back to the subject - they got a lot of people to believe all they officially printed on paper for a generation or even two. And those who didn’t would still indirectly believe a lot of it from their parents or peers.
But eventually, even if the damage is already done, right now not believing everything even from a “respectable” source is a good trait of many ex-Soviet people. Easier to notice among them than among Americans.
EDIT:
About that woman - this works too. She will see that a chatbot can’t provide depth when she wants it. I just hope she won’t feel too bad that moment.
When I was a teen, I thought anyone who joins it is virtue signaling.
Oh no. Just yesterday I’ve seen an article about Blackwell PCs and what not.
You’re telling me it’s not ready?
That they lied to me?
How could that happen?
Oh no God no!
OK, TIL. As someone in Russia, I wouldn’t know.
I don’t think “individualistic” is a bad thing or prevents those from working there. Maybe you meant “atomized society”, but US is not the worst country in that regard, that would be the one I live in.
A modern and more global take on Minitel would be cool.