johnecheck

Sure, blockchain development has always been deeply tied to ideas of open membership and participation. I like those ideas too.

But that's a poor definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography.

If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it. Now, are non-open blockchains at all useful? I suspect so, but I don't know of any great examples.

The wide space between 'membership is determined in advance' and 'literally anyone can make a million identities at a whim' is worth exploring, IMO.

This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea.

It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political system?

You'll win your bet. A few humans will work on more ambitious things. It might not go so well for the rest of us.

There are a number of reasons you might not be able to.

Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.

Ah, I hadn't considered that last bit. That is indeed telling.

The status quo is broken. It's a wobbling top. It's no secret; for all they benefit from it, most CEOs know that this isn't sustainable. For better or for worse, change is coming. Perhaps for some, embracing AI is an attempt to get ahead of that.

By that argument, UBI causes both inflation (for essential goods and services) and deflation (for luxury items and assets).

That's the economy reorienting itself around the new demand landscape. Those price spikes are the signal to producers to ramp up supply, which should push the price back down over time.

Inflation is highly problematic when it spirals. Events like collapse of trust in a currency or government can result in runaway inflation, which is a disaster by all accounts. A one-time price spike caused by a one-time abrupt shift in demand is a very different scenario. Assuming the UBI is higher than the prices increases on necessities, we've successfully redistributed wealth and made those people better able to afford necessities, despite the fact that they cost x% more.

Shouldn't they lose to a competitor who's happy to keep the lower margin and dominate the market?

If not, I'd call that a failure of anti-trust law, not UBI.

UBI is just wealth flowing from the government to all individuals. The goal is redistribution. As a government, you can explicitly specify who wealth is being taken from by paying for UBI in taxes. If you don't raise taxes to balance the budget, your choice is between kicking the can down the road with debt or printing money. Printing money is really just another form of redistribution drawn from the wealth of everyone holding that currency. Naturally, doing so can lead to a crisis of confidence where the value of the currency collapses as people flee to other assets that are less likely to be devalued.

UBI, like any government spending, needs to be paid for. By taxes or financial disaster. I prefer taxes, personally.

Ah, unfortunate. I wasn't expecting the 3d stuff, but web is the most important platform to me. It's just the most accessible distribution platform. Users won't blink at clicking a link and loading a page, but might balk if you ask them to install an app.

Web is also why bundle size matters to me. As many apps have made clear, you can succeed with a stupidly large bundle. No so with a long initial page load.

If you supported web with those small bundles, I'd be very interested. As it stands, I wish you the best of luck.

As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism.

It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance.

Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent?

The outcome speaks for itself.

Yes! Just pile on the tech debt now, none of it matters once AGI comes! And that's any day now, right? ...right?

I'm a flutter developer, I'm relatively satisfied with it. There is a few missing things that could get me to switch if your framework does them better.

First, 3d rendering. I'm already using Flutter to back a 2d game and I'm not alone. A cross-platform framework has a lot of appeal for game devs who'd like to release everywhere and are okay sacrificing a little performance for it. Flutter has some 3d rendering support, but it doesn't work on web.

Bundle size is a pain point for flutter, an improvement here could be great.

Web is an important platform. SEO still matters. Cross-platform frameworks tend to struggle here. How does this do?

Indeed. I worry though. We need those defense systems ASAP. The misinformation and garbage engulfing the internet does real damage. We can't just tune it out and wait for it to get better.

That proves nothing. The fact that Mississippi has 4 "s" is far more likely to be in the training data than the fact that blueberry has 2 "b"s.

And now that fact is going to be in the data for the next round of training. We'll need to need to try some other words on the next model.

What gives me hope is how the sentiment has turned against that massive ecosystem. Everyone knows it's terrible and damaging our society. The time is ripe for a new information ecosystem to emerge. Authority structures and truth heuristics are key considerations.

It's a damn shame that the only sizable social network that brands itself on veracity is Truth Social.

"[A democracy] is forced to drastically change course when a large portion of the population is unhappy."

I concur. But the odds of that course-correct being the right one must relate to the prevalence of the truth in the population, right?

Was Churchill's election a grand triumph of democracy? I can see why you might think so. They elected what seems to have been the right man for the job, despite his flaws.

Was he really? Was that lying drunk really the only guy who could have pulled it off? Or did Britain elect a terrible person and just got lucky that his failings didn't muck everything up?

At a minimum, the atproto provides an easy auth solution and public API for your app's data. Running a relay for your lexicon is basically the same as running a normal app server with those built in.

Credible exit matters too. The idea that all of this data is signed, public, and verifiable by anyone helps ensure that the provider is accountable to the community. A provider might decide against enshittifying a product if they're worried about a competitor doing better and taking their place.

Yes, an atproto lexicon will tend to be dominated by a small number of nodes. It's not the perfect distributed system some would prefer, but it is a real improvement on the completely centralized models seen everywhere today.

Historically, we've seen countless examples of societies becoming more and more unequal. Essentially all of them, true. But note a key piece: those societies weren't always getting more unequal. You can find many examples of societies pulling back from the brink after a period of consolidation.

Perhaps the goal isn't for wealth inequality to never increase. What if instead of perpetual increase or a sharp decrease, society achieved a sin-wave like equilibrium centered around some desirable level of wealth/power inequality?

It doesn't work if the level you desire is zero. Sorry, Marxists.

Neccessary...

Perhaps. Sounds cyclical. I wouldn't expect that reasserted norm to hold for long.

Agreed. Right now, the truth is losing the information war. But abandoning it in favor of a contest of lies? Against fascists? Really?

I don't think so. I value credibility, and I'm not alone. You care about what's true, right? Almost everyone does. It's just really damn hard to figure it out. If we actually want to fix things, our job is to make that easier.

Democracy thrives on information, reason, and participation. A democracy that concludes it should "[f]abricate and / or blow out of proportion any issue that comes [it's] way to blame the fascists" is dying. A society where the winners of elections are the most egregious liars is broken. Its days are numbered. I'd rather we pull a random general's name out of a hat and make them Supreme Leader than watch some pathological liar take power when such a decaying democracy falls apart.

The truth is our greatest ally. We need to harness it as a weapon, not abandon it in a pathetic attempt to insult our enemies and preserve the status quo.

I'd word that last idea differently. All democracies are vulnerable to corruption to a degree determined by factors like information quality and personal relationships/accountability. Small groups with great relationships and communication often work well democratically.

While larger democracies generally have fallen to increasing concentrations of wealth and power, I don't think we should conclude this is inevitable. We can do a lot better than this.

If you generate an AI summary and it's garbage, obviously that's wrong.

But assuming you take the time to make sure it's actually good, this seems like a fine use for an LLM.

This is true. In the simple implementation, your blog would probably lose most comments if BlueSky went down and most users don't migrate to a new PDS.

However, atproto data is append-only and cache-friendly. It wouldn't be hard to record historical comments and join them to the ones returned by the live query. (I'm probably just going to script periodic backups for mine and worry about displaying them when/if BlueSky does dissappear.)

Don't speak for us all. Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't mean that it's not worth talking about and studying.

While I agree that the fields of sociology and psychology have real flaws, implying that we'd be better off if everyone in those fields were flipping burgers is absurd.

The markets are fickle. That can change quickly.

The parent comment made it sound like vendors intentionally withhold information to limit how well the open source competitors work.

Is that happening? If so, it's a clear barrier to OSS adoption/contribution. A shame.

You make a good point. It's quite odd that I often feel more connection to users here despite the lack of 'friend' features.

Nonetheless I do. I suspect it's due to the relatively high average comment quality. I'm looking for a strong taste of belonging in a digital community. That nibble from HN evokes the same tantalizing possibility as rare discord servers and subreddits once did. None satisfy.

Yeah. We need better tools that empower individuals to think independently and we need them now.

Education is part of the answer, but I fear it isn't enough.

"Outside of forums like this one"

The real culprits are revealed. Despite its flaws, Hacker News does foster real discussion that sometimes leads to real connection. Big online social spaces tend to do the opposite.

"Sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy".

While true, times have changed. The information flow is orders of magnitude faster and have you seen any sane and normal people lately? The norm is spending hours scrolling social media. The argument that nobody has spare time/attention and thus we all need representatives falls flat to me.

We need to explore alternative forms of representation to allow people to choose their level of engagement in various levels of government. Perhaps I'm happy to delegate all national matters to a representative I trust but want to regularly weigh in on local decisions.

Between the technical challenge of trust/security and the inevitable political resistance to such ideas, I sadly don't expect to see them implemented any time soon.