kossTKR

Take a look at the highly conspiratorial website https://www.opensecrets.org for an example of how i enquire by looking at sources and money flow helping me realise most politicians are bought by lobby groups working for the owning classes and vote thereafter, not "sincere belief in ideology".

This "you're just a conspiracy nut" perspective for looking at actual networks of power and sources, became common after journalism pretty much died with local media as they shifted to ownership from a few parent conglomerates all working for elite interest.

Now news is about "ideas" and "events" not key players, money and networks of power ultimately benefiting the richest that kan in turn easily sway public opinion without resistance through PR, think tanks and media ownership.

I don't know when you think this rather beautiful "sincere belief in ideology" became the primary driver of history and politics, to me that's a highly naive after a bachelors in History and a love for the pretty standard historiographical realpolitical and resource oriented lenses adjacent to works like Guns, Germs and Steel.

It's obvious this class of people love their status as neu-feudal lords above the law living as 18th century libertines behind closed doors.

But i guess people here are either waiting for wealth to trickle down on them or believe the torrent of psychological operations so much peoples minds close down when they intuit the circular brutal nature of hierarchical class based society, and the utter illusion democracy or meritocracy is.

The uppermost classes have been trickters through all of history. What happened to this knowledge and the countercultural scene in hacking? Hint; it was psyopped in the early 90's by "libertarianism" and worship of bureaucracy to create a new class of cybernetic soldiers working for the oligarchy.

It's pretty incredible that the upper echelons have so thoroughly psyopped everyone below them that the public runs confused around in an endless maze of ideology, false pretexts and stirred up drama.

This way only insiders recognise the most fundamental realpolitical power struggles of all ages; that the "very confusing" wars, coups or power grabs is not very complex at all but always - almost as a physical principle - stemming from the richest members of society pulling the strings to benefit themselves.

Then some note or some FOIA request will be released in 40 years about the orchestration and no one will care.

Just follow the money, or the networks of people and it's easy to see the undercurrents of class warfare, elite power via the security state or oligarch clubs siphoning money and power away from the public, but that's called conspiracy these days and is dangerous (to the ruling classes).

Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though?

Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave everyone a position.

So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".

Yes that's the main problem with all of these concepts like internal family systems, loops, memory - that as long as the models remain static it's not like a brain that's constantly in an isomorphic metamorphosis with reality.

There's really no true boundaries or edges to the biological systems, instead constant interfacing through a myriad of senses and processes, decay, chaos, emergence especially social in nature.

And while these newer symphonic models are closer to group dynamics, my intuition tells me you need more of a universe around "it" to have actual consciousness.

That would be a wild realisation. Do you need to render the entire universe to get one consciousness, or at least some part of it because of weird fields, emergence, and the fact that human taxonomies are actually frighteningly arbitrary?

Ie. to have consciousness with qualia you actually need 47 glorp fields, 1000 other consciousnesses and radiation in this specific frequency.

So not being not being an absolute moralless predator megalomaniac is labeled as being a "kumbaya type" now?

A tiny subset of psychos will be the downfall of humanity with tech getting ever more potent, and it's especially sad when most of the world just wants to live a happy life with their families, not take over the world like these ghouls.

I miss the days of actual counterculture among hacker types, do stuff for the benefit of the human race or one's own community.

AI's will capture viewtime so effectively that human creators channels will wither.

Most popular youtube content is already garbage in my opinion but many small kids are already happy viewing bottom tier AI gibberish for hours.

And if endless AI content will soon be good enough to hit the dopamine centers in adults, only the connoisseurs will seek out the human made content making the markets impossibly small for artisans creating video content.

It's already a tragedy that socialmedia has made it so 95% of all content consumed on the internet is made in the last 24 hours lowering the value of making an effort.

Everyone is in desperate need of quality, boundaries and strict media diets including myself.

Lumafields CT scanning techniques are amazing, and i'm quite surprised at just how complex and ultra precise the circuitry and processing power is inside a tiny USB cable. It's an engineering marvel to me as a layman.

Modern chipsets are probably even more mind blowing. What other items contains surprising amounts of complexity these days?

Being a huge history nerd war is almost always about profiteering, nothing has changed but propaganda.

The US is one big imperial war machine that protects its ownership class assets with their foreign policy, like any other superpower would.

"War profiteering", forceful opening of markets, huge contracts being made after all major wars, resource control?

The forever wars happening from the second world war up until now to keep the West on top. What "we" did to South America, to Iran, to African countries when they wanted their surplus?

Empire logic, game theory, nerdy statistical perspective even if you played a bit of civilisation or read Guns Germs and Steel.

Classical geopolitics 20 years ago was all about these game theories, propaganda, that it's all a big game of Risk, acquiring the most while dominating others like literally all of history.

What is war about today suddenly then? Beautiful philanthropic benevolence of the enlightened western peoples done very reluctantly but with great compassion for the future of the world despite immense expenses?

Yes! I also encountered this in Rhino 10+ years ago and instantly implemented in multiple online projects with great success.

What's crazy is that i'm pretty most times wasted on a computer is from "where is this setting, how do i do this" type stuff, in users ranging from experts to the elderly.

It's bizarre to me that this hasn't been implemented all over faster. Instead cloud interfaces have become even more esoteric in my opinion.

All functions on a computer should have a tiny descriptive string you can search for.

The GUI paradigm from the last 30 years in was a mistake with nested stuff just hiding in random places. CLI was a bit better when you could pipe / search etc. but for most people Universal Search is it.

I would like to know this as well.

A tree overview of all nested functions and objects with a search function that quickly jumps to that place, and maybe even let you call that function with data from state?

A tangent but reminds me of the fact that even though we have millions of photographers with amazing cameras, most news and culture sites display images in low quality.

So most great photos will also never been seen. I remember Boston Globe from years ago with great photo content that really captured the vibe of so many places and people in the news.

These days news means boring propaganda PR pictures or tiny images with artifacts, very weird. It's like we're not as close to the actual world as we were 10+ years ago.

Probably also about licensing, but it's stupid because most photos won't end up as "pressphoto of the year" or whatever they are saving their HQ versions for.

Most problems today stem from scale? A big org of with 100% non technical people and 100% technical people where the sweet spot was the small game studio from 25 years ago, nerds, but social, tightly knit, experts but generalists because of size, close to each other, and pretty small.

Is there anything promising out there?

Is crowd sourced training still unfeasible?

I remember how fast the diffusion world moved in the first year but it seems it's stalled somewhat compared to first midjourney then Dall-e 3. Is it the same with text models?

Maybe i'm cynical but my impression is that most productless companies with lots of storytelling around some phd's are almost always about scamming investors / grant money / public funds.

If anyone have great non sensational examples of the opposite i'm all ears.

I remember becoming aware of this during the crypto wave where there was always a bunch of "researchers" with PhD's around paper-thin whitepapers - and these researches were often from very prestigious universities, and of the hundreds of these companies no one produced anything valuable - and i've seen the same thing in many sectors like nutrition, "healthcare", financial products etc.

Share private thoughts between you and your friends in the future and get rounded up in no time!

I know we're already close with NSA, Five Eyes and whatnot but could the plutocracy be a little less blatant?

I wonder if at some point surveillance and tech bureaucracy will become so cemented there's zero chance of revolt or accountability for the upper echelons.

Whoever's on top at that point will stay on top until there's a sunstorm.

Great resource! I've defaulted to just use vanilla js and petite-vue, it's 15 kilobytes and gives a good base.

The problem is the build requirements you run into quickly if you want to use plugins these days with vanilla js.

Elegance was being able to load actual modules from a CDN. Why did we need these anti-web build steps on top of JS?

I feel like there was a sweet spot of complexity around Vue 1 or say 2014.

The Vue 2-->3 jump illustrates the welcome but total breakdown of frameworks in my opinion. It constantly gets in your way and moving data on a page with a hierarchy you need some bizarrely complex data flow, so many folders, files, tools, brittle typescript linting, "auto" this and that, constant building and so many rules it's not fun to engineer anymore.

Anyway, i think we are very close to a sweet spot if we just use something like Petite-vue / Alpine on top of JS maybe with a tiny router and get creative with JS around that, or just early versions say Vue if we need anything more complex.

Not blaming the engineers! The problem is structural or from managers and higher ups.

This is why most non technical business school types can fuck right off, i’ve rarely seen them make anything better.

Managers with either dev or design experience is the only thing that works.

I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.

This is everything wrong with both (sweatshop) games and programming!

This is 180 of how people programmed for the older consoles in the most fun and creative ways to squeeze the most out of smaller hardware.

Take a look at this for comparison:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/war-stories-how-crash...

Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus.

I absolutely hate this way of doing things, because for me all art, all engineering, all creativity is about boundaries, dogmas, and squeezing and optimising the hell out of your _elegant_ systems.

I mean even in my small webgl/threejs projects the fun part was getting every last bit of eye candy out of the smallest file sizes i could, simplifying geometry, lowering resolution, while maintaining great looks.

100k vertice log piles and hundreds of people with teeth?

Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Is it 100% shitty work conditions? How could single devs and small studios create relatively large games with love 20 years ago for small money?

I easily use 9 as a full stack dev.

1) Coding apps

2) Dev browsers

3) Terminals

4) Sql /DB apps

5) FTP/File handling apps

6) Non work browsing / leisure

7) Specs and text

8) Graphics / Figma / Ps

9) Music / podcast player

Once this is setup with shortcuts it becomes super fast to switch to DB-stuff, or terminal windows etc.

I remember having some mac app that could do this years ago but was abandoned as SIP destroyed many third party extensions.

I really want my 3x3 desktops back also!

Can it really be there hasn't been made an alternative yet?

The problem is that i can do this but not kids.

I've become better at it and is always reminded of the quiet summers when i was a child, the beautiful boredom and fantasy of "some part of my life that happened a long time ago", or running around without a cellphone, just being completely present and "away" from others in good and healthy sense like a rite de passage.

When i see nieces in family everyone under the age of 20 is always inside of cyberspace, never present in the here and now, and while being hypersocial is normal for a teen, it's to an extreme degree for everyone including the smallest ones.

The most frightening thing about these new consumption patterns is that you miss large but subtle aspects of life, the depth, magic and fantasy that bubbles up as weird emergence in the quiet moments before you sleep, when you wake up, exploring alone etc.

I'm hooked as an adult and can already see that i've become addicted to superficiality but the battle is getting increasingly harder as tech hooks deeper and deeper into our neurology.

There was a wave of books 10 years ago, "The end of absence" one them, exploring the themes of being the last generation to have experienced both before and the after 24/7 media consumption.

In one way it's echoing historical cycles like Thoreau talking about noisy trains in the distance distracting his poetry from his wood cabin in 1854 - but in other ways the distraction has become so exponential i seriously fear a generation will have problems with concentration, imagination or autonomy of thought.

Will they learn the beauty of solitude, that you often need some amount of boredom or tranquility for fantasy to arise, and that as in meditation the exploration of internal states can be key to a good and interesting life.

I'm reminded of a video game i once played about the native american ritual called Vision Quest where one isolates himself in a dark cabin - and as a lack of inputs creates vivid imagination like in a floatation tank - one finds his purpose eventually.

Not much different than religious sabbath or sitting meditation. To get something beautiful you have to remove noise.

Amazing to see primitive racism like this still pop up that can quickly be debunked by simply remembering for one second the hundreds of environmental catastrophes in the US (or Europe for that matter) done by companies for profit and zero compassion for either people or environment - many of them swept under the rug for years until areas become toxic waste dumps.

Thinking a few seconds more; what about a small group of people decimating the lives of millions of americans with opioids (Sackler), or entire industries lobbying for less regulation in foods? The EU banned additives list is way longer and they are healthier.

The problem is about profits, greed, regulation, and a bad form of capitalism where exploitation is outsourced or out of sight. Not about some "dumb people in some shithole somewhere".

Actually not, infrastructure has great geopolitical and geostrategic importance as laid out in the book just mentioned by Levine.

Those who control the data flow, access, search etc. control surveillance and the minds of the masses which is why funding is often seen from the sec state.

Isn't Starlink basically a part of the US military-industrial complex hiding behind stories of private enterprise, just like many other Silicon Valley companies intricate relationship with the security state as laid out in Yasha Levines Surveillance Valley?

This is one of the most important and least talked about power dynamics.

This is because that world is hidden to most people but would have just 20 years ago been covered by classical research journalism, namely the intersections between power, fiscal policy, law, the security state, foreign policy and mass media or other systems of control.

Politics and policy making is downstream from mostly non public clubs of people. Become a part of the security apparatus to gain power and draft plans for whole regions of the world and the future of society. The rest of us get to see their own self branding in Hollywood romantizations and ideological "event driven" smokescreens that cover the realpolitcal battles of power and resources that actually drive history.

That way the masses end up seeing the good fights for "Democracy", "Child safety", "Necessary financial bailouts" or "Primitive stupid people in X country need intervention" while these are all covering a big old game of Risk or Civilization ie. resource plundering, land grabs, violent exploitation of foreign markets, siphoning of wealth from the masses to the few, and panopticon-level systems of control implemented to keep dissent and enlightenment about these fact as much in the dark as possible.

Theres a reason the richest European families already took an interest in controlling the emerging postal services of several hundreds years ago just like early pamphlet media but somehow these very old facts have been so memoryholed everyone thinks we live in a somewhat meritocratic or even democratic society these days.

This is very cool, just what i needed actually.

Also your website is very sleek, minimal and your projects are tasteful.

One thing i hope i that this VR stuff will finally make Apple and others think about latency.

It still feels snappier to play a gameboy or use a windows 95 computer with a CRT screen which is bizarre.

There was this huge push years ago about Retina and resolution because "eye candy sells" but gaming and mobile has been pushing the Hz/Fps game in the last years, and i know the new Apple displays have "Promotion", but still theres tiny click latencies all over the place not to talk about how long it takes many apps to open on "supercomputers".

I wonder if anyone has made comparison from click to screen on a gameboy compared to say a macbook pro.