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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I was going to engage in some debate with this, but after your last paragraph I no longer find it necessary.

    It illustrates one of the nastier, but also more important of life lessons. No system or even choice is going to be without its own flaws and vulnerabilities, they’ll just be different ones from system to system. So, it’s less about any one system being “right”, or even just “better”, but instead “appropriate to the circumstances/environment/goals”.

    Once you acknowledge this, it becomes a lot harder to passionately defend any particular system, because you’re no longer as eager to ignore its own unique vulnerabilities. I believe deeply in democracy and freedom of information for instance, but I cannot bring myself to ignore that it creates a vulnerability for us that someone like Xi Jinping, with his powerful control over the local information space, simply does not experience.

    Authoritarian systems, on the other hand, have to deal with the very basic fact that there is nothing divine or magical about that man on top, he’s as human as the rest of us. So, if you get rid of him, you may be able to take and keep his job. Where in a democracy you’d just have to face re-election within a few years.

    Pros and cons, always, with pretty much everything. Then the next most important consideration imo is simply scale. Some systems work very well within very small scales, say, a small family. But when scaling these systems up, it can change the circumstances enough that their value changes.

    To illustrate this I always like to use littering a banana peel. If just one person litters a banana peel, it is largely harmless. If, however, a million people litter banana peels all in one spot, you can actually create a potential problem where one did not exist before. Scaling the behavior up changes how we need to think about it. This has a lot of ramifications for business in the modern world, where scale is usually desirable. Also feeds into many civil engineering problems.



  • For me it’s more about something with the potential to undermine the deathgrip of facebook, twitter, etc from our societies, in an attempt to partially address the steady increase in utter braindead stupidity and mindless vitriolic hatred stemming from profit-driven algorithmic control of our broader information ecosystem.

    That requires the eventual growth of a decentralized sister ecosystem of sorts, able to act as a viable competitor. So, to compete with the giants, that’s basically a fairly significant chunk of everyone. On Earth.

    Fortunately you can always just defederate the highest population centers, I imagine that would become very common eventually. Especially if they tried monetization or something, which would probably not be unheard of with larger userbases.

    All that said, I do feel you and also personally like smaller communities. But I’ll just move to one once World gets too big.


  • If you want to draw the line in that way, then break it all the way down and apply the principle evenly. Every single time you change your mind in any way, shape or form, that is an ever-so-slightly different you. The difference is so minor that it’s basically no difference at all, but it does exist.

    So, when you decide to put stawberry jam instead of grape on your toast, that old you that used grape is dead. And then the next day, when you go back to picking grape, the stawberry you is now dead and the grape you is resurrected.

    Obviously I’m exaggerating with such an innocuous example, but the basic principle applies. It’s all arbitrary, from a truly objective perspective.

    There’s a number of deductions one could draw from this, but a big one is that we try to apply identity as if “things” are real, but it’s mostly just our choices, which can vary as much as we want them to. This goes against a natural human desire for stability, we kinda wish that once we learn something, it can “stay learned”. But that’s just like Mr Incredible complaining that his city won’t “stay saved” in the beginning of the movie.

    Pluto’s recategorization away from planetary status triggered this in a lot of people. It’s arbitrary though, we made those decisions in the first place. And in the modern world, we really need to be ready to handle new stuff all the time, so flexibility is important.




  • No, not necessarily. I don’t think a dev usually would, or even should. It depends entirely on why they’re working on whatever the project is. To put it in more mathematical terms, I’m essentially saying that the amount of feedback any particular dev receives on their project is going to be a function of only really two major variables: How many total users they have, and how convenient they make it to deliver the feedback to them.

    Those two variables are most, but not all, of what governs what happens. They can do with that information whatever they wish. If they want a lot of feedback, they should make it easy. If they do not wish a lot, they should not make it easy. That’s all, really. It’s not particularly high level thinking or anything.


  • People suffer from limited attention. Trying to take a purely principled approach and investing the energy to give back to every project you may want to can become impractical. Especially if one had a busy family and professional life too, it may just not be worth it, however much someone may wish to help.

    It’s just the organization of priorities, and simply put, sometimes a few minutes really is too much to ask in certain circumstances.

    Thus, removing as many hurdles as possible is probably a worthy investment of a devs time if they want large amounts of feedback. Pragmatic, not based on any ideas of what might be right or wrong, but simply what is probably going to happen most of the time, with no consideration to why that might be or what might be better. Pragmatism is frequently unethical.