• 5 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle






  • Yes, (most) everything is feasible in smaller populations (not nuclear maintenance for example). But without technology, they’ve been isolated, uncoordinated, and easily bullied by those larger organized authoritarian bodies. There are billions of people, and narcissists make up about 1 in 5 of those billions of people. A smaller subset lack basic empathy, and an even smaller subset are intellectually competent. Multiply whatever that probability is by billions of people, and you have a guaranteed concern for every single government on the planet.

    I agree with wanting smaller businesses as well. Capitalism isn’t bad (communism is state capitalism after all), but corporatism is the emerging problem from right libertarianism that most people conflate as problems with capitalism

    My point being isn’t that I don’t like leftism, they are my ideals. I just don’t believe we live in an ideal world, so practically I follow a different set of beliefs. Thay said, I do think leftism is compatible with libertarianism in a way that it can compete in the global arena. And that starts off with solving how a decentralized governmental body “identifies” one and only one person to their “identity” (otherwise you get Sybil attacks)


  • So, I emphasized trustless and decentralized in social organizations. “It just works for social media” isn’t exactly addressing what I was getting at. For example, Lemmy has a bot account problem. All that freedom makes it harder to prevent that problem.

    But if you’re talking about how a government is a system of voting bodies that authorize some action given state (policy), and authority is delegated by some means - say, voting - then the botting problem of Lemmy is not just “something that doesn’t work”, it’s a critical failure which would enable fraud.

    So, when I brought up Sybil attacks, I was trying to avoid a long winded digression including arguments from Microsoft on Decentralized ID. But the point being, it can be decentralized. Policy is action given state but action is delegated to people inevitably. But when you vote, would you rather trust a person to count those votes or a trustless automated system?


  • I said it’s feasible for smaller populations - but to be comparable to the size and strength of a world power AND have that sort of left wing economics how many examples can you provide that don’t end up needing authoritarianism?

    By the way, I have nothing against the left or authoritarianism. Some geographic regions lead to power dynamics where authoritarianism is just a more sensible form of management since constraints on necessary resources make it easy for militant groups to seize control.



  • No one, there are already plenty of protocols defined for distributed computing and are made open source. In a hypothetical lib left social network, If you want different networks, that’s fine, you just have to make your own protocol. It’s like how countries shouldn’t have borders, or how computing platforms shouldn’t lock you in or out of others (take apple/Mac OS as an example, versus Linux)

    Then it’s up to individuals to verify the source code and choose to be a node operator. Not everyone needs to be a node operator, just enough on that the common skilled worker can partake should they need to

    If you don’t like the “rules of governance” of whatever network you’re in, that’s fine, go to a different one you do like, or make your own with your own rules. If it’s actually a better system of “decentralized digital government”, you’ll attract people into your Network.

    Consumer grade tech is more than capable of achieving this. You don’t need cpus with 2nm transistors (which are heavily gatekept by oligarchs), there’s plenty of open software and hardware protocols/designs to prove not only this concept works, but has been done before by now.

    The only problem in the past was with solving the identity problem and preventing Sybil attacks, but that’s becoming less of a concern for other reasons (which I could elaborate further on)




  • yboutros@infosec.pubtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHero
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    1 month ago

    Unfortunately, it’s for the best. If you’re serious about research you have to present yourself. Especially if you’re the first person to discover it, you’re the most - possibly only - qualified person to talk about that thing.

    Part of scientific communication is giving elevator talks. You have to be able to argue for funding.

    Not to mention, if you never develop those skills, you’re just opening yourself up to getting a worse financial incentive for the same amount of work





  • I wanted to be a hacker as a kid, so I had some experience with Backtrack 5. A prof said if you wanted to be a cowboy coder, do everything in your terminal. That was good advice, I’ve learned a lot about OS’s from that

    Your OS is basically a set of drivers that allow you to leverage your hardware, as well as a package manager for managing your software, and a system for managing services (like at startup or by some event trigger)

    I’m an advanced user but NixOS has been an excellent OS, it’s like all the fun of tuning arch but with less elbow grease. I was a kde neon (ubuntu base + plasma display manager + KDE desktop environment) user before