Soteriologian
1d ago
Surely it helps, no? Part of why it was so shocking to me is I'd been around a fair amount of dogs -- my immediate family had two, and I don't recall ever seeing either of them do that, not even to inanimate objects, much less guests. My extended family lives on a farm, and always had 2-4 dogs, and I don't remember seeing this among them, either.
I'm checking with Google now and it insists this is indeed normal for dogs of all breeds and ages. Clearly Google is not familiar with the level of reality-warping power behind the Disney world I was in, because this definitely did not happen, as I remember being repeatedly shocked and repulsed when leaving our bubble and seeing how the heathens' pets behaved.
Soteriologian
1d ago
my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things
Yeah, one of my first "I have been living in a synthetic Disney World" epiphanies I can recall having is when I was a teenager hanging out with a group of friends at one of their houses, and the host's dog just jumped on one of the guys and started humping him. The host immediately started shouting at the dog, grabbing its collar and trying to pull it off (the dog, not the collar). My first thought was "what kind of crazy dog is this?", immediately overridden by my much-more-rational thought of "wait, maybe this is what all those ads for spaying and neutering services were referring to. This is what animals are actually like when you don't do that!" My next thought was "And why is it doing that to a boy? I was told homosexuality is not natural and never happens except among godforsaken heathen."
Soteriologian
2d ago
IPFS is riding on venture capital. HL is not decentralised: it’s just a normal centralised gambling platform, where blockchain is as relevant as the stones in stone soup.
Soteriologian
2d ago
Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn.
Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.
Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!
Soteriologian
2d ago
I agree in spirit, but in practice, I've gotta disagree. Many of the services you name aren't really decentralised: they're riding on venture capital, masquerading as decentralised systems, and in my estimation is there is no serious technical model to survive beyond the "subsidised by venture capital" phase.
Soteriologian
2d ago
I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums,
It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.
The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.
For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).
Soteriologian
2d ago
What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!
I'm not saying it should be free, but your power level should definitely not be proportional to your real-world wealth. If you want that system, there's no reason for cyber libertarianism in the first place: just play in the existing system, which already works that way.
The compute cost of good-faith contributors in a forum like this is a rounding error from zero. In a space where people share media, it could be non-zero, but I still think it's small. Cost only really becomes relevant in the presence of bad-faith actors (i.e., spammers). PoW is one method of mitigation, but it's not the only one. For example, making a space invite-only basically renders spam a moot problem, The problem then of course is how do you get an invite in the first place? Perhaps you could make the invite request PoW, relative to the current spam pressure on applications or something,
Soteriologian
3d ago
The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.
In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?
With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.
For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)
Soteriologian
3d ago
Soteriologian
4d ago
He had John Bolton in his first term, and made him cry with edging and constant refusal to actually start any new wars.
Soteriologian
6d ago
pops up 800 miles from its closest recorded habitat in a cruise ship
Come on, is this where we're at? Most people on cruise ships live elsewhere. They're only on the cruise ship as tourists.
That was not my claim. Look, I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this, I don't care to discuss it further.
Technically true while de facto not true at all. The only way to connect IPFS to any relevant degree of real-world usage is via a domain owned by Protocol, otherwise you have to run an IPFS daemon locally, which nobody does. Like, I'm literally a software nerd and I have never met one person in my entire life who has done this (besides me, and that was only to try it out and be annoyed with how comically inefficient it was before turning it off and deleting it). Contrast that with torrents -- even many non-technical people I know who couldn't program their way out of a Python tutorial use torrents!
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