Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that.

For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.

But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.

A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.

Yeah, except there’s one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn’t make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.

It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it.

This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.

But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.

The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn’t solve its initial goals anymore.

So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.

And the most important part is that this doesn’t allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.

Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don’t understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.

Like mowing the grass.

Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.

This is not exactly what I said. “Too many levels” is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn’t happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.

That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.

Agreed.

Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.

Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can’t just, say, press “+” and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word “sortition” used by somebody else on Lemmy.

At some point I thought that it’s good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.

We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.

No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.

I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance.

Couldn’t be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don’t do that, what’s better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?

This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.

Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn’t really a vulnerability even).

7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.

At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There’s a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.

But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.

the oligarchy as it currently stands precedes the capitalist state as we know it today. some of them even come from the very same families, like they are fucking kings (they are)

I mean, these are terms with vague borders - oligarchy, feudalism, capitalism …

About same families - I guess in France/Italy/Germany or in Japan maybe.

and that’s nothing, if you consider feudalism lasted even longer

Same problem. Arguably in Britain a lot of it still lasts, and in Germany.

OK. So my point was specifically about modern regress and tech corporations. Not all of history.

Enforcement.

That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.

I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.

It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.

Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.

So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.

And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.

The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.

One can even say that this is a market dynamic.

So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.

The problem is

1. in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),

2. in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,

3. in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,

4. in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,

5. in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,

6. in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,

7. in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.

So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.

LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.

yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.

And I’m trying to say that the state helping them was first.

this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.

Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.

aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.

He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.

I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.

The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.

The state gives them very expensive projects.

The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.

The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.

So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.

Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s

GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.

Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.

Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.

And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.

But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.

But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?

That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

What else do people use itch.io for?

I’m not doing that, just saying it. There’s no reason to idolize anything. Even idols. Antique Mediterranean was better for being as religiously pluralistic as rural China.

Thx, will remember that

Thanks, but I have my very reasonable doubts

Personally, I don’t think billionaires should exist. Even the ones that I think have done cool things.

Yeah, it’s in the intersection of two “doubt” points making one “almost sure” point.

First, people getting power get spoiled fast, it’s not possible to resist, it’s as if I could have any girl I like and she’d like me and I knew that, just no chance to avoid a sensory burnout after a few months of, eh, feeling that. The possibility that a person can resist that is very small, people like Aristotle Onassis, maybe.

Second, if one person is worth, say, 12000 times more than another person, it’s important to ask whether they really are, or they can be replaced with like 50 of equals of that another person with proper organization and discipline. The possibility that they really are is almost negligibly small, there are a few people alive for whom one can suggest that and maybe more, but most are like those people we know and love.

I can imagine Gabe Newel being worth 100, maybe 1000 times me for the humanity, purely financially, but something of bigger orders of magnitude seems preposterous. Not even touching upon money affecting our relative legal power balance, where even factor 2 difference is just morally not acceptable.

Not that I’m of any bad opinion of Gabe, Steam is one today’s company that both doesn’t abuse its customers too much and does a lot of work on the positive side.

That includes some bad people too … Well, I dunno how bad, just a certain Larry Ellison still loves working, or so I’ve heard. Or Bill Gates.

Gabe Newell is better than many others, but this is true, the best man on Earth will become an absolute pissbag given power for continuous enough period of time to realize that.

And the best man on Earth is probably some volunteer medic in some African warzone, not a computer programmer and a tech businessman.

Gabe Newell is not a usual CEO though.

I think both.

Danger in that world was on the sidewalks and unintended. Danger in this world is on the main pathways the most, and intended by its administrators.

Edgy vibes of that time seemed more like when you reinforce your right to call a president of your country a little bitch. Or like how it wasn’t traditionally welcomed to physically punish kids in many cultures in the Caucasus - because teaching fear of punishment also piggybacks teaching fear of enemy. BTW, this was also a principle in Dragomirov’s writings on how teaching should be done in the military ; his approaches to actual warfare were kinda archaic even in his own time (basically “straight at them” bayonet shock attacks), but the parts on didactics are good.

The pop music I hated then and hate now.

So yes.

No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.

I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.

Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.

Funny, I miss that exactly. The feeling of spring\summer air and the fragrance of jasmine\lilac\linden\freshly mowed grass and the clouds, and ICQ animations with cats scratching your screen and “hasta la vista baby” and all that, and the Web when it was actually hypertext on hundreds of pages hand-crafted all with real people.

And yeah, going to friends to play Tekken, and them coming to play SW: RotS. Watching “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a summer camp. Older girls watching “Charmed”.

It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)

I thought “gnostic vibe”, but yes.

seeing what can be done with the tech to make each person’s experience unique, with bespoke quests and dialogue.

That being possible would be fundamentally a level up from what they are now. I’ve read a paper on this someone linked in a Lemmy thread a year or so ago.

Maybe one day playing a game like Skyrim for 10 years doesn’t have to mean playing the same quests over and over.

I think a more manual approach would work, of a world model like Crusader Kings has, with traits and ties and opinions and random events of NPCs between each other and towards the player, and that AI being used simply to rephrase and slightly adjust descriptions and sequences of events - then maybe.

But consider how many NPCs that means and how many others they meet in their simulated lives, and how hard it would be to debug a story line to ensure that it’s always playable.

An LLM is not, strictly speaking, necessary here, and if used, doesn’t make it easier.

I live in the midst of something that can be very carefully called capitalism. It was called socialism once and then the “socialist administrators” did sort of a rebranding.

Point being - yes, this is simplification.

I think when all these famous studios were interesting, they still by inertia functioned the way people with actual skills founded them. I’m thinking of BioWare, Black Isle, Obsidian, but reading the history of any famous video game studio gives that impression. It was a rather personal business in 90s and early 00s, it seems.

Then the “professionals” came and started “fixing” everything, and something about today’s computing makes me personally deeply disgusted of anything advertised there.

I don’t want a shooter not better than a hundred Q3 clones, but taking 50GB disk space. I don’t even want it with “photorealistic” (no they aren’t) graphics. I don’t want CK3 because it’s slow and has too much bullshit happening, the secret of success is in quality of content more than amount, and more is not always better if a player gets bored with small events. I admit, I haven’t tried Hogwarts Legacy, put from what people say its open world is as useful as Daggerfall’s map the size of England, because most things on that map are all the same, though as a dungeon crawler Daggerfall is still better than typical modern game. And Star Wars - its Expanded Universe mostly came into existence in the 90s, it’s designed the way very convenient for all kinds of video games, or any entertainment and any secondary art at all, and George Lucas approached that theoretically before making the first movie (the “obscenely huge profits” part he may or may not have considered, but it came as a welcome bonus, I suppose), and still every modern time Star Wars game is just not interesting to me ; my favorite one is KotORII, so there is, of course, a gap between me and the majority, but it’s still baffling how didn’t they even try to make an X-Wing remake.

One can go on. People want to play interesting games. Very few people play games because of “more, better, wider” in ad. The whole idea of a game is to be interesting. It’s entertainment. It’s not “I’ve got a new iPhone and you don’t” dick size contest. Some game being very technically cool, but absolutely bullshit in gameplay, writing, UI design, character design, location design etc, - is not entertaining. Some other game being technically a visual novel (not necessarily), but with all those things done well, - it is entertaining.

So, making a good game doesn’t even require a lot of very competent and very stressed CS heroes working since dawn till dusk to the extent of their ability.

They say people had fun in Daggerfall.

So it’s not a nasheed

Thx

I’ve heard that PS3 games, while the OS was too, I think, based on FreeBSD, ran in a sort of a hypervisor and used some features of the Cell architecture.

I’ve never read about PS4 and PS5 OS’s, and them being Intel-based should mean that it’s possibly less exotic.

Of course various unices are almost source-compatible.

No, “based on” doesn’t tell us anything. Just that to avoid repeating work they took FreeBSD.