Something needs to route the PC to the server

I don’t want client-server model. I want sharing model. Like with Briar.

The only kind of “servers” might be relays, like in NOSTR, or machines running 24/7 like Briar mailbox.

IP. How would I go about replacing it? I don’t know, I think Yggdrasil authors have written something about their routing model, but 1) it’s represented as ipv6, so IP, 2) it’s far over my head, 3) read the previous, I don’t really want to replace it as much as not to make it the main common layer.

I’ve personally played with Gemini a few months ago, and now want a new Internet as opposed to a new Web.

Replace IP protocols with something better. With some kind of relative addressing, and delay-tolerant synchronization being preferred to real-time connections between two computers. So that there were no permanent global addresses at all, and no centralized DNS.

With the main “Web” over that being just replicated posts with tags hyperlinked by IDs, with IDs determined by content. Structured, like semantic web, so that a program could easily use such a post as directory of other posts or a source of text or retrieve binary content.

With user identities being a kind of post content, and post authorship being too a kind of post content or maybe tag content, cryptographically signed.

Except that would require to resolve post dependencies and retrieve them too with some depth limit, not just the post one currently opens, because, if it’d be like with bittorrent, half the hyperlinks in found posts would soon become dead, and also user identities would possibly soon become dead, making authorship check impossible.

And posts (suppose even sites of that flatweb) being found by tags, maybe by author tag, maybe by some “channel” tag, maybe by “name” tag, one can imagine plenty of things.

The main thing is to replace “clients connecting to a service” with “persons operating on messages replicated on the network”, with networked computers sharing data like echo or ripples on the water. In what would be the general application layer for such a system.

OK, this is very complex to do and probably stupid.

It’s also not exactly the same level as IP protocols, so this can work over the Internet, just like the Internet worked just fine, for some people, over packet radio and UUCP or FTN email gates and copper landlines. Just for the Internet to be the main layer in terms of which we find services, on the IP protocols, TCP, UDP, ICMP, all that, and various ones and DNS on application layer, - that I consider wrong, it’s too hierarchical. So it’s not a “replacement”.

Honestly every law usable to keep a business working that would fail otherwise is shady. Other than preventing (literal physical) theft, robberies and murders.

Especially if it limits your freedom to do whatever you want that doesn’t involve stealing, robbing, killing, raping, putting stuff on fire …

It’s not feudalism, it’s the usual fascism in making. Maybe with some capitalist mechanisms.

The problem with so much leftist thought is precisely that it denies agency to those it seeks to liberate.

Which is why at some point I decided that I’m fine with explaining my opinions though Trotskyism and not anarcho-capitalism. I didn’t stop being ancap in essence (recently went to an ancap group in TG and was glad to see that the main principles haven’t been lost), but in Russia most people around use communist terms and logic on politics without even realizing it. Even the right-wing and nationalist kind talk like that (the official “communist” party doesn’t, though, it sounds like moderate nazis with weird symbolic). And if I want to find a way to improve something, it very clearly doesn’t lie in conceiving a structure and then trying to make it real through power or deceit.

I think they do understand what they are doing. Just like with modifying a “protected” program locally, a native one. They are making laws about what you can and can’t do, and outlawing tools allowing you to do that.

Honestly until it’s possible to make laws forbidding you to do something that doesn’t violate anyone, such will be made. If you can spend N money if forcing something through markets, and a bit less than N if lobbying for a law, then you’ll do the latter.

Anyway. The problem is in the Internet and the Web as things which encourage this behavior.

Much drama.

I agree about semantic web, but the issue is with all of the Internet. Both its monopoly as the medium of communication, and its architecture.

And if we go semantic for webpages, allowing the clients to construct representation, then we can go further, to separate data from medium, making messages and identities exist in a global space, as they (sort of, need a better solution) do in Usenet.

About the Internet itself being the problem - that’s because it’s hierarchical, despite appearances, and nobody understands it well. Especially since new systems of this kind are not being built often, to say the least, so the majority of people using the Internet doesn’t even think about it as a system. It takes it for given that this is the only paradigm for the global network. And that it’s application-neutral, which may not be true.

20 years ago, when I was a kid, people would think and imagine all kinds of things about the Internet and about the future and about ways all this can break, and these were normal people, not tech types, and one would think with time we wouldn’t become more certain, as it becomes bigger and bigger.

OK, I’m just having an overvalued idea that the Internet is poisoned. Bad sleep, nasty weather, too much sweets eaten. Maybe that movement of packets on the IP protocol can somehow give someone free computation, with enough machines under their control, by using counters in the network stack as registers, or maybe something else.

I’ve recently got an idea (a paranoid one) that this

Microsoft was never a nice company. Even in the 1990s they were exercising their E.E.E (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) strategy to beat federated and decentralized platforms and technologies.

is a popular wrong myth.

Because Sun was still alive. That Sun. Seeming as if half of its employees were geniuses. Seeming as if they had a plan for all the industry for a 100 years forward. Which was the original “corporation of good”, almost nobody dares to treat it as something not sacred.

Sun’s plan was extremely hierarchical, and definitely not decentralization\federation minded.

Saying that a technology is universal (or not) requires understanding of it down to elements.

Maybe the Internet itself is conceived the way that it will always lead to centralization and hierarchy, as a tool to change the society.

See how IRL democracy and interoperability and choice in various situations were and even are absolutely normal, in friend groups and often in community places, but on the Internet you come to a place and it has moderators, appointed by other moderators and administrators, and administrators are gods, and there’s often no interoperability. And the longer it exists, the less interoperability there is.

Maybe we need a new global network, reimagined from ground zero with understanding of the risks. That is, a new common layer, where IP is in the Internet.

Salami slicing tactic is a bit different, it’s putting separate elementary components of a mechanism by themselves, carefully. Until it’s whole and can be turned on.

It’s what the Silicon Valley people have done with the Internet. Since its creation, I mean. It’s designed as a totalitarian system. I wonder if there are backdoors in the IP protocol, or at least BSD reference stack that was adopted by almost everyone. But even if there are none, the system itself is architecturally ephemeral where democratic mechanisms can put a base, and perpetual where authoritarian ones can put a base. It’s centered on “who talks to whom” and not on “which messages are preserved and propagated and on which subjects”. Some brilliant minds are on the wrong side.

Or maybe I’m having a bipolar psychosis again and need to take my pills. Or maybe both.

Called power imbalance.

Well, yeah, what I meant is that “separate but equal” and a few other variants are really, sincerely, existent here. Which is why people in Russia of the village bum kind sometimes like Confederates, but if they’d meet a white person from the US really thinking shit of descendants of people their ancestors had enslaved, and thinking they are worse, there’d be livid fury. But it’s overall different, even neo-Nazis here are usually about hostility to people of some groups, and about “purity of race” and “it’s our land, let them go back to <T>”, but the “some being better than others” and the “right to enslave and treat badly” things look completely wild from here even for many neo-Nazis.

So - what happens if you say publicly to a crowd of “old white dudes”, preferably of the middle-upper social layer, that white people are absolutely just as good as black people?

Yes, but there are people in the USA who have made systems solving very complex tasks. Suppose people who’ve built Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google - suppose they build the robotized system that is going to fight such a war. (Which is also similar to what Russia and Ukraine did, their new military development is all around local analogs of those companies.)

They have a whole new MIC emerging, with Palantir and more general companies developing new weapons. Mostly, like I said, autonomous drones (meaning far longer range, smaller vulnerability to jamming and miniaturization - what can you do against a killer bird the size of your fist?).

Russia and Ukraine are mostly fighting using drones and artillery now, with very small suicide groups of people used to find openings, infiltrate lines and take pieces of territory.

Suppose a military fighting just like today’s Russian or Ukrainian one attacks an unprepared old one, with very expensive and big AD batteries, artillery, tanks, infantry transports and so on, unprotected from swarms of cheap drones immediately killing anything detected. They might be able to wipe it all out like a week before the world around will realize that such a blitzkrieg has happened.

Also not only swarms themselves, but modern tools of operational control. Lots of blunders are due to living humans panicking or making emotional decisions and shows, or just not being able to process information quickly enough. Due to struggle for power, or crime. A swarm of drones doesn’t have those problems.

In any case, for the purpose of this fear it only makes sense to explore the possibility of it not making a blunder. What if yes - if yes, then either the general west supports such a war and Mexico is done, just slowly, like Gaza, or it doesn’t and then, I guess, the US is going to slowly drift out of relevance.

EDIT: And that fantasy of mine is connected to a situation where US leadership goes almost Khmer Rouge. So - a clearly suicidal, but murderous scenario. So - control over millions in such a model is done by killing many.

But you are right in there not being anything resembling such amount of equipment available now to use. So I’d expect all this to be at least a decade away even if it can happen.

they also lost insane amounts of material, both ground, sea and air war machines;

Intended for obsolete paradigm of war, a lot of them. Very expensive, old and not so efficient. And not just “lost”, also “tested in real life conditions”.

So what can Russia do with its improved army?

Defend from whatever it fears in the future, that’s probably their idea. If you are expecting a war, due to paranoia or not, this might seem justified. Similar to how averting a hunger is far easier than going through it, because during a hunger people who die also consume food before it, just not enough, and work with worse efficiency. In case of such a war of defense your preserved materiel and people will be expended possibly far less efficiently than in a smaller war to get some experience.

My whole line in this thread is that such a strategy seems to be consistent with the claims of feeling threatened by NATO, officially expressed by Russian officials since 00s. It’s funny, but it’s really so.

Russia also lost the Middle East, meaning Syria is gone and even Iran has its own problems. I’m just not seeing any way forward from this, even if they can patch the economy together.

Perhaps it’s optimization. Doesn’t matter how much you are trying to hold under control if you are not succeeding. Similarly to hunger.

Anyway, this is me playing devil’s advocate.

Leads me to a question, like someone from Russia where we have our problem of casual racism, but not quite the clean nature of the US one, we have racism very diverse and dependent on the context (some think A are better than B, some that they are equal, but A and B sleeping together warrant a murder, some that A are better than B, but them sleeping together is fine, some that A and B are equal, but should be eternally hostile and don’t owe each other noble conduct, or maybe both inequality and segregation, but noble conduct is owed always … we have multitude of kinds, and for multitude of separations, and in general it’s not a clear and firm problem).

And by you using such a designation it seems you are from the US.

How do your non-supremacists (average people) react to a statement that they are exactly as good as black people? How do your supremacists react to such?

(Say, here the first kind would generally not understand why would you say that, or laugh and joke something about how in the ideal world you would be right ; and the second kind would generally respond with sarcasm.)

I think this is an evaluation based on wars of the past.

Without 1) autonomous combat drones, 2) new fascism in the USA allowing it to kill any amounts of foreign and its own civilians, 3) surveillance that wasn’t possible before our time, 4) computers making many decisions in real time.

With those present they can launch a swarm of AI killbots, possibly with tactical nukes, and be done before the general population even realizes well enough what happened (that’s a slow thing). No conscription\mobilization\losses - much smaller problems with Vietnam-like protests, morale, fragging.

This is an extreme fantasy, of course. Strongly inspired by Soviet post-WWII doctrine for a nuclear war plus new tools.

Unions’ power is in being inclusive. Ideology makes divisions.

To attacking a non-NATO country. NATO’s purpose is not to defend random places and support random revolutions and occupations around the world

Yeah, well, attacking a NATO country with the military Russia had in 2022 would be suicide.

And as shitty the rift is with the US, Russia now has a rearming EU to worry about.

A rearmed EU will be less dependent upon the US. If we are expecting the US to go bad in the following decades, then EU less dependent upon it might be less likely to partake in pummeling Russia when that happens.

He put the country on a war economy which is going to cause an insane recession if not an outright collapse if the war ends.

That depends on the expected outside conditions. If there’s a worldwide crisis coming, then doing this before it is even advantageous.

At insanely low prices, and by creating even more dependencies on untrustworthy partners. Who’s to say China won’t use the new dependency to invade Russia? Can Russia depend on that?

China doesn’t generally invade anyone. Peace works in their favor. They are even catching up as an innovating and not only manufacturing nation. China already controls Russia though its industries’ supply chains. Also China controls much of the world through its rare metals.

So yes, Russia can depend on the Chinese “roof”, so to say, being stable.

Insanely low prices are regrettable, but one of Russia’s biggest exports is grain. Grain demand is different from oil and gas demand, - I don’t think I have to explain why, - so that falling or stopping being profitable is highly unlikely.

It went from an army that could threaten Europe to one that could threaten Ukraine. I know, drones are the new thing, but all of Russia’s adversaries have much greater manufacturing capabilities than Russia, Russia is not going to outproduce the West or China in drones.

From one that boasted threatening Europe to one that actually threatens Ukraine. Also you are writing this as if Ukraine were weak.

It’s not about capabilities, it’s about a whole functioning well-tested system. Russia doesn’t have to outproduce China, Russia simply can’t fight China, it’s dependent upon China in everything. But the good news (for Russia) are that all its potential adversaries are western or western-aligned.

Like training an LLM on a dataset (sorry).

This is the new big lie of Russia. No, defense spending is coming from loans, basically a credit line we didn’t use because the Germans were jacking off to austerity.

You weren’t using it, now you are using it. That’s too “at the expense of everything else”.

Just look at the numbers. It’s a war economy. 40% of the Russian budget is going towards the army, and if the war ends or this money runs out - that’s 2027/28 if we’re being generous - you’re going from a labour shortage to 10% unemployment. That’s “dissolution of the USSR” level economic turmoil.

They are making rules for labor migration stricter, and the number of labor migrants in Russia is enormous, I’d say it’s more than 10% workforce. I don’t have the current numbers, but it’s a few millions of citizens of Tajikistan alone. So - they are slowly impeding labor migration, and making it less attractive. Might be a preparation for this exactly.

OK. I don’t know where the ship is going or what its captain thinks. I’m just seeing that it’s been promised things completely different from what transpired for all my life.

All I’m saying is that if let’s say the end result of this is a ceasefire on the current frontline, Russia basically lost the war.

Russia lost the war the moment it started the war, because with pre-war Zelensky they could make any kind of equal alliance, that’s what his voters wanted and what he was promising.

However - in any case, 1, Russia has developed a modern armed force from the nonsense it had, it paid with plenty of lives for that, but many of those convicts and depressed\poor people who were attracted by the money offered, and, 2, with freezing of the conflict using the current line of contact Russia has gained strategically important territory on the Azov sea coast, connecting it to Crimea, and has almost approached Odessa.

Honestly, if Ukraine becomes de-facto landlocked, it’s over. Taking Odessa is hard, because there are limans to the south and east of it, they’d have to basically encircle it from the north first. In WWII when Soviet troops liberated Odessa, they too stormed the city from the north.

So there are two variants - 1) they make some peace\ceasefire\whatever with Ukraine losing what’s now controlled by Russia, and then after some time Russia commits perfidy and attacks again with the intention of taking Odessa, and 2) the same, but Russia doesn’t commit perfidy and just remains with the current situation.

Before this war Russian-controlled Crimea had a single chokepoint in its connection to Russia. After it there’s also the route through the mainland. We live in an era of developing land logistics.

I’ve already said that the Russian military has gained experience, the best possible kind at that - all other possible adversaries are either too weak or too strong (part of alliances and with their own experience). I suspect that’s even why the war was started at all - to gain experience of modern warfare with an adversary approaching equal, the hard way.

I’ll attribute the situation where it makes sense to western racism and chauvinism. A conflict where two East Slavic nations fight each other won’t have really grave consequences for Russia in terms of western reaction, and at the same time the Ukrainians are too gaining an experienced military. Almost a win-win decision for a psychopath leader.

Yeah, about that - when some kind of peace\ceasefire is made, Ukraine basically becomes a better buffer state for Russia than before. With no wish for more bloodshed, thus no threat for what Russia has occupied, yet a military better not to cross. So if, suppose, EU or NATO suddenly goes fascist in 10 or 20 years after now (all that Chat Control stuff doesn’t inspire confidence in the future), they will have to pass through Ukraine unless they make it a NATO or EU member, which they won’t due to their own arrogance.

So honestly, even without taking Odessa, Russia is improving its strategic position. From a purely military, 1930s-like, point of view. I mean, improving if its intention in the large picture is self-defense, because for pulling a Hitler it’s already a clear failure since the first few months, but honestly what if Putin really believes in bad-bad NATO intending to eat Russia? And nation leaders and powerful people are usually psychopaths, so maybe a psychopath is fitted with a better brain to understand them. Maybe he’s right.

Look, I’m from Hungary. If the peeps who did 1956 got Western help beyond thoughts and prayers, and the revolution ended up with Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén counties as “East Hungary” or bombed flat and even part of the USSR behind the fence, and the rest as basically a Western country, the memory of that revolution would be much less bittersweet.

Ukraine wasn’t behind anything like the Iron Curtain.

Every time I try pho bo I have doubts that anything is a big power compared to Vietnam.

Like - there are people who like Kipling’s thing about that “white man’s burden”, so - IMHO Vietnamese can take the “yellow man’s burden” and civilize Europeans and Americans and all those. Teach them how you really keep your nation’s dignity. Frenchies - check. Murrkans - check. Khmer Rouge - check. China - check.

For that supposed 20% he reinvigorated NATO (prior to the full scale invasion countries started questioning if we still need NATO), got EU to increase defense spending and got Finland and Sweden to join NATO.

Don’t you see how this works both ways?

He measured NATO’s response, he found a way to fight wars and not break (in the sense of popular outrage at loss of life and economic effect) for Russia, and which categories of population can be recruited for money and which shouldn’t, he confirmed that the resource exports money source can be reoriented to other countries than the West, and he made unofficially NATO-aligned countries officially that.

EU’s defense spending increasing is at the expense of other things.

They also proved they’re a paper tiger and their arms manufacturing is crap. Oh and of course sanctions and the war completely wrecking the economy.

They proved that to themselves too and reacted. Changed the military doctrine, evolved new tactics and strategy, built new MIC production chains. Russian army was inexperienced and thoroughly rotten, now it’s not. Russian weapons were expensive and untested, now there are cheap drones of various kinds produced on scale and used, well-tested and constantly improved.

The economy is not completely wrecked. It really seemed to be going there many times over these years. Some of the people who told me it’s going to crumble are professors. It’s not even approaching that anymore. I live in Russia.

People working in the Russian Central Bank are very competent. One can talk and talk about good and evil, but their work has been perfect basically since 1999 till now. And people making actual decisions too understand a lot.

It seems intuitively (incorrectly) that the way Russian society is built, with its inequality and injustice, it can’t bear a big war. But if slaveholder agrarian societies and feudal societies could fight wars with their plutocratic contemporaries, then Russia’s mafia feudalism can fight Western societies. Which are honestly too slowly changing to mafia feudalism ; perhaps some will flip to fascism.

Considering what all those western nations have shown themselves, I’m honestly not sure there are good guys here, and if there are none, then I’m kinda almost feeling patriotic. But I don’t understand why Putin had to invade Ukraine, Zelensky was fucking elected because of his promises to make peace and restore ties, and for the national interest it made much bigger sense to just do that, Ukraine would still be naturally dependent.