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your statement has way too many relative references, you speak of the latter, and the former, and the alliances between the opposition of the former against the alleged plans of the latter in a scenario where one invades a soon to be allied 3rd party

my point being is that in trying to sound serious and formal you've imposed on your reader an extra layer of unacking your point which you also had to needlessly pack so you'd sound like I already said (see: I did it again, put in a reference instead of repeating cuz it makes me sound more serious and 'deep')


This is why natural language should add support for defining named variables.

Can we get that in the next edition of the standard?


Unless I'm completely missing an extra layer of satire here (which would be topical), I think that they were doing it deliberately.


could also jump straight into the code that generates so much of that 'unlimited' html (them web frameworks)


so do I, but my ISP after getting eaten by another larger ISP made it impossible to access remotely.

long live the free market. free for institutional-entities to step on individual humans.


> A hole is not something, it is a cavity in something else

this reasoning also applies to "infinity". it literally means NOT-finite. it refers to the lack of a thing: namely a biggest number.

then again, freaking language and maths sure make us able to think about these 'lack of [blank]' as if they were actual things (to the point that abstractly they are as real as it gets)


> this reasoning also applies to "infinity"

"Infinity" applies to the reasoning of what a hole is, but not to what a black hole is. A black hole is not not something. It is something, yet a hole is not something. Unlike a hole, a black hole is defined by its inherent characteristics, mass, spin and electric charge. A hole can only be defined by characteristics of what it is not, the empty volume of missing substrate.


agreed 100%. a black hole is a physical object unlike infinity. thanks for not letting me get away with being 'sublty wrong'.

my larger point was about how language 'creates' such real abstractions; sometimes with terrible names (your original complaint).


You are right about language, with contronyms and oxymorons. Especially in nomenclature, many things are named incorrectly or have contradictory names, such as Koala Bear, Whale Shark, Killer Whale, Starfish, Prairie Dog, King Cobra, Red Panda, Guinea Pig, Bearcat, Flying Lemur, Flying Squirrels, etc. Also, asteroid, which are not at all particularly "star like."


this person seem to not understand how microsoft's business stays on track.

they seem to really think that individual contributions truly affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission; but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's overall mission.


I guess MS should just pick people to hire in a lottery then.


I somehow suspect they wouln't fare any worse.


at least they did it before...

maybe some government issue with visas?

I'm have this paranoid supsicion that some powerful shadow (i.e. unkown) actor within the USA political landspace really wants to take Facebook/Meta down.

I suppose they did not go along somebody's political plans? so little trustworthy information sure makes my imagination take off


Why does a certain 'paper of record' have to publish a hitpiece on facebook/meta every single day. Seems awfully suspicious.

1. Today: When Facebook Actually Broke My Brain https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/opinion/facebook-bipolar-...

2. Yesterday: Skepticism, Confusion, Frustration: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggles https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerber...

3.Day before yesterday: This Is Life in the Metaverse https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/technology/metaverse-face...

Does this obsession seem normal ?


Someone tries to manipulate the market because of a short (or long?) position on FB?


nah, the people on such a hypotehtical unkown level work without money constraints; they will print more if needed.


That's a weird take considering it's a company that's been very publicly and loudly saying it plans to make cuts due to falling revenue. They got hit hard by Apple's privacy changes and some other "macro headwinds."


What's not trustworthy about the simple fact that the company is having a really hard time right now and needs to trim fat to try and make it?


Trim the fat? From what I can tell no executives have lost their jobs or had their comp reduced...


That's not what trim the fat means.


we cerntainly have the technology... just not the social-political will to do it.


Not to be pedantic, but we do have the social-political will, just not enough of it.

Yet.


I'm beginning to understand, how is it (and thus, why is it) that decentralization is doomed to fail under our current culture.

decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power. that's it. that's the only reason necessary to explain why it'll never be allowed to stay decentralized (and decentralizing). in many countries/cities, cab liceneses are quite a corrupt business; it comes down to who you know that can hook you up with one (kinda like drugs but without the raw illegality). typically the driver does not own neither the cab nor the licence; they're just some poor employee without many options.

>It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.

sounds naive, you know who will also come if you start to get popular with your platform? the government/police who really act quite like a mob. them people who want/need/like to be powerful. because any such platform which is popular has power, power ripe for 'centralizing'; just say it's for safey and legality instead of 'centralizing'.


> decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power. that's it. that's the only reason necessary to explain why it'll never be allowed to stay decentralized (and decentralizing).

You have to also look at the other side of the equation, the user. The user often doesn't care about decentralization, but about convenience. And a single, central point to say, order stuff, or food, or a taxi is a convenient thing.

Think about say, ordering food by searching by hand for every business within a given radius around you, going to their own website, looking at the offering, and entering your details. And then doing it differently the next time when you feel like eating something else. It's a pain, and a centralized delivery system makes things a lot more convenient.

Decentralization often implies choice paralysis. Which Mastodon server do you register on? Which email provider? Which XMPP server? And what if your server of choice isn't being kept up to date, or doesn't support X extension popular service Y wants? A centralized service everyone uses quickly becomes attractive.

Another issue in this mix is the prevalence of mobile devices, which are only active for short intervals and otherwise mostly sleep. They can't be true peers on the internet due to this, and need external supporting services. This also leads to centralization.


> Think about say, ordering food by searching by hand for every business within a given radius around you, going to their own website, looking at the offering, and entering your details. And then doing it differently the next time when you feel like eating something else.

This is exactly what I do, and it's completely fine. My desktop web browser can even save my credit card details (but I have mine memorized so I don't do that) and does save my address to make it just as easy as GrubHub or whatever. Three different restaurants have thanked me for using their website rather than the other services that they go through because it's cheaper to them.


Rather than looking at it as "decentralizing dilutes power, and so the evil cabal doesn't allow it", I would present your insight differently.

Decentralizing dilutes power, and power wants to agglomerate, so decentralizing is often like asking water to flow uphill.


Yep, so it doesn't "just happen" - you need to build a pump first, and you need to keep it running for the water to flow uphill.

But it can be done.


The switch for the water pump, electricity connection, etc., must necessarily be centralized.

It's impractical to design a pump operated by millions of switches or fed by millions of electrical cables.


It's less efficient, sure. But it's eminently practical if your goal is to avoid hydraulic despotism long term.


It would be so less efficient that you could simply buy a 1000x more water pumps for the same price. No one sane would choose a water pump with a million switches over 1000 of the same pumps with 1 switch each.


that makes it sound like a natural law, an inevitable process. is it, though?


At least within social structures, I would argue it is, much like power vacuums and game theory.

Even monkey troupes and wolf packs have central power figures.


first we should clarify what we mean by 'power'

in this context, 'energy over time' is not what we are talking about.

I'll leap to say ultimately, it's probably quite like mass and gravity; the end observed effect of mass lumping together is like this 'observed' effect of power agglutinating. but which is the mass? and which is the gravity?


> decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power

Exactly. It dilutes the cabbies power of negotiation, collective bargaining, unionization in general. It's bad for workers rights.


it sure does look like such a thing

then again, everything we see is majoritarily 2 dimensional (with a whisper or soft hint of depth)


and their bosses care about both developers and designers being replaceable cogs in their company... else the bus accident test fails


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