Ogmios

Somebody should do something!

Reminds me of when Bill Gates went to Saudi Arabia and argued for equal rights because it would double their workforce.

Could it perhaps be specific models that are no longer manufactured? I was checking out the price I could expect for one of my old PSUs and found that it was apparently a particularly well liked unit for some reason, and so it’s used price was a fair bit higher than expected.

Amen

Looks like a Michael Jackson impersonator.

I may be high af miss, but in the morning I’ll smoke some more and you will… will you be joining me?

Right, but when we’re talking in the context of regulating broad democratic systems, the potential for deliberate corruption of the systems is vastly greater while employing black cube technology.

I’m talking about hardware though. Even before you get into whether or not software can be trusted you should understand that computer chips have a very large number of undocumented processes that can run on them. Some are actually used only for testing purposes, but there really isn’t any way to verify everything that happens on the physical machine itself. You just have to trust the people who manufactured it (ie. total strangers).

Installing democratic control

Unfortunately the nature of these enterprises makes that prohibitively difficult to accomplish, not only for regulating them, but also for protecting democratic controls elsewhere. One of the big difficulties in tech security is just how much is happening inside black boxes where nobody can actually verify the process.

Doesn’t even take direct pressure from others. Getting published is one of the best ways to gain access to funds/resources, and just as with every other profession many will succumb to the temptation to take shortcuts or fudge the truth in the pursuit of money and/or prestige. I knew one woman who gave up on pursuing a career in cultural anthropology because she had come to believe that getting published was more of an exercise in creative writing than in actual science.

It’s the worst system we’ve ever come up with, right after all the other ones.

Unfortunately that’s what the Internet has always been. It was only allowed to be decent for a short time so that people would build the infrastructure necessary, before they flipped the switch on hardcore control.

Occupy scared the shit out of bankers. It’s no mistake that pop culture became obsessed with divisive issues immediately afterwards.

Yea, buying a $70 meal then complaining about money being scarce is kinda… questionable.

Amazing how much easier it is to motivate yourself when you have the ability to make significant decisions on the fly, based on the immediate feedback you receive from the system, instead of spending half your time hitting your head against a wall attempting to sus out self-contradictory instructions given by people who don’t actually understand how any of it really works.