Posted by Bender 4 days ago
Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.
>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Technology is what has always precipitated political change
It’s a theory for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems.
This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving.
Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government
Or even, say, AI. They know about "chatbots" and "generating images" or "adding effects". Herein ends the story.
You can't teach someone this sort of skills if they like staying ignorant.
Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa.
Issue is the size of the community and linking up to actually serve internet or surface public services there.
It was invented by China in the 10th century.
[1] - https://www.tinc-vpn.org/
[2] - https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-t...
They depoliticized people to this degree that they fantasize of joining the a-political resistance movement, its kind of sad. This isn't meant as an insult, you should be angry that you live in a society that left you politically oblivious. Like no dude, people fought against power all the time, the people who you listen to just told you that all that do are dangerous politicized radicals or terrorists. Find who is punching UP, then get a political education in that direction.
I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.)
There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).
By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.
You want access to Fable? Show us your ID.
As much as I am completely against this in spirit, all that is needed is restricted access to frontier models and then it just a question of how do you want to see my papers sir?
It's really slow, but its private.
You know, there's an argument that if your soul/consciousness is occupying a randomly selected body (whatever that means - don't take it too literally) you'd expect to be occupying a body during the time when there are the most human bodies to occupy. 6% of all humans who were ever alive so far are alive right now.
It's not really rigorous because some consciousness has to occupy this body and that consciousness would make the same argument, but it's a weak inkling of an argument that the future probably has less humans than the present.
It's still far off but I wouldn't be surprised if these were the earliest signs of societal collapse. It does seem impossible to avoid, going in cycles.
But it's all talk. Political pressure is like gas pressure. Gas expands to fill the available volume. What do you actually do to push back, besides talking about it on the web? This defines the available volume, if you don't do anything it's infinite.
Version control the laws.
Compare the laws with all other countries.
Hoard data.
Write code to replace government employees and to make laws easy to implement. (If done well consider selling a product or service)
Make everything modular so that the establishment can steal it.
Get people involved. Doesn't matter if you need to write a sim and convince them it is a game.
Pretend the whole exercise is writing code so that you can imagine you are perfect for the job.
I learn that people from all political angles like the idea of voluntary taxes (but no one believes it can work)
If the whole thing can run on donations and volunteers with a few "state" owned companies a hot swap becomes inevitable.
For the longer explanation, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>.
That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine.
Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point.
But Weber's claim is also nuanced:
- Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate.
- Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms).
- If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process.
- And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless.
There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases.
Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold.
I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people.
You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion).
Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to.
This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song.
You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills.
A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire.
Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that.
There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc.
I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
Actually, one should do very little. We should all do very little. That will already produce a terrifying force that may crush everything precious to us.
And you should only do what you are good at. If you can't sing and dance or can't give a speech - don't do it. You will ruin everything.
> I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
If you are going to take on the impossible wilfull ignorance can be a useful tool. You can't think it's impossible, if you do you should just quit.
Coding isn't a bad hand of cards. You can build something awesome without scaring the shit out of the old guard.
>the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
Law makers keep tagging on new features. It's an incomprehensible mess. If someone wants to build something we don't offer them a nice spec with all relevant information. You get a pile of trash that immediately convinces most to abandon all hope.
If the application has become unusable from technical debt you have to.... well... face the music.
The traditional way is to give a war of some kind, burn everything to the ground and start over. We have it down to an art. We are going to [have to] keep doing this until we come up with a better idea.
It's kind of awesome how the foundation of all advanced civilizations was build by people with few of any tools or resources. I'm sure they had people who thought it couldn't be done not to forget those who paid the ultimate price.
Today the naysayers have airco, washing machines, bubble baths and a super computer in their hands.
> I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
There wouldn't be a need to write this if that wasn't the case. It's not a competition tho. It's a puzzle as old as time. It sits there waiting for someone competent enough to solve it.
>There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Those are fun reads. Thanks.
I wrote this funny thing called subjective sort.
Rather than pick your preferred option you are presented with two random ones.
https://subjective-sort.go-here.nl/
Provide the 2 election programs, make people sit down and read them for at least 30 minutes and if enough votes are cast this will sort the list from best to worse.
I came to this after wondering what the signal to noise ratio was in elections. I examined Facebook likes and YouTube views and came to the conclusion THERE IS NO SIGNAL.
The 200ish views on the videos from the us Green Party aren't enough to account for journalists. Further down the list the number of Facebook likes didn't even account for friends and relatives.
It also reminds me of conversations where I proposed tiers of voting diplomas and told people I didn't need to read their response or listen to their arguments. I can just disagree without knowing what I'm talking about.
Another fun thought was to make election program legally binding.
The way it currently works is exactly like looking if the bird is on our left or our right while pretending it matters.
But I think it's better to work on documenting existing government before considering changes. The later will limit participation to much.
A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
Law makers wouldn't need to pretend they are doing something unique.
You might do the same with all infrastructure projects. They can't all be cheap. Half should more expensive than average. It should be fascinating to see where the extra money is going.
Some goes towards corruption, some into incompetence but there should also be plenty of praise worthy efforts.
It seems we have the tools to do such things now without breaking the bank.
Think of the law as a truly outdated code base. Why would you do a rewrite you ask? Because we've learned a thing or two along the way?
It would be good. There have been some attempts at source code style revision management for statutes (such as https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ ). Are they a useful start? What should be the next step?
Last but not least, it is to maintain this website, last updates seem to be from 2022. But I can't manage to imagine if it's a lot of work or not.
Do what you enjoy or think meaningful.
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
This btw actually happen: "Sesame Scheme: Unintended Consequences of Allergen Food Labeling"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074487 )
What are we talking about?
There are no laws that will turn out well.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
Not addressing to you specifically, just figure of speech
I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.
We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.
I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.
The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...
I remember reading someone argue that anytime you see a claim that we need to do something to protect democracy just replace the word democracy with bureaucracy and then the statement makes sense.
The router must then be configured to only allow Squid HTTPS, Unbound DNS and Chrony NTP out to the internet.
Doing this will of course break things like video games. The parents should have a way to bypass Squid and permit all traffic out during family video game time.
[1] - https://github.com/alatas/squid-alpine-ssl Not my repo, needs updating
https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...
Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians
You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.
Farewell to freedom on the Internet and the days of wild abandon.
Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.
Bro… it’s joever for you
The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.
So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.
I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.
One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.
At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.