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>Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.

>In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.

Id put it that this is incorrect insofar - as the bazaar was/is a public commons with a dual regulatory environment city(state) and the guilds , which would enforce/regulate as needed.

The digital marketplaces we have would be more anologous to feudal plantations ,where each coder(sharecropper) survives at the whim of their particluar feudal lord , who have total control within that space and the state via lobbying mostly keeps off.Theer are no guild equivalent so when Playstore/Github makes a ruling like the recent hike of dev fees or ci runner. Theres no state or user leverage that can force a reversal other than complaints.

Paradoxically id say they are more megachurch than bazaars.


Guilds are now scorned as communism

Yep and its insane when most devs are actively hostile to unins etc from too much libertarian koolaid when they can see the active backing things like teacher/nurse/police unions provide. They may have some bad ideas , butthe structure and backing kinda gets glossed over.

There is the case where SouthAfrica wanted to introduce pretty much a copy/paste US version of the Fairuse DRM law that already exists in US law and the Multicorps went ballistic , and the USG was threatening sanctions.

Not for the first time either , in the early 2000s SAfrica wanted looser patent enforcment for lifesaving HIV treatments and did get sanctioned.With resolution of the law being droppped and corps getting bought out via USAID/Pefpar payment.

So yeah whatever option that is tried , better be fully baked before the announcement.


Evenn though its onelayer down - the same tactics that were used to suspend/takeover domains would still apply , at the end of the day one still has to get the IPv4/IPv6 address from someone(who can be coerced).


When Trump pressures RIPE NCC or APNIC to deregister an IP address block, that's the end of the internet as we know it, and the return to national networks with very limited interconnection. Even Russia still has address registrations despite being sanctioned.

Alternatively they pressure USA ISPs to block the addresses. That's already regularly done but it probably won't be enough to satisfy the extortion industrial complex which is out for blood.


> When Trump pressures RIPE NCC or APNIC to deregister an IP address block

sed "/Trump/US-Govt/g"

Why do people here always casually single out Trump? He's not an outlier, it's just how US foreign policy has worked for centuries.


"Not an outlier"

A quick look at the last few administrations is all anyone needs to see how this one interprets the powers and duties that come with the office.

One of my favorite phrases coined during the last Trump administration was something like, "not just wrong, but wrong beyond normal parameters." It basically meant exactly what we are discussing here; namely, being an outlier of some sort.


I specifically mentioned foreign policy. There, I don't remember a single US government that was not a net negative for the rest of the world (Israel excluded).


I always find any discussions which do not adequately desrcibe the terms cuious. Thers a reason why academic articles usually stress on the 'term of art' to make exact what is being addressed and the scope. Going forward as far as 'Democracy' i personally think not many countries can claim to have been/are one. If we are definig it as a system where the majority make decisions while minority rights are protected.

For one the US has only ever been aspirational to those ideals since its founding and objectively with Citizens united eventhat pretence has dissolved [1] and moving to out and out a collection of oligarchs that pay lip service to any democratic institutions/norms.

To bring it back to the article after WW2 , Japan has been basically run by one party backed by the US , which still holds veto over key military/financial decisions. Certainly if it was a democracy this situation could be changed by the vote (eg bases on okinawa) , that it persists shows the hollow nature of the derciptor.

What articles like this show is the kabuki theatre is incresingly being rejected by the deimos worldwide who are seeing through the tricks in realtime - hence the plethora of cencorship laws going live obstenively to tackle lewd images/terror etc.

[1]https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/04/16/The-US-is-not-a-d...


A true democracy would be people voting on laws directly and having the _option_ to appoint an assistant to vote for them.

That's right - politicians would not be "leaders" but assistants who could be removed or replaced at any time.

---

A political party and a person's political opinion are both points in a high-dimensional vector space. The greatest issue with representative democracy is that voting is the act of describing one point (your political opinion) by picking another point from a small predefined set (political parties) which is acceptably close to yours.

That's nuts and it should be obviously nuts to anyone who understands a tiny bit of vector math. Thank god they don't teach it until university or we'd have riots every day until it was fixed.


Not even in its founding. Federalist #10 spells out exactly the fears that Madison had about democracy. You give people full political power and they'll use it to redistribute wealth/land. So you need to give people somewhere to funnel their energies without rocking the boat too hard. Originally we weren't supposed to vote for Senators and the presidency was mostly conceived as a ceremonial role and the Electoral College was there just in case the establishment was ever too threatened by "democracy"


Yes, nowhere has a 'democracy', this is a sales or branding term.

What we have is 'representative democracy' where people choose someone to represent them.

So, hundreds, thousands or even millions choose one person to represent them for 4-5 years. That person decides those people's best interests on what to do for the thousands of decisions that come up.

The representative however does not need to do any of the things they said they would. They can not be held accountable for saying one thing but doing the other (ie lying), except at the end of their term, when they can be voted out. (Giving another the chance to do the same.) They only have to catch the people's aspirations, not deliver on them.

And even on those 'decisions' that the representative does get a chance to opine and vote on, the representative is hamstrung - bills contain so much that no one would agree with. Even if there were well-meaning representatives, they are unable to do anything with bills written by lobbyists in the pay of the companies that the bill is meant to 'restrain' - representatives cannot agree only with the good and leave the bad.


The closest i feel is with the swiss canton system where each region kind of runs its own affairs and the major ones get put to a referendum - so immigration stuff might be on the local regional level , while things that would impact everyone gets a referendum.

Of course theres the issue with voter apathy/fatigue.Hopefully a system where excluding emergency situations elections should select for implementors of already decided laws(via referendum) to reduce the stakes and possibility of corrupting influence once in power(since there would be limited to shaping not introducing new laws).

Unfortunately i doubt most of the current systems are reformable short of a revolution, so well proceed to stumlealong until the wheels fall off.


Yeah C++ isnt going away anytime soon - its not even in the COBOL phase of its lifetime despite the rise of Rust/Go as systems languages.

However it would be imperative for a push such as Carbon[1] to be similar to the kotlin to Java. A modernisation that simplifies , maintains backwards/forwards compatibility and reuses established libraries and tooling.

This however will need a entity that can champion and push it forward with a strong enough project to anchor it in the mainstream.The transitions are doable ,like Android dev from plain java to kotlin , or in OSX moving from Objective-C to Swift.

Additionally borrowing a robust batteries type standard library to reduce the sprawl of coding options and funnel greenfield projects into best practices and less boilerplate.

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2337225/beyond-c-the-promi...


I think most people wouldn't call Go a systems language? Generally garbage collection lack of explicit memory access would put a language outside the category? Hard to write a device driver, for instance.


True although there is Ocaml which has been used in OS/driver/Hypervisor development while also having a GC. I always thought the Go equivalents would have perfomance at parity - but never reallyseen that realised so far.


I think youre conflating 2 different things, share as a payment currency and share as reserve.

Share as a payment/trade currency is not going away though it will be greatly reduced especially with CIPS that bypasses SWIFT.Andmost data showing no change is usually from SWIFT - with zero visibility to the volumes in CIPS.

Share as reserve is more visibly viz central banks stacking gold and hedging on treasuries , with most tresurie bids coming in from offshore financial hubs likethe Caymans.So could be a whole shellgame there to inflate the volumes.

So yeah the $ isnt going away anytime soon (cross border trade still requires it in many places),the exorbitant privilege it enjoyed is.


With the sadder realisation from the article that more independent co-lo facilities are getting shutdown leaving many largescale deployments withno recourse but to go to the cloud for hyperscale. As a business at least in the US , im not seeing any greeenfield facilities being spun up to compete with the big5(Oracle/Google/Azure/Amazon/IBM) clouds.


A number of cloud migrations I've worked on are due to these reasons. If you're the second largest customer at a colo, and the largest is pulling all of their equipment out, chances are the colo won't be around much longer and you need to start getting proactive. Some of the companies are on very tight migration timelines because the colo announced they are closing down and were caught flat footed.


On the software front as mentioned VHDL and Verilog are showing their age with their design as well as ther tooling ecosystem.Attempts such as CHISEL[1] (written in Scala)also havent gotten much traction - seeing also the language choice - would have btter have been in something more accesible like kotlin/ocaml.

Secondly the integration with consumer devices and OS is almost non-ecistant - it should really be simpler to interact with ala GPU/Network chip and have more mainboards with lowcost integrated FPGAs even if they are only a couple of hundred of logic cells.

[1]https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel/blob/main/README.md


Watership Down by Richard Adams


Is it that good? I quite liked The Plague Dogs. He writes with a nice flowery style.


Yeah its a must recommend from me , worldbuilding is very immersive and the characters are A+. Havent read Plague Dogs - will put it on my List. Ta


Yes


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