Basically a group of Marxist revolutionaries captured power in a big enough country, and their intention was to build a new society, a new world order, without capitalism as they saw it, and by means they could somehow devise.

So - I’m too dumb to expand well on this, but see the (formally dead since late 20s) concept of a soviet (a council) in the initial intended system. Citizens would both decide the fate of their polity and be inseparable from a collective, so soviet system is very simple - an atomic unit (a house, a factory line) elects their representative, on the next level (a factory or a street, for example) such representatives elect ones for the next level (a district or a town), and so on. A polity can retract their representative any time, they just need to vote on it. That works for all levels, so if the new representative decides to retract polity’s vote for the level after it, there’s a new vote, and a chain effect is possible of removing the highest representatives.

This would seem OK and fine for you, but in fact it means that a lower polity can be pressed\intimidated\deceived into doing what I described any time, and so on. Which is why during Stalin’s ascent to unchallenged power he didn’t even break that system, just put a little bit of social pressure more via speeches than via threats.

So - this mandatory grouping seems to me in idea similar.

One can see some similarity between Soviet education not system, but rather pipeline, and the age cohorts in Sparta, say, toddlers were “consecrated” or “accepted” into “oktyabryata”, in 12 (if I remember correctly), into “pioneers”, schools and universities and technicums all had that strong grouping in activities, say, schoolchildren were sent in groups by age to mandatory competitions and warlike games (“Zarnitsa”, BTW, actually a good thing, teaches one orientation, coordination of movements of large groups of people, use of radio for communication and detecting communications of others, - all useful), students were sent in large groups to construction sites or harvests to work, etc. There were both rituals and actual mechanisms similar.

OK, I guess I’m just trying to find something

US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.

I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.

The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.

Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.

will preach to them about Spartan values or something

Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.

But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.

Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.

USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.

Free and open source software. “Open Source” has always been an attempt to attract big fish, hoping they are not evil, just slow. It’s morally obsolete, while FOSS still isn’t.

And BSD\ISC\MIT understanding of FOSS is even less morally obsolete every day that comes, no expectations that a properly designed virus license will somehow convert the humanity, just letting out seeds of knowledge that will eventually change the world or maybe not. It’s sacrificial, but also very potent.

Anyway, most of those expecting free support are companies making money on products they haven’t spend a dime improving. Or employees of such companies.

The whole world is using Java, but where is Sun? The whole world is using Asterisk (ok, maybe not all of it), but its developers are not millionaires AFAIK.

Entitled script kiddies are just dumb and rude, but I think there’s much less of them than the former group. And they are less persistent, than that former group.

On desktops. All Android UIs are clunky.

Just because Session is a fork of Signal doesn’t mean it isn’t better.

And nobody said that, strawman count one.

Session adds identity protection and it is decentralized.

Just so you knew, everything about security is made much harder and more complex by decentralization. Welcome to the real world, two good things do not help each other, you have to compromise on something.

This statement adds nothing but the vague idea that decentralization helps security, so answered only that.

There is no personal information needed to create accounts; no phone number or email required. There is no metadata storage.

The article I don’t remember was about purely technical mistakes of Session developers in processes inherited from Signal. Mistakes! Mistakes happen in software. While what you are doing is listing features.

Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date.

You are again talking about features and policies and limitations.

Damn right it’s better to use a system where users using their IP addresses store messages in a blockchain, very anonymous.

Had the Trump cabinet used Session instead of Signal, there would be no evidence to the identities of the individuals messaging each other. Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date. The leaked war plans were not from encryption failing, but traceable identities by an insider.

Buddy, that journalist didn’t trace anything, they just were added to a chatroom, saw what’s being discussed there, said oops, informed others and left it.

I’m sure you can set a nickname to your real name in Session too.

In a different time, and a different age, somewhere around year 2000. The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, Peter Jackson abusing LOTR fans. PlayStation before it got boring, Web before it got stupid, Sun Microsystems before it got dead, construction and aerospace and software design alike being done by actually competent people.

Microsoft did the barely necessary to be taken seriously.

This also helps child predators and other traffickers.

Having backdoors and means to create stalkerware and spy after people in various ways benefits those who have energy to use them and some safety. Lack of truly private communications also benefits them. The victims generally have very little means to ask for help without the criminals knowing that.

Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, drugs, all these things are high-value crime. They benefit law enforcement getting part of the pie, which means that law enforcement having better ability to surveil communications will not help against them, - the criminals will generally know what is safe and what is not for them, and they will get assistance in such services.

Surveillance helps against non-violent crime - theft, smuggling, fraud, and usually only low-value operations.

Surveillance doesn’t help against high-value crime with enough incentive to make connections in law enforcement, and money finds a way, so those connections are made and operations continue.

Giving more power to law enforcement means law enforcement trading it in relationship with organized crime. To function better, it needs more transparent, clean and accountable organization, not more power.

But all this is not important, when someone is guilt-shaming you into giving up your full right, you should just tell them to fuck off. This concerns privacy.

This also concerns guns. The reason it’s hard to find arguments in favor of gun (I mean combat arms, not handguns or hunting rifles) ownership is because successful cases for it are rare (by nature, that’s normal, you don’t need a combat rifle in your life generally, your country also doesn’t need a nuke generally, but it has one and many more), and unsuccessful (bad outcome, but proving the need for gun ownership) are more common, but hard to notice, - it’s every time you obey when you shouldn’t (by that I mean that you harm others by obeying).

Point being - no person telling you that dignity should be traded for better life has any idea. You are not a criminal for desiring and achieving privacy, you are also not a criminal for doing the same with means to defend yourself, you are also not a criminal for saying all politicians and bureaucrats of your country are shit-swimming jerks and should be fired, and even demanding it. And if someone makes a law telling you differently, that’s not a law, just someone forgot they are not holding Zeus by the beard.

Depends on your taste for stories and the general atmosphere. I think in better parts of Star Wars EU this would make sense (or it wouldn’t, but the right way, same as in reality).

I think there was an article recently about Session devs, first, having their protocol derived from Signal’s, second, not knowing what they were doing with that, which would discredit it pretty hard.

Also everything is traceable, it’s a question of effort and who you piss off.

Everybody agrees that disinformation is present in the relatively unregulated parts of the Internet and in crowds, but it would be hard to make people agree what is disinformation, outside of places like this with clear alignment.

Note how much fewer people agree that mass media are full of disinformation, that would be because mass media are man-made tools which give each their own kind of disinformation, a personalized poison. Same with social media.

My point was that where I live a significant part of population, including doctors, would consider the scientific idea of autism disinformation, and their own caveman bullshit not. This is similar to many other subjects and layers of existence.

So let’s please think for a moment before just blaming Telegram, the parts to hate about it are its clunky UI, lack of proper E2EE encryption, misguiding advertising, need for a phone number and a protocol which seems an untrackable mess (compared to better ones, not to what I can devise, of course), judging by alternative usable clients being too few.

Started reading the Kademlia paper, then tried writing a minimal realization in a file named “min.tcl”, it got big with something like e-news and contact directory, then “clean.tcl”, it got messy and grew something like a chat and a buddy list, then the new revision was called “dirty.tcl” and now I’m fixing what turned into horrible mess since it initially worked.

Not that I’m going to share a terribly messy one 2360 line tcl/tk script.

Just - how is this even happening, there are plenty of people smarter, there could have been a compelling standard, dozens of usable applications, herds of apologists and widespread usage of something that doesn’t take, say, 4 competent people more time and effort than this exercise took me.

Yes, yes, I know all that. I meant that all this conversation is rather useless because when actually compelled to do something, most people ignore principles.

While pedophile hunters seem barbaric to me, I don’t have kids.

I do have a dog, and dog hunter hunters, as in “people hunting dog hunters”, seem all right for me.

Cowards really like to inflict pain on creatures not well enough protected by the law. So hunting them is maybe good for the society.

So deontology and principles and morals only matter when they are challenged by one’s own impulses. Innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.

or fucking off the country

… and then your descendants end up living in something like Louisiana …

Sorry, associations with Murrica and Frenchies.

Anyway, thinking you are different makes you learn the hard way that you are no different. I thought Russian state is too cowardly to actually invade a big enough country for a real war (Georgia just doesn’t count, they simply don’t have strategic depth, they barely would even if they somehow annexed East Pontic mountains and Artvin from Turkey, that is, Tao or Tayq, the latter is the Armenian name for this and I’d prefer it to be annexed by Armenia, but neither will likely happen, anyway, a separate republic would be better, it seems some people there are chill enough). Oops, got excited. Back to “too cowardly”, murdering and torturing those infinitely weaker than them - yes, bombing Chechnya - yes, betraying allies - 100% yes, but 2022-now was unexpected.

Same with ISIS-like groups being now preferred to Iran and Shia militias for the west. If we kinda remember why the latter are supposed to be bad, that’s because they are threatening Israel and are a theocracy and against freedom and rule of law and all that. I mean, if HTS is about democracy then I’m an alien. If HTS is more democratic than IRI (which still has traces of being founded by both mojahed and left-liberal groups), then I’m a donkey. And in any case it kinda went unnoticed how groups formerly part of ISIS suddenly became better than Iran in western media. So the (military-wise associated) west supports groups clearly worse than their adversaries everywhere except Ukraine. And nobody questions that. I think the part about “free media in the free world” in western worldview should be revised too.

While your average Russian still thinks their state is just dumb\incompetent\evil-but-cowardly, and your typical European still thinks EU and NATO and such are on the right side of history. While the Russian state has already grown that meat grinder mechanism it lacked in Russian public conscience (Chechnya was considered something both unintended and in the past), and the EU and NATO are quite clearly on the strong side of history, sometimes officially congratulating jihadists with massacring whole towns.

OK, I went into politics, just - a nice joke, but tables may turn overnight and Americans may start giving out such advice.

Agree, one of the reasons I haven’t even started trying

Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.

Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.

and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot

Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.

The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.

Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.

The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…

That’s a wrong hope in any case.

I don’t think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.

But yep, that’s the kind of people.

About dinosaur things - I’ve started learning Tcl/Tk and it’s just wonderful.

That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system’s evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.

I think it’s intentional. Where you had to think to do something, you’d inevitably learn to think. Where you had to put soul and wisdom and aesthetic feeling into your work, you’d inevitably touch those things for other parts of your life.

There are people higher in the society, who think lower castes shouldn’t have that and will be fine with knowledge and expertise just sufficient to do their jobs.

They wouldn’t be so hellbent on this particular technology, if they didn’t see how relatively recent progress changed that curve of expertise for radio, electric engineering, all engineering, computer science, automobiles, home appliances, and what not. So they see this consistently works for 25+ years.

So they work to deprive us of practice that allows to do more in all those directions. There’s a moat that could as well be an abyss between what we know and what we’d need to know to make relevant things. That moat wasn’t there 25 years ago. The path from a novice computer user to someone knowing all DOS interrupts and what DMA and IRQ are was less than the path from a novice computer user today to making a simple GUI application.

(I’ve got executive dysfunction, so feel these things more, but I’m certain they are true.)