I really wish we would stop sticking wireless in every device. The spectrum is limited and the security concerns are just not worth it. And if you try to sell it, certifying will be RPITA even in US (rightfully so!). Just had to redesign a little Modbus RTU sensor prototype for mass production, noticed the old version used BT MCU. So I immediately imagined the certification nightmare - and the sensor is deployed underwater, it's not like BT will be useful anyway. Why? Quote "but how do we update firmware without a wireless connection"… How do you update firmware on a device with RS-485 out, a puzzle indeed. In all fairness, the person who did it was by no means a professional programmer and wasn't supposed to know. But conditioning beginners to wireless on everything - that's just evil. /rant
Not that you aren't factually right with regards to all modern technology being funded thru MIC, but USSR/Russia had exactly the same kind of MIC and has miserably failed at converting it to something profitable in the past. No reason to expect anything different this time - it's probably even worse because every successful entrepreneur that wouldn't leave the country ends up in prison. That said, there isn't much of good news for Ukraine either, sadly. The fat man slims down but the thin one starves to death.
USSR: kicked their educated jews out (twice -- pogroms & doctors plot), kicked most of their educated gentiles out in 1917, used up their remaining human capital as cannon fodder against hitler. Everything USSR had was gifted from the west to keep the west's military-industrial grift running (see Antony Sutton's works for details). They were a boogeyman used by western elites to extract wealth from their own taxcattle.
Modern Russia is a gas station and strip mine with decent relations to the south and the east. Not a phenomenal position, but a hell of a lot better than what they had. Building up their defense sector so that they don't get internationally looted again (i.e. the 90s) is the right move for them, and an unfortunate reality for us.
Aside from some factual errors, that's one way to look on things. Another one is that USSR's political top, however incompetent, released their personal fates are tied to their country, while the modern ones plan for a retirement elsewhere (or at least did so before SHTF in 2022).
> USSR: kicked their educated jews out (twice -- pogroms & doctors plot)
Sorry, that's not how it happen (source: my grandfather being a USSR Jew). Pogroms were before USSR (and were a huge factor in USSR becoming a thing) and before most Jews had access to upper education. The pre-WWII USSR was perhaps the most Jewish-friendly country in the world, or at least in Europe (however low of a bar it was at the time). After the purges and the war, with most of pre-revolution intellectual communists dead or worse and fresh-baked ex-peasant comrades now forming most of the bureaucracy, the pendulum came swinging back.
> kicked most of their educated gentiles out in 1917
Forced deportation was a few thousand cases, mostly humanitarians. Most of the educated gentiles left voluntary (showing their good judgement). And then emigration controls were put in place so the rest wouldn't leave - it's just 20's USSR weren't yet the totalitarian state it would latter become and had no machinery to prevent people from leaving.
> used up their remaining human capital as cannon fodder against hitler
Not like Stalin would not prefer to use cannon fodder elsewhere. It just wasn't an option at the time.
> Modern Russia is a gas station and strip mine with decent relations to the south and the east
That's what it was in the aughties. No more.
> Building up their defense sector
Russia already got damn nukes. That's the best defense against symmetric warfare the money can buy - and against asymmetric an inflated defense sector doesn't help much. Russia didn't built up defense sector because of any genuine or perceived threat, rather for the same reason USA does: it's a huge pork barrel.
> they don't get internationally looted again
Looted as in being sent food aid? (Well, truth to be told, this aid came with a heavy load of Mormon and Scientology cool-aid drinkers). The whole "90's looting" is tankies' legend. It was exactly the same kind of de-industrialization that happened in the West - except the social guards weren't in place and the state machine was totally collapsed. Which is certainly not a fault of any other nation.
> the right move for them, and an unfortunate reality for us.
The problem isn't "building up the defense sector". The problem is damn invading neighborhood country. Not only was it an asshole move, it was incredibly dumb because it leaves no good exit option. Even if the hostilities in Ukraine ends one way or another, the "new elite" aka bunch of goons with guns aren't going anywhere.
I know. Beside the point. The point is that 20th c. Russia/USSR's human capital had been obliterated.
> Russia already got damn nukes.
Old technology. Suicide. West has better weapons, like twitter (arab spring), autonomous drones, and whatever sonic/microwave mystery we used in Venezuela. Russia is behind.
> Looted as in being sent food aid?
Looted as in having state bureaucrats sell national assets to western corporations for pennies on the dollar, then buying soccer clubs in UK with their ill-gotten gains, as Russia's peasants starve and their birth rate collapses.
> The problem is damn invading neighborhood country.
NATO wants to put missiles on their doorstep. How would any other country respond? We would have glassed Cuba if Khrushchev hadn't taken his missiles back. US state department had been plotting the Zelensky revolution / Russia war since the Obama administration.
I am not a tankie. I am disgusted. We are skirting WWIII to prop-up the boomer pension ponzi scheme. We started shit in Ukraine (yes, WE started it) because the Russians were selling oil to Europe, diminishing the petrodollar in the process. It's also why we've kicked people's shit in from Afghanistan to Syria to Libya to Ukraine. Doesn't matter who you voted for, (D) or (R), the child molester uniparty was going to start that war regardless.
No. Putin started shit in Ukraine after the locals got feed up with his dear friend's blatant corruption and he took it personally. America was never ever a factor there. The world doesn't spin around USA, even Americans may think so.
> Zelensky revolution
Lol, Zelensky didn't came into public light until a year or so after the revolution.
he was the 2nd stage of the same (five eyes funded) revolution. install a puppet. bait putin. wreck economies throughout eurasia. profit. if you read the declassified correspondence of our baby-eater class, you will begin to see this for what it is, rather than some marvel capeshit fantasy of good vs evil.
I'm not related to the rest of the conversation, but the "NATO expansion" talking point is so egregious at this point that it's impossible to pass by and ignore.
> NATO wants to put missiles on their doorstep.
No they didn't. Joining NATO was never really on the table for Ukraine, because by the time there was political willpower, Russia had already created enough territorial disputes to prevent it from even being a hypothetical possibility. Not only was Ukraine never close to being in NATO, but you talk of "putting missiles" somewhere, which is like five steps further than that.
If they cared so much about NATO, you'd think they would've done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO, putting their borders 100km away from St. Petersburg and about as far from Moscow as Ukraine's borders are? And yet nothing happened...
Nothing was happening between NATO and Ukraine before full-scale war started. Russia could've kept the situation as it was indefinitely. They chose to go to war not because they were desperate and terrified of something, but because they thought they could win the war really easily.
Then when their war led to Finland joining NATO, Russia's official response was to look mildly displeased and forget about it soon after. Because they never cared about those borders. Those borders were close to them for close to 20 years then.
> US state department had been plotting the Zelensky revolution
The "Zelensky revolution"? The one where Zelenskyy suddenly hopped off the stage and became a US-backed revolutionary leader? Not knowing that he was elected a full government change after the revolution, all the way in 2019, shows that you know nothing of Ukrainian politics despite being so confident about it.
There's a weird consensus between Americans who really love and really hate their country that the US has its hands in all the cookie jars, and that nothing in the world can happen without America's involvement. Ukraine has a student protest that snowballs out of control due to escalations, resulting in the country preferring democratic countries over the bright future of becoming a Belarus-like slave state? Must have been the US. Sure, this definitely was something the US liked a lot, but the connections to it are a lot more tenuous than things the US did meddle in. Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it. The US has a lot of power, and it has access to lots of variables they can tweak to try and influence the situation, but the primary parties here are Russia and Ukraine.
> done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO
Russians weren't happy about that either, but they were too weak to do anything other than complain. Now they are strong enough to retaliate. George Kennan was absolutely gutted by how stupid that expansion was[1].
> Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it.
90%+ of mankind does what the signals (radio/newspaper/television/movies/music/textbooks/social media) tell them to do. Money controls the signals. Our Epstein class controls the money (global reserve currency). At least it used to. Ukrainians get the "fell for it" award. Only way to survive this onslaught is to block the outside signals the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. Europeans are slow, because they are only beginning to figure this out.
Their war would have been over before it began if it weren't for the funds and equipment we have furnished.
What we have of RISC-V mostly goes ARM route. The problem isn't ISA itself, it's the peripherals. Most x86 motherboards comes with ACPI that (while being an unholy mess of a specification) allows vendors to provide bytecode drivers for simple stuff like power regulators and fan controls. In theory ACPI and UEFI are cross-platform, but no SoC or platform vendor seems to bother. RISC-V embraced opensource which means you get a declarative devicetree specification, but no runnable drivers to go with it. So all peripheral drivers must be upstream to be usable. That's of course not realistic because SoC vendors don't give a shit about your problems (and because Linux isn't the one and only OS!). Interestingly, devicetree, originally conceived as a part of OpenFirmware, was supposed to go with a Forth virtual machine exactly for this reason, but that part never made it to RISC-V.
Paradoxically, Linux core maintainers prefer the ARM situation (as do RMS-grade FOSS fans). For them going x86 route means constantly getting blame for crappy code they didn't wrote. Not that I'm unsympathetic, but it really goes against users' interests. And again, BSDs and smaller OSes often simply doesn't have resources to support the myriads of platform hardware.
As a non-mathematican, I found that trying to introduce C as a closure of R (i. e. analytically in author's terms) invariably triggers confusion and "hey, why do mathematicians keep changing rules on the fly, they just told me square of minus one doesn't exist". And in terms of practical applications it doesn't seem particularly useful on the first glance (who cares about solving cubics algebraically? The formula is too unwieldy anyway.) Most applications tends to start in the coordinate view and go from there. And it does introduce a nasty sharp edge to cut oneself on (i vs -i), but then for instance physics is full of such edges: direction of pseudo-vectors, sign of voltage on loads sources, holes in dimensional analysis (VA vs W, Ohm/square), the list could go on. And nobody really care.
> "hey, why do mathematicians keep changing rules on the fly, they just told me square of minus one doesn't exist
Mathematicians aren’t chasing numerical solutions, they’re chasing structure. ℂ isn’t just about solving cubics, it’s about eliminating holes in algebra so the theory behaves uniformly and is easier to build upon.
And as for "changing rules" they haven't changed, they have broadened the field (literally) over which the old rules applied in a clever way to remove a restriction.
I'm very pro-AI and i think LLMs are an important technical step in achieving it (even if in the end it might turn out that LLMs helped achieve AI by showing how not to do it). But they suffer from premature commercialization. I'm very much against trying to sell them as the ultimate solution to everything. And another issue, not related to the technical aspect, is that business practices of certain self-styled "AI companies" calls for guillotining of their upper management.
Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.
Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.
The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.
Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.
The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.
Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one.
But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.
For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.
I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.
We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe).
Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief!
(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).
ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.
> Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer
As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
> It occupied the same space that Electron does today
This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.
And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
> And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating
- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.
- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.
- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.
- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.
No, there was gatekeeping, it was knowledge. You had to be knowledgeable enough to work the system. You had to have the time to dedicate to learning the system and how the internet and how computers worked. Those twin gates kept the internet as it was in its early days.
Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work.
The issues were fully solvable but Adobe didn't care to solve them. Apparently, someone else was supposed to fix their proprietary platform with paid development tools. /s
I really wish we would stop sticking wireless in every device. The spectrum is limited and the security concerns are just not worth it. And if you try to sell it, certifying will be RPITA even in US (rightfully so!). Just had to redesign a little Modbus RTU sensor prototype for mass production, noticed the old version used BT MCU. So I immediately imagined the certification nightmare - and the sensor is deployed underwater, it's not like BT will be useful anyway. Why? Quote "but how do we update firmware without a wireless connection"… How do you update firmware on a device with RS-485 out, a puzzle indeed. In all fairness, the person who did it was by no means a professional programmer and wasn't supposed to know. But conditioning beginners to wireless on everything - that's just evil. /rant
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