OK, TIL. As someone in Russia, I wouldn’t know.

I don’t think “individualistic” is a bad thing or prevents those from working there. Maybe you meant “atomized society”, but US is not the worst country in that regard, that would be the one I live in.

A modern and more global take on Minitel would be cool.

France has a tech sector?

Aesthetically I like reading technical texts in French.

(Contrary to the stereotype, romantic texts not so much, that’s where English is better ; and despite trying my best, I still haven’t found a way to like Dutch ; neutral on German.)

But the point is - has anything big lifted off in France in the last 20 years or so?

I’m not talking about quite a few particular people whose names should be in history books. I’m talking about companies and systems.

Facts are facts, and nothing a human says is a fact, it’s a projection of a fact upon their conscience, at best.

And those doing the “fact checking” are humans, so they are checking if something is fact in their own opinion or organization’s policy, at best.

These are truisms.

There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.

This is wrong. People like to pick “their” side in power games between mighty adversaries, and to think that when one of the sides is more lucky, it’s them who’s winning. But no, it’s not them. If somebody’s “checking facts” for you and you like it, you’ve already lost. Same thing, of course, if you trust some “community evaluations” or that there’s truth that can be learned so cheaply, by going online and reading something.

That’s called “diversification of investments”. And what Apple and other companies today are doing is called “putting all resources onto one critical point” (or “milking the golden cow till it’s dead”, I guess).

Good strategy is to do both. Finding a critical point gives you advantage, but things change and oligopolies gained by past successes don’t last forever.

With Android - not cool. With some SBC like RPi in such a box - very cool.

It’s not the most functional for everyone with every balance of power possible. It’s the optimal for casual (dumb) usage with surveillance economy, ads and content consumption, but not production, and when that content is mostly not text.

Idiocracy machine.

A bendy screen is useless IMHO. Even a flip phone with two screens is better.

Steve Apple isn’t the only one to blame for it, Apple just used to great success a few cultural cliches about future technology.

Still, unifying the control device and the display device is very stupid. I understand something with a normal screen for displaying information and a touchscreen for displaying controls.

My mom has some weird combination of disorders, hard to determine since she becomes aggressive when advised to visit a psychiatrist. I suppose it’s just NPD though. Point is - she makes technical things up and acts insulted when I explain it’s nonsense, and doesn’t learn. Thus she’s so bad with tech that I wouldn’t give her an Android phone simply because she won’t be able to use it.

So - she still asks from time to time if she can use her old Nokia.

From time to time - because that small unimportant thing about cell standards being phased out, that I blabber, she doesn’t even try to catch.

Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I’d prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.

A government … only in theory does. Like a church represents God, because humans are too dumb to understand him directly.

“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.

Both sides of this fight prefer it being called such, so that one seems against misinformation, and the other seems against censorship, but they are not really different in this dimension. They are different in strategy and structure and interests, but neither is good for the average person.

That could have been a Linux\FreeBSD\OpenBSD\NetBSD\Haiku.… install event. Combined with raising awareness about Gemini web and some (I dunno which) ways to create decentralized platforms (not self-contradictory) for all kinds of speech, political organization included.

But, of course, one can’t solve social problems with only technical means.

The “centralized” part is not a problem with their protocol and it’s well explained.

The 3rd-party clients thing … I agree with, but one can find justifications for that too. They probably don’t want people to use it for filesharing with uuencode and base64. Or even for VPNs, like they did with Tox when it seemed to have a future.

The phone number thing sucks, but there’s a need to defend against bot registrations somehow.

The desktop app sucks absolutely and conclusively. If there were a library one can use to make a Pidgin plugin, it would be a godly gift.

“Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power” - every autistic person ever.

Seriously, I’m just surprised there are people who both need this and haven’t already trained their imagination to do better without pictures and text generators.

I remember there were plenty of little bitches saying that censorship won’t be turned the other way and that it allows to remove bad people from the Internet. That bad people should be censored, and Reddit\Twitter\Facebook when used for politics will not be abused by bot armies, and that censorship will not be repurposed very easily.

I was being accused of being a right-wing troll, a luddite, a retard, an incel and what not for saying that they were wrong on every point.

Yes, even bad people should not be censored. When they misbehave, they should be barred from the place they harmed, ideally not forever, but for a week or so maximum.

I’ve learned this not just in morals, but in practice, when repeatedly banned on one forum by an admin of directly opposite political views … for 24 hours max each time after multiple warnings, and only once a week or a month (can’t remember) much later when I joked about exploding Muslims. Despite that, I was (I hope) a good enough member of that forum for like 10 years after, till now. Apes waving banhammers today have something to learn from that.

But that’s not the point, the point is that even if you consider centralized censorship good, that’s how it works.

So getting back to little bitches loving censorship - where are they now and do they have anything to say?

There is, it just has to be more convenient, hence the listed functionality.

Not good enough due to fragmentation and amount of steps. Attention economy, remember. No attention resource to bother with something manual for a specific person.

And that is why gun rights are human rights. Also intrusion detection sensor rights and automatic turret rights. Automatic flamethrower turret rights, for the smell of burnt flesh to indicate consummation of civil freedoms.

Except we can’t build what we can’t comprehend that also works.

The problem here is that people with power to direct funds are, more often than not, utterly ignorant in building anything.

I think where all this is generally directed is a society, like in Asimov’s Foundation or Plato’s Republic (with additional step), where people competent in building something are reduced to a small caste, most of them with local, not professional, competencies, like priests, and with a techno-religion centered on that “AI”. This is a hierarchical structure very vulnerable to, well, that kind of powerful people.

The majority will work non-essential jobs (like in Heinlein’s Door Into Summer), which do not give them any kind of power, the soldier caste will work the military, and the builder caste will work the technology, and the philosopher caste will be those powerful people. The difference with Plato is in having that first group of people which does not fit into any main caste. By Plato they would all be builder (worker) caste, but that would create a problem with the attempt to make it a religion and a hierarchical monopolized structure. The builder caste should be small.

You might see a whole lot of problems with that idea (which still seems to be attempted), that’s because the people from whom it comes don’t understand how civilization works and that instruments change the rules constantly, not just to the point they can understand.

That was the Internet. People using only AOL or something (I’m born in 1996, so not sure) would apparently not be called Internet users.

It’s the same with Facebook and co now, except they squatted on our free communication space. So they managed to pretend there’s nothing else in the Internet.

Can still have the old thing. Things needed for everyone to use it as intended - hosting and connectivity and naming and authentication solutions. Hosting and connectivity - no-configuration distributed storage of data from your webpage or whatever, solutions to NAT traversal not requiring user configuration (think old Skype). Naming - that’s centralization by definition, but still points of failure can be limited to names signed by some identity provider that doesn’t have to be online. Authentication - that’ll have to be cryptographic identities, so what’s lost is lost. But one can make a convenient for the user “inheritance” operation, of grabbing everything signed by a certain identity to clone it (while obviously a new identity, can be used in case of losing the old one).

I guess somebody would have already done this.

I’ve encountered people disagreeing with ASD ending with D, because people are born, live and die autistic, and also autistic people usually understand each other well enough, it’s with non-autistic people where their communication impairment shows, mostly. And rigidity of thought, sensory issues and such can be arguably considered difference, not impairment.

So yes, “mental illness” is an unpleasant thing to say, especially about things which are not developed and treated during one’s life.

But this is simply not what the issue is about.

The issue is about moderation of social platforms, that one must choose between “the platform” moderating content by this or that policy.

But in fact this is all gaslighting, bullshit, scam. Because in the era of web forums there were no platforms at all, and moderation was still a thing. Due to bigger load on moderators and those being from the not so huge number of active users of some forum, moderator’s rights could be customized very precisely, say, certain kind of discussion certain Alice can be trusted to moderate, and some other kind of discussion not really (due to having a strong opinion), or maybe there’s Bob who can be allowed to make warnings and approve new registrations, but can’t be allowed to delete messages and ban users.