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.)

It’s probably not truly random, when two centuries from now people have descended a few more levels down. Just like their result

Humans are the same everywhere. Political structures and cultures are not, but humans have evolved for much longer.

Which is why when you (if you do) think about the EU being some land of honey, it would be wise to also think “what am I missing if I don’t see similar problems there”.

It doesn’t help that a large amount of Americans see protest as pointless right now.

It’s the wheel of life:

0. Protests help something, but they are hard, violent, inconvenient, people die, money is lost, but they achieve goals and generally people know that protests and breaking everything around is necessary. Cutting infrastructure, beating officials (including police) to pulp, closing roads. Stopping factories (ok, that’s not a problem in the first world), stopping trucks and trains, stopping mail. Causing blackouts.

1. To avoid that, people talk. They form mechanisms to avoid real protests, but these mechanisms are dependent on real protests. Like gold standard - it’s supported by circulation, so if you can’t fall back to gold, you can’t really call it gold standard. It’s the same with protests. Real democracy is dependent on falling back to protests and just killing a few of the government jerks who think they are some kind of thief aristocracy.

2. People have long, really long period of questions being resolved by talking. And if it comes to protests, these are soft protests and they - mistake - become too subject for discussion, like let’s not go to those streets, let’s not hurt businesses, let’s follow these rules and obey police.

3. People get used to that.

4. The protest gold standard is in fact abolished, you’ve been softly and slowly made a serf, congratulations.

5. Try protesting now, you’ll get absolutely abused for doing pretty normal things.

OK, I’m from Russia, here people looked at tanks on the streets of Moscow in a few crises and decided they are smart and wise to follow rules made by thieves and murderers.

OpenOffice 3 had the best office suite UI I can imagine.

Dunno where all this “MS is good” comes from.

Don’t like today’s LO UI.

OpenOffice’s old branding from Sun times was so nice though. Felt like modernity and magic in the sense of Star Wars prequels, Stargate SG-1, that warm kind of thing.

Pain in all holes to use as a daily WYSIWYG-edited format.

Most applications would be fine with plain text, some could use markdown, some would need org-mode, a bit further something like HTML or word-perfect format.

There should be a porn movie with that headline

No need to penetrate Telegram, it’s already a centralized system with unencrypted server-side storage of chat history and everything, done by people highly untrustworthy.

I think this is it - https://eudl.eu/doi/10.1145/1460877.1460907 .

Funny how everyone around laughs at free speech when it’s for humans, but when it’s a text generator, then suddenly there are some abstract principles preventing everyone to sue the living crap out of all “AI” companies, at least until they are bleeding enough to start putting disclaimers brighter than in Vegas that it’s a word salad machine that doesn’t think, know, claim, dispute, judge or reason.