I personally think they could replace the “centralized” part with the “relay” part. Seems technically possible with their protocol. Their center plays mostly the relay role. So it would be a bit similar to Usenet, or to NOSTR, or even maybe to something like old Freenet.

But yes, there are good arguments that making it decentralized would slow down necessary changes and fixes.

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.

So one Chinese spying platform is worse than other Chinese spying platforms.

I mean, it’s interesting in the sense of something big being really honestly banned in USA.

That seems to have been a part of Russian, Iranian, Turkish etc Internet experience.

But I still want back the days where we’d talk about programs and services, not platforms.

There’s a program you can use to communicate to other people, it, of course, communicates to a service, but the protocol is small and already reverse-engineered, and you can use a hex editor to change the hostname or addresses it communicates with, even if hardcoded. Nostalgic ICQ sounds.

Or - there’s a service you can use to find pages and files. There are hundreds of such, you can host one yourself. You’ll have to dig through a lot of things you don’t need and build your queries carefully, but there’s no platform playing with your life. Just the Internet, and one of thousands of machines scraping it. Yep, it’s big and most things there you don’t need.

Or - there’s a program you can use to have nice online communities. I didn’t even know that Hotline and KDX existed when I was a kid. But if I knew, I would be even happier than it was in fact. No platform. Someone hosts a Hotline server.

There was also such a program that allowed you to navigate hypertext pages leading to other pages leading to other. And there were services which would serve such pages over the Internet to you and many others, and accept changes. People who think today’s Web is in anything nicer than that Web - they simply don’t remember how it was then. It can’t be really felt by looking at archives of old personal pages and such, of course those look weak, they are a specter of the past. You need to go over web rings and read recent updates, by real people for real people, visit guest books and web chats and forums, see that world alive. Unfortunately I also remember how I wanted to be able to make that even more alive - via technical means. Like trying to live in a video game. That was a mistake many people made, apparently, and ruined the real miracle by pursuing that dream.

I won’t even try. It’s not something I want machine to do, I want someone’s opinion to go into how a book is narrated.

I had somewhere Asimov’s Foundation audiobooks, in Russian, recorded somewhere around 1991, and I don’t think a machine can do that.

I’ve just thought that LLMs are good for two opposite kinds of people:

1. The obvious, psychopaths or people behaving like them, who think they’ll distort the concept of truth and possessing such technologies will make their approach to society easier.

2. The people like me, who know that no random message written or picture drawn can be trusted anyway, so it’s better to overload the humanity with fakes so that it learned this simple truth.

I think both are right to some extent. Still it won’t work the exact way they want.

It’s like when Bolsheviks, when fighting illiteracy, basically conditioned people literate in first generation to think that everything officially printed is true, even that something being officially printed is identical to true, and that the religious darkness and ignorance is to doubt that. Like - blind belief is science and knowledge, and skepticism is darkness and ignorance. What could go wrong.

And then in Stalin’s years there were shortened evening education courses for workers. Where, well, they’d learn how to calculate something in some specialty, but without depth and context.

So you’d get a lot of engineers capable of really building and operating things and believing they could build and operate even more complex things (like spaceships eventually, or some planet-wide railway system, or whatever), but not understanding the context, the philosophy of science even. What’s worse is that they’d think they understand that well, because they’d have “scientific communism” about materialism and dialectics in their education.

So, back to the subject - they got a lot of people to believe all they officially printed on paper for a generation or even two. And those who didn’t would still indirectly believe a lot of it from their parents or peers.

But eventually, even if the damage is already done, right now not believing everything even from a “respectable” source is a good trait of many ex-Soviet people. Easier to notice among them than among Americans.

EDIT:

About that woman - this works too. She will see that a chatbot can’t provide depth when she wants it. I just hope she won’t feel too bad that moment.

When I was a teen, I thought anyone who joins it is virtue signaling.

Oh no. Just yesterday I’ve seen an article about Blackwell PCs and what not.

You’re telling me it’s not ready?

That they lied to me?

How could that happen?

Oh no God no!

OK, I agree that it changed the world. But Nokia getting sabotaged played a role.

I’m still not sure how much different modern processor-building is between ISA’s beyond the decoder and legacy limitations, which are harder on Intel architecture than on ARM.

I suppose M-things are cool, so a milestone, and a welcome one, but, apart from Hackintosh builders, it doesn’t raise the demand for ARM machines a lot. The demand for Apple machines on ARM - yes, since they’ve gotten a new technical cool factor, which hasn’t happened for some time before that transition.

They sometimes do good things which become fashion, and they do bad things which become fashion (I still hate widescreens on personal computers ; you either get distracted by what’s above and below the screen, or get anxious from the sides being in peripheral vision zone ; anyway, we still scroll vertically).

Thank fuck, a simple and clear marking that an average user can understand!

Next thing you know - all the hardware producers just start using some new standard they’ve collectively conceived. Because “simple and clear” is bad for their business.

But does it feel warm? Can you see the texture of those patrices pounding the paper? The natural feeling of primal typographic power, transferred unbiased by our golden cable?

Usually what’s called simpler as opposed to techy ways makes things, in fact, loads of crap more complex.

Nvidia is still rather nice with FreeBSD, because their official proprietary driver there is, well, fully official, while drivers ported from Linux somewhat lag behind and have problems sometimes.

The iPhone was kind of a big deal. It wasn’t completely original, but nothing ever is. It made the smartphone worthwhile for the average consumer in a way that Palm and BlackBerry and others simply didn’t, and directly led to the mobile ecosystem we have now.

That’s more terrible than great.

Edit: Oh, also the M-series processor. That’s pretty great.

ARM is its own thing.

Supreme Commanders of a few nations have that proverbial red button to delete anything (customizable selection of what to delete, too). You just have to get in contact with one of them, call them for a cup of coffee. Ask them to rid you of that problem.

Have they ever “invented anything great”?

I guess original iPod was an unexpected shot in the right direction. And PPC Macs were fine, I guess. That opinion is based solely on the appearances and the fact that PPC good, Intel bad, Motorola fossil.

How the hell are you going to work with that?

Is that slab of touchscreen in your pocket a workstation too?

FFS, when I was excited about sensory screens like in sci-fi, I meant electronic notepads (with accumulators lasting a month, probably also usable as hardware authenticators and not too beefy audio and video players, but intentionally weak and without real OS, some kind of electronic paper with a visual PostScript editor, I dunno ; probably functional as remote controllers for something else ; thin reliable cheap devices with wide, but not tall functionality).

That was when iPhones still were some new stupidity and I had a Nokia phone (a good one) with cute nice buttons and Nokia UI design, you know how it all felt then.

EDIT: that association was because I assumed you imagine this like “touching” objects in VR with your fingers and such

They can be silent too, so not even that problem.

Also where I sometimes go with a laptop, nobody will hear the click-clacking.

The reasons old ThinkPads were are better than MacBooks (except for being old) are about design too.

For me ThinkPads are beautiful and convenient, while MacBooks are ugly and inconvenient.

Most people simply don’t have an opinion of their own, they get theirs from “social media influencers” (something that once meant the leaders of that clueless crowd, usually bribed by companies, and now means in fact not separate humans, but teams, employed by companies).

And that’s where Apple shined, it really managed to promise apes a lift in status by backing them. Almost a Fender Stratocaster level feeling. Not just that, if you do some digital archaeology, you’ll find that around year 1999 many people seriously considered Apple to be some kind of counterculture, underground etc thing. That doesn’t work anymore, because Steve Jobs lost the battle against his own ignorance and died, but frankly I think it stopped working after iPhone. Wrong kind of propaganda and wrong kind of audience to be compatible with the old image.

Still that image was rather strong. One can still sometimes find traces of it. Hotline and KDX software, and that idea of convenience of GUI programs.

I want a laptop with a trackpoint, keyboard with good (like Model M) key travel and resistance (and water resilience too), color e-ink display (preferably 5:4 or 4:3 screen ratio) with good refresh rate, everything removable, 5G modem, GPIO, additional SSD slot, good set and amount of interfaces (not an Apple fan), and - important - chassis and hinges not made of shit.

Just in case somebody from Lenovo is lurking here.

I blame every goddamn tech journalist who wanted it gone

Weird if heir PMs and such really believed people who are clearly companies’ PR and not representation of anything real, instead of focus groups.