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@shibao @shibao I am somewhat more optimistic than you about letting the normies filter themselves, I think.

> here is the pudding: every single tech trend can now be labeled a form of devolution. the attempt to reify nostalgia like bbses, newsgroups, irc servers, phpBB forums, windows vista rices, devolution. the retreat to self-hosted open source software, devolution. the evacuation to alternative social media, devolution. the fortified bunker of local-first, devolution.

I do disagree with this. I don't see low-resource or self-hosted systems as devolution. I think we had this marvelous internet built by clever people and then we got herded into the boomernet and people lost skills. DIY is good shit, I think: I don't think amateur radio is like a devolved version of broadcast radio. You flip on an FM station or satellite radio, right, and you receive a transmission, you don't get to dick around with antennas and you don't have to solve any equations or account for lensing or do any improvised engineering. It's a fundamentally different activity. Fedi is like a side-effect of all the fun hacking. I learned more about Postgres by doing Pleroma than I have during my entire professional career: at work either the scale was too small to matter or the scale was large enough that there was a DBA and coders didn't get to touch, but I debugged my shit and helped people debug theirs and there's a lot of stuff you find out when the budget is nil that you do not find out when the DBA files a ticket to get a bigger machine and bitches about replication. I mean, I was on Twitter but I didn't really give a shit about Twitter: I give a shit about fedi because of fedi but also because there are weird hacks. And not just that, but I get to see things I wouldn't see otherwise. The FBI thing, right, I wouldn't have learned anything about the innards of FBI data harvesting if that hadn't happened. (I recall you mentioning that it was prudent to be cautious about catching an obstruction charge; I don't know if I showed you the full post-mortem but it's here: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html .) When there are about to be major events, like, the October 6 thing was preceded by about a week of massive upticks in ssh brute-force attacks. German feds, I was barely aware that German feds *existed* until they showed up on my server.

> to recapture that bell labs magic

So, :dmr: and :ken: had some interesting thoughts on this, and :dmr: basically spelled it out in one of his write-ups, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System", that even though Multics was a failed project, it had cemented the idea of what he called "communal computing": hackers sharing a box, trading code around without friction, wandering through each other's home directories, hanging out in the machine room and sharing a machine. I think it's understated but I think that's the core of the magic and I think also that not as many people understand this. On a good day, fedi gives you a fraction of that (in between all the goddamn political threads).

My theory on the boomernet is essentially that people were herded there: the fade of broadcast media meant that the feds no longer had the option of calling up the handful of people that owned all the newspapers/TV stations/radio stations. When phones were the primary means of communication, they could tap a line. They had a handful of phone companies to deal with, they could just ask for what they needed. Along came the internet and it got real murky when that started being the primary means of communication. Google's got direct DoD ties, and if you look, all of the "social media" companies have DoD ties. So the mall internet won, but I think that was temporary. So I view it as the embers being stoked rather than dying out.

> and if not for all those just educating themselves, cleaning apartments, trying to raise families, finding lifelong partners (i will be alone forever if you couldn't tell already), and building things.

See, I remember how things were before 9/11. These are the things people concerned themselves with before everyone got extremely literal-minded ("Um, sweaty, actually a whale is not a fish and I have no idea what figurative language is"), intolerant of ambiguity (I couldn't figure out why Avenue 5 was cancelled because it was great but the IMDB reviews commonly complained that they weren't sure who the "target" of the satire was, meaning that they didn't know if it was a funny show or not until they could be reassured that they were laughing at a comfortable/safe target group), and also grandiose ("Fuck making life better for the handful of people near me: if it doesn't change the world, it's not worth doing"). Starting from Carter's election and continuing until the last election, boomers were the *majority* of voters. I view boomers as the aberrant form and I think culture is healing, but it's like, people didn't receive culture from the boomers per se: it was the prepackaged generation, you know, they received culture rather than creating it, they didn't really pass it down.

> the endless flood of p-zombie normies

This is another thing about fedi, IRC, etc.: people bitch and moan that you can't attach an image to an IRC channel. They want to use Discord and if they're moderately clever, Matrix. "This book has no pictures!" They get confused by fedi: it's complicated, they don't like it. So they don't come here. The FediBBS client has kind of a "I'm goddamn sick of normies ruining my life" manifesto in the README ( https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fedibbs;a=blob;f=README;h=50d1d4950a49500d32c32433f29b94452ccafbf9;hb=HEAD ) and some of the other docs and it's like...this is what I want, I made a client that does what I want a client to do and it makes zero compromises to placate people that I don't want to talk to, let alone be flooded with. I think this was the main problem with Soapbox, like, I know I've ranted about this ad nauseum but it *looks* like Twitter and there was the very short-term "It gets people that don't understand fedi to use fedi" and what made anyone think that was a good idea? If you show up somewhere and it *looks* different, this primes you to understand that it *works* differently: making it look exactly like Twitter just let people slip into treating fedi like Twitter. Then they complain that Twitter features are missing: they wanted quote-posting so they could dunk on $outgroup. And the shitty normie Twitter slapfights came here.

And not just normies themselves: once you have enough normies, you attract people that want to manipulate normies. You see the German feds call fedi "the hydra on the web" ( https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/faa13e7f66b7ff9e97634aaf04f6fd4faab95cf3931080fd03b0d98d76c7df2a ) and talk about the difficulties of using NetzDG as a pretext for eliminating "misinformation". You get political shills, you get broadcast-only callous use of the platform to push views (whether they're pushing their own views or they're shilling for someone else) like 90% of Mastodon, or you get political NGOs like NewsMast that are here just to push politics. I think these people get in the way of hackers talking to hackers. (Speaking of NewsMast, the way I found them was their botfarm picked it up when I had this MRF on for a while: https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fse;a=blob;f=lib/site/mrf/shut_yr_mouth_about_them_politics.ex;h=2d861996b79deb2a1df69f59fa2d18a0472ff966;hb=HEAD . Essentially it tag-stuffed every post from FSE with political hashtags and NewsMast started scraping FSE and retweeting the lainbot.)

So if the normies go elsewhere, I'm actually *happy*.

> so too will the online platforms be transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of uhhh, checks notes, the us tech oligarchy and palantir

I like your optimism, but I think this already happened.

> the only ones that remain will be the true nerds again, the autists and the schizoids and the dysgenic, the weirdos among weirdos, the outcasts among “outcasts”,

I see no problem with this. There's U-235 and U-238 and you only get critical mass if you have enough U-235 with less U-238. U-235 is only fissile if it's more than 90% of the material: any more U-238 and you get poor yield. Adding more U-238 for broad consumer appeal just gives you a shittier bomb.

@DailyStormerDigest @judgedread

> I do agree the extent to which we can all be Skinner Boxed with fake AI generated news is as hard to grasp as it is frightening.

I mean, why wouldn't they? I can't wait for, 30 years from now when it is somehow revealed that this has occurred, everyone agrees that the government has to promise to stop doing that and the government says they'll stop doing it and nothing changes.

Troll farms are prohibitively expensive; an LLM isn't, and it writes better than a minimum wage temp and it will analyze some Karen's entire social media history without getting bored. So for the compute equivalent of a $15 Pi (which will be idle most of the time), you can have a machine follow an entire person around, day and night, and fabricate some whispers in their ear.

> That was actually the first thing I thought of when there was the apparently false reports that the video showing blood gushing out of Kirk's neck was an AI fake: "here is the first instance of all of us being Skinner Boxed".

I think it's a reasonable expectation to have at this point.

There was some series of hand-wringing articles ~20 years ago about millennials being too cynical and advertisers being mystified because people were trusting word of mouth from friends about which yogurt was best instead of a 15-second short film where three diverse women all agree that Yoplait is too delicious to be healthy but it somehow is both delicious and good for you and is guaranteed to contain less than an LD50 of corn syrup. Then the Data Science decided what to put into people's mailboxes and consumption was saved forever.

And if they can't herd everyone on earth into the same platform and people keep wandering out to places like fedi (if you've read the "Hydra on the Web" paper that the German government put out, that is their lament: https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/faa13e7f66b7ff9e97634aaf04f6fd4faab95cf3931080fd03b0d98d76c7df2a ), they can do this. I don't know how many spare cycles all those DoE machines have but Microsoft and Oracle love federal contracts, and they're most of the privately held clusters on https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2025/06/ . You know, back of the envelope, right, I think a lot of organizations on the high side of medium-size could afford the computes. I don't know if you're familiar with the academics scraping fedi but enough time on the UU cluster to process a small place like fedi fits in individual professors' grant budgets, apparently.

> Best outcome: democratization of AI so we all have it as a weapon.

Yeah, for the first time in a very long time, the bottleneck is hardware availability. The datasets and a lot of models are open, but the sophisticated ones want a lot of juice, and even if the "regulations" grow legs, they won't in China, so the Chinese models kind of set a floor on availability.

> Control of cyberspace is the most important front in the war ahead.

Pic related.
shadowrun_e-210422-044826.png

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