Notices by phiofx (phiofx@hachyderm.io), page 13

@morten_skaaning @anji @bert_hubert there was deep integration in multiple ways but this relationship increasingly falls apart as their socioeconomic system heads into unchartered territory where Europe simply cannot go. This level of inequality and social disintegration would blow Europe to pieces (as it did in the past).

@bert_hubert practically every paragraph here resonates deeply.

For argument's sake a minor quibble with this: "Instead we have tons of highly educated folks ... building complex financial constructs"

Here too, it is (was) mostly imported US financial thinking / tools, which sort of stopped after we got seriously burned. Europe's financial system is in a half-baked post-crisis limbo that competes in under-performance (and ultimately merges with) the dire state of its digital infrastructure.

@bert_hubert there is immense talent and resources in Europe but a notorious reluctance to actually take serious risk or discomfort the status quo / vested interests.

So its always talking a beautiful talk ("digital and green transition", yeah, I actually totally dig that) but not walking the tough, walk-on-broken-eggs, walk.

Yet the pressure to own up to the challenges of the digital era is rising and as you say, the total dependence on remote centers "is probably not smart in the long term"

@bert_hubert I love these comparative analogies between sectors, they enable reasoning around topics that otherwise seem too one-of-a-kind.

My hunch is that "cloud" in its current hyperscale incarnation is a lost cause but the broader objective of digital sovereignty is anything but. The objective would be to leapfrog into the next design by identifying cloud failures (e.g. gaming) and more viable economic models. Europe needs a sophisticated digital "mittelstand" to match the industrial one.

It is 2024 and we don't have #jetpacks. *If we did*, they would be remotely controlled at the whim of #bigtech, while their #HUD would show locational #adtech

But while mass computing has been on a ever regressive path there are pockets of strong resistance

Not just the #fediverse (still largely CRUD webapp replicas) but behaviors and software tools like real-time #livecoding and #musicsynthesis, where self-sovereign #tech augments human creativity and illuminates stolen alternative Universes

#Meta unlawfully ignores the users’ right to easily withdraw consent (to be tracked).

@noybeu has filed an additional (*) complaint with the Austrian data protection authority today to take into account the withdrawal situation.

(*) Additional to the #GDPR complaint against Meta over “Pay or Okay” filled last November

https://noyb.eu/en/meta-ignores-users-right-easily-withdraw-consent

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-gdpr-complaint-against-meta-over-pay-or-okay

Stumbled randomly on the #orkut story, one of Google's various failed social media projects that I knew nothing about.

While long gone, apparently its creator is still thinking about a comeback
https://www.orkut.com/

What struck me in the Wikipedia summary are the various challenges the service faced (legal, political).

Not sure if the decentralized #fediverse has a contingency plan how to manage reputation damage when the inevitable happens.

@amcasari how do you cope with the scenario that if you do it now you might have to do it again later (with all the associated loss of face)?

@devnull @luceos @leroy @nodebb @multiverseofbadness

The comparison between discourse type forums and reddit/lemmy/kbin is quite interesting in a #fediverse context. Conceptually they differ on the hierarchy level: single domain versus multi-domain.

In federation that distinction fades, a multi-domain experience can be emulated using a client and multiple servers.

On the other hand reddit/discord became big by making it really easy to start a sub. This is not yet the case for self-hosting

@ErikJonker

Financial negotiations don't always conclude if the gap is too large to bridge. This may well be the case if one of the two parties thinks it is not viable to pay/receive what the other is able to offer and be still a profit making business.

The legal system being slow creates dubious tech business models with potential expiry date. This is happening belatedly in the data privacy space, with behaviorally targeted adtech on quicksand, at least in the EU

@bjmendelson @SandraDeHaan

@BillySmith @HelenG @Matt_Noyes

I never understood why creators could not/would not create their own digital distribution infrastructures.

I mean, its somewhat easier to explain the lapse (and hence the "helpful" middle men) in the case of taxis, hotels, appartment owners etc.

@gyptazy @stefano @grunfink being written in C its not too surprising that its economical (though by no means automatic... somebody wrote good code :-) but in terms of easy extensibility using low level language has some drawbacks.

@datarama i guess an objective data point that current tech industry objectives are misaligned with our digital welfare is the difficulty of using python to build games and other small apps on mobile.

There is #kivy and #beeware, so its in-principle doable but going against the grain of these platforms and their "preferred", "first class" stacks

Which is a pity. Given how stuffed mobiles are with sensors one could imagine all sorts of fun (if not useful) projects in the spirit of #raspberrypi

@ErikJonker

Umm, this does not answer the question if they still have a business *after* they compensate copyright holders (i.e., including all costs and other legal business model requirements)

In the context of the NYT lawsuit it was insinuated they were in discussions which evidently did not pan out.

How a mere algorithm class (such as #llm) leads to a business is non-trivial. Google could not sell "search IQ" on the basis of their #pagerank, they sold ads.

@bjmendelson @SandraDeHaan

@benno trained, fully developed humans are harder to replace by AI, so no.

@datarama tinkering and inventing is innate and enjoyable to many people. The challenge with digital tech is that there is now a huge cognitive gap that makes it inaccessible to most. Filling-in the intermediate abstractions that are needed to bridge this gap is not trivial and has always been subservient to business models. The open source community also guilty here.

Imagine if people could tinker with their smartphones instead of incessant swiping screens of hermetically closed devices.

@datarama alas we never managed to grow a bicycles-for-the-mind industry.

the mobility analogy that has come to pass would be something like mega cruise ships, where hordes of people rent a small cabin and are "entertained" for the duration of the trip, being just a little bit more obese after it ends.

but there *are* some places where bikes are loved, pointing out that possibilities are always open. the flow of history is very capricious, doesn't fit rational expectations and projections.

@datarama in embedded systems you might be sitting closest to a sane tech architecture.

If we could reboot into a blank slate we'd probably want silicon to be very commoditized, distributed fairly evenly (not hoarded in apocalyptic datacenters mining "coin" when not mining people's souls), with lots of #opensource interoperability.

Tech as part of people's tools and furniture, with little drama. Support mostly localized (your friendly neighborhood geeks installing #fediverse upgrades etc).

Reclaiming digital #tech from the sociopaths that are dominating is almost a pre-condition for solving real human problems.

Not because #technosolutionnism but many, many of our societal problems are deeply enmeshed with broken information flows.

Yet its nigh impossible when society's economic wiring simply does not reward what is in its own long-term benefit.

In terms of the (much derided) #esg taxonomy, #opensource, human-centric tech should be the darling of the S=social pillar.

The fakeness of #generativeAI output is shared with the fakeness of the #cryptocurrency, #nft "economies" and the datamined #adtech social "communities"

Cheap digital simulacra that parrots human reality in the gross, distorted way of a dystopic scifi nightmare

The real, increasingly dire problems of human society ignored, exacerbated. Wave upon wave of new fangled tech attacking, not helping the human condition

Old visions of empowerment and agency giving way to #bigtech dictatorships