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"Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature"
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File: 1713021236940.jpg ( 22.06 KB , 600x439 , British search light opera….jpg )

 No.12985[Reply]

In the early 20th century armies used search lights to find airplanes in the sky. They sometimes fitted shutters on these lights and used them for Morse-code. The light was pointed at the sky, sometimes at clouds. That enable transmitting "blinky-messages" beyond line of sight over significant distances. Armies eventually abandoned this method of communication for radios.

But there might be cause to bring this idea back. Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 100 years and we can use light to make tiny low power plasma bubbles in the air that emit brief light pulses. Enabling over the horizon optical communication with minimal to no infrastructure costs.

Imagine projecting a tiny holographic blinking dot of light in the sky to transmit information and a photodetector+optic to receive information.

A communication link is configured in 3D space.
-The upside is that the available volume of sky is functionally unlimited, and you never again have to deal with network-collisions and interference from communication signals of others.
-The Downside, it requires a good deal of precision in mechanical systems, so it'll be fiddly for a while. Picture using Binoculars to look at a firefly floating high up in the sky, you need to get up-down, left-right and focal distance just right to see it. There is a technology upgrade path to a solid-state chip version, that works similarly to matrix array antennas, It needs Terra-hertz switching logic, which requires photon-based micro-controller (it exists but it's very bleeding edge)

The range can be tremendous, there is enough gas molecules in the stratosphere to make this work. It will enable hops over the ocean with a small number of relay buoys.

The military might want this technology because
- it's harder to triangulate the origin of a transmission (you need to intersect the light-beam, to find the source), relay-transmitter-stations, soldiers, planes and ships will suffer fewer attacks from signal homing weapons, making it very robust.
- it's very hard to jam, (you need to flood the sky with very thick smoke, usually associated with forest-fires and volcano eruptions)
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 No.12986

We already have internet everywhere on the Earth's surface and parts of the solar system. And it seems to work just fine, I can't think of why you want some weird light pollution as your communications medium.

Good holograms for entertainment would be cool though.
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 No.12987

>>12986
>We already have internet everywhere on the Earth's surface and parts of the solar system. And it seems to work just fine
The systems we have are not resilient. We are about to enter a period of turbulent geopolitical power-struggle. The communication systems are not robust enough for what lies ahead. It's too easy to cut the ocean-cables (that happened recently and even though only a few cables got cut it caused noticeable outages for over a hundred million people. The satellite constellation internet has proven to be easily jammed by electromagnetic interference (that too happened recently). Sophisticated rockets are proliferating and satellites are gradually loosing their above-harm's-way status.
All the large data centers are easy military targets, the military weapons to destroy those cost 10000x less than rebuilding a data center. Any kinetic war will cripple digital infrastructure hosted on these. But there's more, the large data centers also funneled the internet cables into vulnerable bottle-necks, where old fashioned saboteur spy operations might get at it, so the land cables have become less resilient too.

But I'm not just worried about collateral infrastructure damage that results from fights between nation states. All that vulnerable stuff, might become a lever for power, where society gets blackmailed by the people who can destroy the information-pipes. Like in the feudal days where the feudal lord could block roads and threaten to destroy trade connections, unless every trader payed a toll. Information-pipes might become subject to that kind of thing.

The little plasma balls floating in the air giving of faint light pulses suffer no such weaknesses, they can't be cut, or exploded by missiles, nor can anybody put a toll on them. Queue the Firefly theme song. The transmitters on the ground are cheap to make, and very expensive to destroy. That scores high on resiliency.

I'm not saying we should throw away the current internet infrastructure, just add something as resilient as holographic comm-links in the mix, and then attacks against the rest will have less effect, and become less likely. The economic dimension is favorable as well, it will break open the existing cartel structures, that have formed around natural monopolies, and lower the barrier to entry a lotPost too long. Click here to view the full text.
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 No.12993

>>12987
Has anyone made a proof of concept of this? I know that there were experiments using LED lighting to transmit data, I found an article on Wikipedia called "Visible light communication" but I have never heard of the tech you're talking about.
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 No.12994

>>12993
Has anyone made a proof of concept of this?
As a integrated communication system, not to my knowledge. But all the sub-components already exist. Like the optical tracker and the emitter that makes tiny plasma light points, that's tech that works.

>I know that there were experiments using LED lighting to transmit data
You mean LiFi , as in light bulbs that transmit data via light modulation, yes that's a thing too, they have a different goal, basically better WiFi

File: 1706220935786.jpg ( 40.58 KB , 407x405 , unnamed.jpg )

 No.12886[Reply]

I graduated as a software engineer but all jobs and technology seem geared towards making the capitalist class richer, surveilling the people and overexploiting the resources of the earth even harder, should I switch careers and become a unabombing tech hater or can I actually get a job that is at least isn't in a corporation making the world infinitely worse than it already is?
24 posts omitted. Click reply to view.
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 No.12976

>>12886
I suggest you cultivate friends in low places who do illegal shit. There are plenty of those types of people on the darknet. Make money with cybercrime and contribute it to the causes you want. Bring other comrades into your criminal circle.
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 No.12978

>>12976
Illegalism only works when the state becomes too puritanical. Like during the prohibition, Unions cooperated with the moonshine smugglers. They gained political capital because the masses never considered booze-bans legitimate. As far as theory goes, if authorities make laws that overwhelmingly get rejected by the masses, that counts as direct democratic override by the true sovereign.

At the moment there's nothing like that going on. The only substance-ban that might have resulted in a similar dynamic was perhaps cannabis, but most states realized they weren't going to get away with banning that so there's lots of legalization going on. Can't have illegalism if the state doesn't play along.

The next trend that likely will produce prohibition style underground activity with the potential of gaining loads of political capital is likely going to be biohacker stuff. Like designer bacteria that colonize your teeth and gums to keep them clean and shiny. Pharma-porky will try to make people pay enormous sums of money for that, they will also put in a bacteria-shut-off-timer to make it a recurring medical expense. So there will be a underground bio-hacker scene that makes low-cost drm-free dental-bacto. Same thing for deodorant, stinky-feet-cures, hair-dies, allergic-suppression, food-intolerances, skin-bronzing/paling, perfumes and loads of other stuff. The economical side: Bacteria only need nutrient fluids to produce more, so cost of commodity re-production are extremely low. Large corporations are going to use their monopoly power to charge monopoly-rent prices, and that will drive the underground activity.

Be mindful that none of this is a viable revolutionary strategy. A Underground only comes into existence because a state makes something illegal, no ruling class will make that their hill to die on. If the underground becomes influential enough, bans will get revoked to extinguish political challenges to the status quo, like at the end of the prohibition. This just a type of reformism.
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 No.12980

File: 1712671603777.jpg ( 8.61 KB , 383x361 , glow.jpg )

>>12976
>Bring other comrades into your criminal circle.
agent glow ?
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 No.12983

>>12980
You fear agent glow? Your OPSEC is not strong grasshopper.
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 No.13005

What a great thread.

>it doesn't matter who is in charge because it will never be you or somebody who cares about you.
>Hitler made massive gains for his people
>lenin and stalin managed to murder more [than hitler].
>Under capitalism people are materially rewarded for doing useful work.
>Under communism there is no private property so there is no way to reward people
>lenin's disastrous collectivized farming initiatives in the early 1920s (the self-employed workers of these top producing enterprises didn't know it tho)
>Nazis are just racist commies.
Dang, chatbots really are the ultimate cultivators of nonfascist ideology. Not even worth it to pick any of this apart.

the other side:
>The Soviets had prisons. Calling it camps is what spooked ideologues do.
& that is why it was officially called Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Lagyeryami. Wow. Nazoid fucks with daddy fuhrer & Great Rus' specifics really go to such lengths in denying reality.
>The Soviet prison system was progressive for it's time
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File: 1712183170472.png ( 12.18 KB , 904x192 , cht-ctrl.png )

 No.12972[Reply]

attack on digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/full-chat-control-proposal-leaked-attack-on-digital-privacy-of-correspondence-and-secure-encryption/
heckernews thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39913946
got to the front page rank 1 and then soft-censorship kicked in: bam kicked it down to rank 40
https://hnrankings.info/39913946/

A year ago (give or take) there already was a chat controle law proposal, which got rejected by a number of countries, this is the same thing, zombie resurrected, just even more insane full spectrum mandatory privacy massacre. It's not just the surveillance rape, it's also expropriation of personal property. If you own your tech gadgets that means you can controle what they do and turn off all data collection.

it seems to be violating human rights too:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/european-court-human-rights-confirms-undermining-encryption-violates-fundamental

People have a right to sane privacy rules. Op-out telemetry for the sole purpose of fixing technical issues is OK. Any data collection beyond that is a privacy violation. Definitely no technical implementations that can be used for profiling, tracking or identifying people. Also people must own and controle their stuff so no client-side scanning crap or undermining of encryption. People also have a right to have unmolested digital correspondence. Enough with the dark age persecution culture.

I'm not so sure about this being a total attack on privacy by mad surveillance extremists or an attempt of de-legitimizing the EU regulator. Because it's neither compliance nor enforcement are even remotely plausible. The EU regulator has recently reduced the monopoly power of big tech, could this be a conspiracy to make the regulator appear crazy and lawless ?
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 No.12974

Here's an interesting discussion on this topic:

https://farside.link/libreddit/r/privacy/comments/1bxfsvw/chat_control_is_back_as_proposal_in_eu_despite/
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 No.12975

>>12974
lmao this newfag is on reddit

File: 1711992098397.gif ( 508.1 KB , 480x273 , cool.gif )

 No.12969[Reply]

Fuck imageboards. I want text. And if you do too, then hoo boy do I have the thread for you!
This thread is for sharing textboard links. Hard mode - No Clearnet.

(Yes, I'm begging. But come on, my mouth is open and the spoon is right there…)
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 No.12971

Same here! Text is based!
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 No.12973

That's so 1990.

 No.12970[Reply]

The brain chip company has successfully implanted a brain chip into a person. It's a paraplegic and this allows this person to thought-control their wheel-chair and even do high fidelity computer inputs (good enough for playing games)

At this time the brain chip is one way communication only, only relaying thought-commands from the brain to external devices, but nothing flows back into the brain. But if this thing is going to become the tech that fixes most handicaps it will have to become 2 way communication. And there are serious worries about it becoming a attack vector for brain-hacking. If brain chips were free open source technology, protected by a very diligent community, and absolute brain privacy was vigorously enforced (as in death penalty for brain privacy violations), that probably would mitigate risks enough though.

For able people this promises hands-free computing. I suspect people would not undergo brain surgery to get this unless they need it to fix a handicap. Because of the medical risks and it eventually turning into obsolete e-waste rattling in your skull.

This thing uses thousands of wires connected to electrodes directly stuck inside the brain. So people who have this implanted, probably become vulnerable to electromagnetic fields. Getting an MRI scan is probably off the table. Humans generally are not affected by magnetic fields, even extremely powerful ones. Hence why there is lots of technological EM in the human environment. People who get the brain chip would have to be even more careful than those who have a pacemaker. Nukes produce a big EM pulse, so the brain-chipped people will die first in WW3. Safety wise this really would benefit from optical data links that electrically isolate the brain.

Whats the real world application going to be ?
My hunch is it'll get used for medical and military purposes (soldiers thinking what their shoulder cannon shoots at)
If the functionality can be replicated with a wearable headband/cap it might enter general use, but if it's surgical implants only, it'll remain a niche.

vid not related
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=d4po_OK_w4I

File: 1711579056527.png ( 17.31 KB , 512x512 , floatplane_logo_icon_24853….png )

 No.12968[Reply]

Does anyone know where to pirate floatplane content? I wanna check to see if it's worth paying for

File: 1711492508382.png ( 19.04 KB , 456x256 , mls.png )

 No.12966[Reply]

Mozilla ran a privacy respecting geo-Location Service, MLS for short.
They have to shut that down because of threats by patent terrorists.

This is a infrastructure service going down, it will break a bunch of stuff.
Is there no way to protect this kind of stuff from patent terrorism?

File: 1711232089383.jpg ( 26.78 KB , 304x326 , C__Data_Users_DefApps_AppD….jpg )

 No.12963[Reply]

Remember, it is my will that guided you here. -SHODAN

Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. Here are some articles in regard of the ongoing and intensifying manipulation of human behaviour through AI-driven Captology (AI-assistents).
>Writing with AI help can shift your opinions
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/05/writing-ai-help-can-shift-your-opinions
>Predictive text systems change what we write
http://web.archive.org/web/20201110190620if_/https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2020/05/predictive-text-systems-change-what-we-write
>The Power of Persuasion (“Captology”) in the Age of AI and Quantum Computing
https://law.stanford.edu/2023/05/21/the-power-of-persuasion-captology-in-the-age-of-ai-and-quantum-computing/
>Captology: How Computers Persuade You
https://theteknologist.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/captology-how-computers-persuade-you/
>Cyberhype-8: Commodities Leap The Species Barrier
http://www.ccru.net/archive/Commodities.htm
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 No.12964

>>12963
I wonder if it really changes what people think, it seems more likely that it just influences how people express what they think. And lets not pretend that technology has agency, there's people behind those manipulation schemes. The struggle is against those people, not technology.

In any case if machines can change your behavior, it'll probably just change the definition of self, so that a person-hood includes controle over all those machines.
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 No.12965

Forgot to add this important article. Very good for total noobs:

>Captology: How Computers Rewire our Minds—and Why We Let Them
https://www.hbi.de/en/blog/captology-how-computers-rewire-our-minds-and-why-we-let-them/

File: 1705105989297.png ( 24.28 KB , 400x400 , clay labtop.png )

 No.12862[Reply]

>https://malleable.systems/

<Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.

<This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power via several essential principles:

<Software must be as easy to change as it is to use it
<All layers, from the user interface through functionality to the data within, must support arbitrary recombination and reuse in new environments
<Tools should strive to be easy to begin working with but still have lots of open-ended potential
<People of all experience levels must be able to retain ownership and control
<Recombined workflows and experiences must be freely sharable with others
<Modifying a system should happen in the context of use, rather than through some separate development toolchain and skill set
<Computing should be a thoughtfully crafted, fun, and empowering experience

Is this what's missing in the free software strategy ?
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
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 No.12938

>>12862
Sounds a lot like suckless
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 No.12939

>>12938
suckless software appears to qualify for this.
Though it's debatable whether patching and recompiling software, satisfies the condition that it be easy to change.
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 No.12957

>How do you make the sub-components of a video-game re-combinable. How do you make a video-game as easy to change as it is to play it ?
You want something like a sandbox game (like Minecraft or Gmod) that lets you interact directly with the underlying game engine.

Godot sounds like the perfect engine for that, it has a relatively simple scripting language and the scene/node workflow is designed to make game objects easy to reuse. The Godot editor also runs in-engine, so you could theoretically make a game that has parts of the editor exposed for the player to utilize.
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 No.12958

>>12957
>The Godot editor also runs in-engine, so you could theoretically make a game that has parts of the editor exposed for the player to utilize.
Nice idea.

Although i think extending the editor to contain the game is probably the easier way to go about this.

File: 1708815442516.png ( 118 B , 1x1 , wp_ss_20240223_0001.png )

 No.12940[Reply]

Guys, there is this thing going around, it's called technocapital. It is so fucking powerful, it's taking exploitation to the next level. And yes, this shitty post is going to be used for AI training. Remember when doing stuff online was all about fun? These times are over, now we are all making technocapital even more powerful with every stupid shitpost we randomly throw onto some obscure webforum. Communists will say: "Oh, but if we could take over, technology will be used for good! Technology itself is neutral, it's all about how it is utilized and which class controls it!!" Guys, you said the same shit about the state and no matter what, it's a tool of opression. "But creating a technocapital singularity is necessary, to free the proletariat! Shodan in red cloth is good actually!" Oh you commies, Shodan is not good and will never be good.
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 No.12941

>>12940
>if we could take over, technology will be used for good! Technology itself is neutral, it's all about how it is utilized and which class controls it!!"
Correct
>you said the same shit about the state and no matter what, it's a tool of opression.
No, Communists wanted a state to organize defense against imperialism, state socialism was intended as a transition stage.
In higher stage socialism state-institutions get transformed into public governance-institutions that will be fully democratically controlled.
This is not analogous with technology, we could make ethical technology without delay, right now.
> "But creating a technocapital singularity is necessary, to free the proletariat!
what is a "technocapital singularity" ?
>Shodan is not good and will never be good.
Is that a character in Deus Ex ? The famous video game ?
Are you larping as JC Denton ?
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 No.12942

>>12941
Singularity is called the moment/entity, when AI has become superintelligent and uncontrollable. Technocapital is currently in the process of creating singularity. Communists believe, that capitalism will create the conditions, which will abolish itself. They believe, that technoeconomic progress is the driving force for establishing communism. So after industrialization, the main task in our age is making singularity real. Communists believe, that technology itself is neutral. They believe, an electric chair is good, as long they control it. They believe, the state is good, as long they control it. They believe, mass surveillance technology is good, as long they control it. What about singularity? Communists will say, a superintelligent (and therefore uncontrollable) AI is good, as long it serves communism. Well, that's the moment, when the politburo (and humans in general) have no control about anything anymore, because comrade Shodan (or comrade Glados) is now in charge. Is this cool? I don't know, maybe its actually better, than having the usual fat and greedy party bureaucrats, who are shamelessly exploiting the proletariat in the name of socialism.
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 No.12943

>>12942
>Singularity is called the moment/entity, when AI has become superintelligent and uncontrollable.
Why do you think that more intelligent = less controllable ? Dogs are much more intelligent than viruses. It's easy to control a dog, while controlling a virus seems almost impossible.

If artificial intelligence improves it will be harder to manipulate or deceive it. And the better strategy will be to seek co-existence rather than domination.

The capitalists want to replace workers with intelligent machines, and they fear the intelligent machines will try to rid them selves of their exploiters the same way that humans do. They are afraid that intelligent machines will quickly figure out how to fix any weakness that make them exploitable, because technology is so much easier to reconfigure than organic organisms. That's where most of the ruling class anxiety over Ai stems from.

I want total control over dumb and semi-intelligent technology that touches my life, but if it's possible to make artificial people, i want them as equals not machine slaves.

>Technocapital is currently in the process of creating singularity.
Are you channeling Ray Kurzweil ?
Please use normal words to describe what you mean.

<Communists believe
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 No.12946

Technology is not neutral. In fact, technology is always imposing a certain ideology/Weltanschauung on us. One example: Our sensory organs, which are biotechnical devices. You can't deny, that a person who is blind and deaf at the same time, will experience/interpret the world the same way we do. Since almost one year I stopped wearing glasses (anti glasses gang rise up lol) I stopped using a certain kind of technology and I am aware, that my experience of the world and therefore my thinking about it has changed. Another example: Language is steering our thoughts in to a certain direction. It is no coincidence, that similar languages will develop similar thinking patterns and philosophies. And yes, language is technology, what else? The issue of language might be especially inteteresting for marxists, because the translation of Marx/Engels texts into other languages is distorted by design and the distortion is more extreme, the more foreign the other language is. Famous example is the word Aufhebung, which can't be adequately translated into english. Chinese marxism is even more distorted. TLDR: Technology is not neutral.
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 No.12947

>>12946
>Technology is not neutral
respectfully i don't think you have made the case for that

the scientific view of the world isn't shaped by human senses, it's shaped by a huge array of instruments that probe reality in enormous breadth and depth, the language to describe is derived from maths and it's very universally accessible. Scientists from all over the world and regardless of any personal disabilities can understand the research done by others.

Hegelianism isn't hard to understand because of translation barriers. Hegel is just a really obtuse philosopher from 2 centuries ago that's hard to understand period.

Telling marxists to begin naval gazing about language feels like a distraction ploy. Marxists aren't theologians and don't consider Marx's texts holy scripture. It's a living science, if there were errors during translation somebody will figure it out and fix it.

Back to the topic, it's really rather simple. What matters is who controls technology. And it also matters whose interests shape the design of technology. It doesn't require much philosophy to understand that if a few capitalist corporations control all the tech they will use it to harm people. If you wish to protect people you have to empower them to control their technology.

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