A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

    Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

    Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

    And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

    But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.



  • I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

    However, I do think there could’ve perhaps been a happy medium, where OS’s retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

    I guess I’m imagining a sort’ve evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

    The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call “programming for the rest of us”. HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It’s let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

    David Lingwood, APDA

    There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.












  • I don’t think humans would be naturally self centered if they lived in an environment that actually encouraged sharing and cooperation instead of actively encouraging and rewarding psychopathy and selfishness.

    There were likely people who thought it impossible that wolves would someday become domesticated, and eventually be our best buds, due to their ‘unchangeable’ nature.

    We are all products of our environment.


  • That sounds similar to this quote:

    “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” — Edsger Dijkstra, 1975

    But there’s been a good deal of programmers who have said that BASIC, and its ease of use and seeing almost instant results is extremely useful to not turn people off learning to code to begin with. Python is functionally the new BASIC in that regard, and while the language itself may not teach you to become an expert programmer, it may have gotten more people in the door than otherwise would have.

    But that’s just my 2 cents.






  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.mlThe Future of Odysee
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    7 months ago

    In the comments of that second link you provided, someone made a salient point:

    At the end of the day, it all comes down to content residing on someones hard drive. That will cost, either directly through cloud services, or indirectly by decentralized storage like the libry app where users donate their disk space and bandwidth. It is not clear to me how the new system works, and who carries the cost?

    Odysee’s response was this link, which another commenter then pointed out:

    I love how Arweaves biggest flaw (bandwidth) is only mentioned as a cliff note “Notably absent from Arweave’s formulation of the Kryder+ rate are bandwidth costs. Arweave covers this using a separate set of karma-based incentives – see here.” And the article linked just dodges the actual question at hand by throwing an empty promise to incentivize people to give their bandwidth for “karma”

    So Arweave is literally just Peertube with another brand new crypto on the backend to incentivize people to start using it and ultimately ‘sell’ their hard-drives to the blockchain to be used to host the video content. Otherwise, you need to pay to ‘permanently’ store your content on the blockchain for a baked in 200 years worth of storage time (so, I imagine that will be rather high).

    It should also be noted that in the FAQ regarding what will happen to LBRY Coins once this new crypto replaces it, they simply say “It’ll still be yours to do with as you please!”, I.E, this shit is worthless now since nothing will use it, but hey, it’s your shit, and that counts for something!

    Again, I would highly recommend viewing Folding Ideas video on the subject if you haven’t yet. This is ultimately going to be another thing that makes the creators a tremendous amount of money, but will ultimately crash and burn for everyone else.


  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.mlThe Future of Odysee
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    7 months ago

    So they were bought by Forward Research.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arweave-adds-over-7m-users-140000864.html

    Foward Research is a crypto blockchain company that owns Arweave, which as far as I can tell is trying to incorporate crypto into a cloud data storage service. It’s all very vague, but that’s what I sussed out.

    I wasn’t aware that odysse was originally a crypto video sharing platform, I thought it operated more like YouTube.

    Forward Research also bought solarplex, which they boast as having sold “over 120,000 NFTs”, which tells me all I need to know about their intentions.

    I’d steer way clear of this, nothing good can come of it, and if you have any doubts, watch Folding Ideas NFT video.

    Stick with Peertube.