It is unclear what you are asking. What you are asking sounds more like using something to add color to the monochrome on the screen, like the Magnavox Odyssey [1] or the Vectrex [2]. But that would be orthogonal to what this is doing.
I think they mean that rather than have the RGBI splitter hardware, have a full-signal splitter that displays the same full color image on each monitor, then put a color filter sheet on each monitor to only pass a specific color.
It would have the benefit of working with NTSC, PAL, composite, and other output signals that don't breakout RGBI components on separate pins. But it would have the downside of only supporting 3 monitors instead of 4 (can't color filter on intensity). And of course each monitor would look red, green, or blue according to their filter.
I played with this once hoping the browser wouldn't care what the file was.
The plan came from an experiment from long ago where I put 1x1 images at the end on my pages, the images loaded from websites my page linked to. Preloading the assets made those pages load much faster. Sadly it also broke pages that served "hot linking images not allowed" text on images.
The new plan was to have a javascript or css file called favicon.ico so that the browser would load it at the same time the html was requested. Then one wouldn't have to wait for the html to be parsed for the second round trip to happen.
NB: Weber's definition of government (which your quote misstates, so to speak, as is often the case), is that the state is that entity which has the monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. It's legitimacy, not violence, which is key.
That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
Which itself is kind of a BS indoctrinated definition.
Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine.
Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
My argument isn't that Weber's definition is correct or accurate; that's a whole 'nother discussion.
It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point.
But Weber's claim is also nuanced:
- Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate.
- Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms).
- If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process.
- And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless.
There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases.
Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold.
I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
To state the obvious: If anyone can code his way out of something it is someone who codes.
If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people.
You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. Much of the push-back here is that evidence is strongly suggesting that 1) it is not and 2) code tends in general to be a power-amplifier for those already in power. Put another way: your reform-minded hacker is not the only coder, and the opposition (or more accurately, the establishment) likely has far vaster resources.
The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion).
Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to.
This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
> This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out.
For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song.
You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills.
A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire.
Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can. The examples you cite (protest songs, protest food) work as part of the battle for hearts and minds, and can be quite effective. They're working at the political level, within epistemic space, itself a significant element of political dynamics. When epistemic systems change, so do political ones, and we've seen this repeatedly through history.
I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that.
There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc.
I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
>Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can.
Actually, one should do very little. We should all do very little. That will already produce a terrifying force that may crush everything precious to us.
And you should only do what you are good at. If you can't sing and dance or can't give a speech - don't do it. You will ruin everything.
> I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
If you are going to take on the impossible wilfull ignorance can be a useful tool. You can't think it's impossible, if you do you should just quit.
Coding isn't a bad hand of cards. You can build something awesome without scaring the shit out of the old guard.
>the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
Law makers keep tagging on new features. It's an incomprehensible mess. If someone wants to build something we don't offer them a nice spec with all relevant information. You get a pile of trash that immediately convinces most to abandon all hope.
If the application has become unusable from technical debt you have to.... well... face the music.
The traditional way is to give a war of some kind, burn everything to the ground and start over. We have it down to an art. We are going to [have to] keep doing this until we come up with a better idea.
It's kind of awesome how the foundation of all advanced civilizations was build by people with few of any tools or resources. I'm sure they had people who thought it couldn't be done not to forget those who paid the ultimate price.
Today the naysayers have airco, washing machines, bubble baths and a super computer in their hands.
> I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
There wouldn't be a need to write this if that wasn't the case. It's not a competition tho. It's a puzzle as old as time. It sits there waiting for someone competent enough to solve it.
>There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Those are fun reads. Thanks.
I wrote this funny thing called subjective sort.
Rather than pick your preferred option you are presented with two random ones.
Provide the 2 election programs, make people sit down and read them for at least 30 minutes and if enough votes are cast this will sort the list from best to worse.
I came to this after wondering what the signal to noise ratio was in elections. I examined Facebook likes and YouTube views and came to the conclusion THERE IS NO SIGNAL.
The 200ish views on the videos from the us Green Party aren't enough to account for journalists. Further down the list the number of Facebook likes didn't even account for friends and relatives.
It also reminds me of conversations where I proposed tiers of voting diplomas and told people I didn't need to read their response or listen to their arguments. I can just disagree without knowing what I'm talking about.
Another fun thought was to make election program legally binding.
The way it currently works is exactly like looking if the bird is on our left or our right while pretending it matters.
But I think it's better to work on documenting existing government before considering changes. The later will limit participation to much.
That was the obvious issue with all the blockchain smart contract stuff that was getting pushed previously. Any time it interacts with the physical world the blockchain goes out the window the moment on someone on the ground decides they don’t agree with it. Your cryptographically signed deed means nothing and can’t evict someone off the land.
There is little room for a property or money transfer system that leaves no avenue for legal recourse. And the DAO fork made it crystal clear why it was always just window dressing on the same social consensus game.
I said little room, not no room. For most entities using crypto where legal recourse is a more realistic threat model than scammers/hackers it isn't the unjust kind they are so worried about.
If you're selling shoes you have little legal threat. If you're doing anything unusual, you need protection from the government because the government hates anything out of the norm unless you bribe it.
This comment ignores the cost of deploying government violence. In most of the world the government cannot "just" rubber hose every petty criminal on the basis that "he might have some crypto he's not telling us about". The people would not stand for it.
I think you misunderstood my comment. The scenario I was thinking of is something like a blockchain contract that declares you own a block of land. If a hacker stole the NFT land contract, the government and society would still agree it belongs to the real owner and thus the blockchain out of sync with reality.
A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
Even if the people did stand for it, it still costs money and human effort for the government to pay its police employees to do the rubber-hosing - and there are principle-agent problems like government agents being susceptible to bribes (perhaps in cryptocurrency!), being too lazy to enforce the written laws, or having personal scruples about cryptocurrency use.
Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
Law makers wouldn't need to pretend they are doing something unique.
You might do the same with all infrastructure projects. They can't all be cheap. Half should more expensive than average. It should be fascinating to see where the extra money is going.
Some goes towards corruption, some into incompetence but there should also be plenty of praise worthy efforts.
It seems we have the tools to do such things now without breaking the bank.
Think of the law as a truly outdated code base. Why would you do a rewrite you ask? Because we've learned a thing or two along the way?
> Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
It would be good. There have been some attempts at source code style revision management for statutes (such as https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ ). Are they a useful start? What should be the next step?
I like the idea, especially the amendments you can visualize almost like a commit tree. They should add something to search like the oldest laws which often are deprecated and useless, in order to help get rid of them.
Last but not least, it is to maintain this website, last updates seem to be from 2022. But I can't manage to imagine if it's a lot of work or not.
You missed figuring out if your position is supposed to make [grandiose] proposals.
Monitor what everyone else is doing, how fast they do it and what you can do to help. Condition everyone to think it's Xmas if you hand them something. After doing that 200 times hand them something obviously nonsensical just for laughs.
Well put. There are probably a few 100 other edge cases worth examination but you got it down to a digestible list.
One trick i always apply to products is to ask yourself what kind of people you are looking to create. Who are the resource and what do you want to change them into? Anything we say is manipulation so appealing to ignorance isn't an answer.
It seems we like people to be constructive and feel empowered to do useful things. We would want them to have access to useful educational information to guide them on their path to enlightenment. We want everyone to contribute to the wellbeing of humanity and the environment which starts by convincing them they can. Then we also don't want to force people into such a narrow scope that they can't express themselves freely anymore.
It would probably be funny to have a personalized LLM review your content contribution before you hit the submit button and present you with a harsh bullet list enummerating everything that is wrong with your contribution. Then if your writings meet certain criteria the right audience should be exposed to it.
We could make it even more spectaculaire by merging the contribution with similar ones under the guidance of its authors. In stead of 100 very similar recipes for apple pie have an AI assisted battle royale that arrives at one that describes the variations (and lists its 100 sources)
You might even identify and recruit some pâtissiers to write walls of text denouncing and/or praising some variations. Currants, sultanas or raisins? The world needs to know.
It is a puzzle to solve. One could take many approaches each with their own pro's and cons.
I once proposed the state takes part ownership of sectors that are profitable and demonstrate a lack of innovation. Things would probably stay shitty but would only slowly shitify further. There should also be a complimentary formula to privatize if it fails to deliver.
A different approach I really like is to gradually require all products and services to supply an increasingly detailed invoice with historic references and gradually require more performance lab tests. Like, you buy a pack of cookies and the label (qr) shows what the seller paid for it, its delivery cost (a different service) broken down to fuel, vehicle, salary, what flour was used, who make it, etc The entire Volgon poetry of it.
I'm also a professional soccer player. Each model comes up with different nonsense.
Only Grok did well kinda...
> Grok 4.20 says
>Dutch software developer and Usenet poster known for eccentric claims about perpetual motion machines and pseudoscience.
Yes, I guess I'm that guy.
Few things are as funny as putting a working device in front of people and see them continue to assert it doesn't work.
It took Howard Johnson, who holds academic credentials in chemistry and physics, nearly six years of legal challenges to finally secure his patent.
After presenting undeniable, physical proof that the device worked and produced continuous motion without an external power source, the presiding judge ordered the USPTO to grant the patent.
More interestingly, after such a long circus the patent could no longer be groped for so called national security purposes.
And most interestingly, there was no academic or industrial interest in the technology.
It reads like a global iq test and it turns out we are really dumb.
I remember handing an Ethernet cable to a friend and he said I was getting old. His laptop didn't have Ethernet! I still haven't recovered from the realisation.
My [old] laptop had a a card reader, hdmi, vga, a serial port and rows of usb2 ports, a plug for power, headphone jack etc etc
Back at his place he showed me the USB hub and the Rube Goldberg dongle collection. I said, ahh there you have all those connectors you didn't need.
I now think USB is magic. Not wanting to use it for everything means you are getting old. The future is a desk full of dongles.
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