That power isn't even a rounding error compared to their power today. In those decades you had commercial dominance over a niche sector. Today you play kingmaker together with the other oligarchs.
Big Tech today is the media. Taken together, they completely control what a majority of the populace knows about the world. It is considered completely impractical and somewhat suspicious not to carry one of their location tracking communication devices at all times.
Orwell's Ministry of Truth could not dream of what Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and Apple can do at any time, anywhere.
> I set it and use JavaScript to tell them to reload the page
While throwing out all users who opt-in to javascript, using Noscript or uBlock or something like it, may be acceptable collateral damage to you, it might be good to keep in mind that this plays right into Big Adtech's playbook. They spend over two decades to normalize the behavior of running a hundred or more programs of untrusted origin on every page load, and to treat users to opt-in to running code in a document browser with suspicion. Not everyone would like to hand over that power to them on a silver platter with a neat little bow on top.
Oh please. That ship has sailed. I'm marginally sympathetic to people who don't run JavaScript on their browsers for a variety of reasons, but they've deliberately opted out of the de facto modern web. JS is as fundamental to current design as CSS. If you turn it off, things might work, but almost no one is testing that setup, nor should they reasonably be expected to.
This has zero to do with Adtech for 99.99% of uses, either. Web devs like to write TypeScript and React because that's a very pleasant tech stack for writing web apps, and it's not worth the effort for them to support a deliberately hamstrung browser for < 0.1% of users (according to a recent Google report).
See also: feel free to disable PNG rendering, but I'm not going to lift a finger to convert everything to GIFs.
There are many reasons to accommodate non-JS users beyond accommodating people who have intentionally disabled it, and most of them are in accessibility territory.
Be careful with using percentages for your arguments, because this is not that different from saying that 99.99% of people don't need wheelchair access.
This used to be true, but now I don't think it is anymore. Modern frameworks and modern screen readers have no issue with acessibility.
Some survey from WebAIM found that 99.3% of screen reader users have JavaScript enabled.
So... are they really in accessibility territory still? Only people I still see complaining about Javascript being required are people that insist the web should just be static documents with hyperlinks like it was in the early 90s.
Can you find a modern source with valid reasons for accomodating non-JS users?
Slow/lossy connections: JS may not load, but site still works.
Users that prefer non-animated pages and disable JS for this reason.
Users who prioritize security.
Users of older devices in which your JS can trigger errors. Yes, these exist. Not everyone can upgrade their older device. Many people do not even have their own device to use.
Just you wait, I'll get... What's the name of the LLM thing again? ClawFish or something? I forgot — and the LSP is down, so that's that. Anyways, I'll tell the MoltClawde (???) to skillfully vibe code a skill for generating vehement anti-blackpill diatribes, then equip it and reply to your post with a such vehement — but, you know, sort-of lyrical — anti-blackpill diatribe, your pill will shine so much, it will make post-balrog Gandalf look like pre-balrog Gandalf and your own LLMthingmaclaude will wax poetical about not surrendering to generalized societal stupidity while it publishes balrog-related CVEs about curl's GAND_ELF() preprocessor directive.
> that's a very pleasant tech stack for writing web apps
99.9999% of websites shouldn't be apps in the first place.
Anyway have fun fighting AI bots and enshittifying your site in the process. In your case, I'm sure the both operators will have as much sympathy for your plight as you show others.
the recent google report claimed that less than 0.1% of users have javascript disabled ... like for every website, or just some, or?
your PNG/GIF thing is nonsense (false equivalence, at least) and seems like deliberate attempt to insult
> I'm marginally sympathetic
you say that as if they've done some harm to you or anyone else. outside of these three words, you actually seem to see anyone doing this as completely invalid and that the correct course of action is to act like they don't exist.
It would be literally impossible to know whether a user disabled JavaScript on another site, so I'm going to say that they meant that for their own sites.
> you say that as if they've done some harm to you or anyone else.
I was literally responding to someone referring to themselves as "collateral damage" and saying I'm playing into "Big Adtech's playbook". I explained why they're wrong.
> the correct course of action is to act like they don't exist.
Unless someone is making a site that explicitly targets users unwilling or unable to execute JavaScript, like an alternative browser that disables it by default or such, mathematically, yes, that's the correct course of action.
> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food
That's a bizarre claim, confidently stated.
Of course I can make a fire, cook and my own food. You can, too. When it comes to hunting, skinning and the cutting of animals, that takes a bit more practice but anyone can manage something even if the result isn't pretty.
If stores ran out of food we would have devastating problems but because of specialization, just because we live in cities now you simply can't go out hunting even if you wanted to. Plus there is probably much more pressing problems to take care of, such as the lack of water and fuel.
If most people actually couldn't cook their own food, should they need, that would be a huge problem. Which makes the comparison with IT apt.
I don't think they're saying _you_ can't do those things, just that most people can't which I have to agree with.
They're not saying people can't learn those things either, but that's the practice you're talking about here. The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.
Can you list a situation where this matters that you know this personally?
Maybe if you end up alone and lost in a huge forest or the Outback, but this is a highly unlikely scenario.
If society falls apart cooking isn’t something you need to be that worried about unless you survive the first few weeks. Getting people to work together with different skills is going to be far more beneficial.
The existential crisis part for me is that no-one (or not enough people) have the skills or knowledge required to do these things. Getting people to work together only works if some people have those skills to begin with.
I also wasn't putting the focus is on cooking, the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important.
And you are far more optimistic about people than me if you think people working together is the likely scenario here.
>the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important
These are very important when you're alone. Like deep in the woods with a tiny group maybe.
The kinds of problems you'll actually see are something going bad and there being a lot of people around trying to survive on ever decreasing resources. A single person out of 100 can teach people how to cook, or hunt, or grow crops.
If things are that bad then there is nearly a zero percent change that any of those, other than maybe clean water, are going to be your biggest issue. People that do form groups and don't care about committing acts of violence are going to take everything you have and leave you for dead if not just outright kill you. You will have to have a big enough group to defend your holdings 24/7 with the ability to take some losses.
Simply put there is not enough room on the planet for hunter gathers and 8 billion people. That number has to fall down to the 1 billion or so range pretty quickly, like we saw around the 1900s.
> The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.
You can eat some real terrible stuff and like 99.999% of the time only get the shits, which isn't really a concern if you have good access to clean drinking water and can stay hydrated.
The overwhelming majority of people probably would figure it out even if they wind up eating a lot of questionable stuff in the first month and productivity in other areas would dedicate more resources to it.
You think that the majority of people actually know how to do those things successfully in the absence of modern logistics or looking up how to do it online?
I have a general idea of how those things work, but successfully hunting an animal isn't something I have ever done or have the tools (and training on those tools) to accomplish.
Which crops can I grow in my climate zone to actually feed my family, and where would I get seeds and supplies to do so? Again I might have some general ideas here but not specifics about how to be successful given short notice.
I might successfully get a squirrel or two, or get a few plants to grow, but the result is still likely starvation for myself and my family if we were to attempt full self-reliance in those areas without preparation.
In the same way that I have a general idea of how CPU registers, cache, and instructions work but couldn't actually produce a working assembly program without reference materials.
I mean before you stave to death because you don’t have food in your granary from last year, you don’t even have the land to hunt or plant food so it’s not even relevant
I wish more people understood this. Or perhaps they do, but it doesn't fir their political pitches or something.
Funding an enormously complicated semiconductor facility from a blank sheet of paper somewhere in Europe is a very expensive way to accomplish little, if the rest of the supply chain from materials to products is in non-friendly nations.
The way to bring in an industry the same way you do anything complicated: You start small. Get the specialized diode factory up and running again, and then build out supporting industries and value chains as needed. Complex lithography equipment can wait until last.
It wasn't long ago we built mobile phones in Europe. Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Bosch all had production and most if not all components were sourced from Europe or the US. Two decades ago is the blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things, not even a generation, and many who worked on this are still in their working years.
Without being directly related, it would also be a good opportunity to chisel out a crack in the Android/Apple monopoly. Then maybe in a decade or so you could actually live as a functioning citizen without giving remote root to the oligarchs and self proclaimed supranational kingmakers.
Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at.
Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details.
Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct.
I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.
There is too much focus in this discussion about low memory situations. You want to avoid those as much as possible. Set reasonable ulimit for your applications.
The reason you want swap is because everything in the Linux (and all of UNIX really) is written with virtual memory in mind. Everything from applications to schedulers will have that use case in mind. That's the short answer.
Memory is expensive and storage is cheap. Even if you have 16 GB RAM in your box, and perhaps especially then, you will have some unused pages. Paging out those and utilizing more memory to buffer I/O will give you higher performance under most normal circumstances. So having a little bit of swap should help performance.
Yes, closely related to the question why AI services insists on writing software in ineffective high level languages intended for humans to read, such as Python. Which then needs to be compiled, use large standard libraries etc. Why not output the actual software directly, intended for a computer to run directly?
Same reason humans write in higher-level languages instead of machine code? Each additional unit of program text costs energy at write time, so there's a bias toward more compact _representations_ of programs, even if they're less efficient at runtime.
Because the written code, variable names, structure, and comments also serve as context for the LLM.
This is why LLM written code is often more verbose than human written code. All of those seemingly unnecessary comments everywhere, the excessively descriptive function names, the way everything is broken down into a seemingly excessive number of logical blocks: This is all helpful to the LLM for understanding the code.
Maybe for existing models, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. AI tools that generate or manipulate images or video don't need human words in the format. Also, I'm not sure how much meaningful names help beyond a certain program size. Assembly is quite understandable locally - even for humans, but especially if you're an AI model trained specifically on it - and globally, even codebases in high-level programming languages are too large to grasp just as code.
> AI tools that generate or manipulate images or video don't need human words in the format.
AI image manipulation tools use the image as context just like text tools use text for context.
You can get an LLM to modify assembly if there’s enough context about what it’s doing, what the input means, what the output means, and so on provided manually.
A chunk of assembly by itself is missing a lot of context that is naturally embedded in higher level programming languages, though. Like variable names.
But a coding agent is free to write any relevant context elsewhere, where it is not necessarily constrained by the syntactic requirements of a programming language. When we write Assembly, we also tend to write comments. It's not like people can't program in Assembly. Most console games in the eighties were written in Assembly, for example. I used to write programs in Assembly in the early 90s.
The difficulty with Assembly is local reasoning, like register allocations (which was particularly annoying when we had few registers, some of which were specialised) and jump targets, which doesn't require a lot of context, but is still tedious compared to C. Global reasoning is pretty much identical to C.
Big Tech today is the media. Taken together, they completely control what a majority of the populace knows about the world. It is considered completely impractical and somewhat suspicious not to carry one of their location tracking communication devices at all times.
Orwell's Ministry of Truth could not dream of what Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and Apple can do at any time, anywhere.
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