point 1:

representatives did not get elected for a certain (maximum) timeframe and could always be voted out again.

point 2:

(possibly rightfully arguing that the burgeoise could not accurately represent the workers)

You are asking him to have stopped before completing the beginning of the revolution, {…}

i am not asking to stop in the middle, i am asking to do their homework. if you have a vote, are unhappy with the results, force your way… that means either you don’t have the support from the general population or did not properly prepare for the system you had a vote in.

point 3:

While I will not say it was a good thing to match it with violence, {…}

well hopefully so!

{…} it is difficult to side with the Sailors against the forming Socialist Republic.

never mind…

if open opposition, demonstrations, strikes, etc. are not allowed, even faced with violence - democracy has failed. in theory you could vote representatives out, but if you know those with the power are not shy to imprison and kill you it is not dêmos krátos anymore, just krátos.

point 4:*

I have, and it does work, {…}

really? which communist small government are you part of? i am really interested in finding out about modern attempts in communism.

{…} ignored the idea of the Mass Line {…}

i did. additionally i had to simplify, summarise and choose context a lot. afterall this is neither a history nor politics class, but a lemmy comment below a comic strip.

i give you that: soviet democracy looks pretty neat on paper. lets look at its implementation.

people gather and elect representatives. these representatives in turn elect representatives again as needed. as the system grows, this will gradually form a hierarchical governmental body. in contrast to most democracies, representatives did not get elected for a certain (maximum) timeframe and could always be voted out again. additionally there wiuld not be a desperation of power: they where legislative, executive and judiciary all the same.

1905 the lenin and the bolschevikes introduced such a system. shortly after they only got a minority in the votes. lenin forcefully disbanded the opposition, (possibly rightfully arguing that the burgeoise could not accurately represent the workers) and explicitly excluding the burgeoise from the democratic rights.

Some people say that the end of soviet democracy was in 1918. Lets go with 1921: Martial law was in action, many people where discontent with the bolshevik government, mainly workers and sailors where protesting (kronstadt). this act of rebellion was swiftly crushed by the red army and many people lost their lives. at the same time lenin was still assuring democracy is working as intended.

conclusion: the democracy lasted for about 16 years. in multiple occasions people where forcefully pushed away. this is possible, because a pyramid structure is created by the system. later this form of government was described as “extremely democratic dictatorship of the proletariat”. dictatorship does not have to be bad for the people, but it has the tendency to do so.

overall i encourage you to explore socialist systems from the bottom up. start on paper, if it works try it out in the real world. gradually increase the size and dont be afraid to learn and adjust - now failing is still cheap and easy. the soviet democracy might have worked on a smaller scale. but applied to a country the size of udssr it was too much power focussed on too little people.

We are talking about communism, agreed. That means we are also talking about communes: small(ish) groups of people who want to live together in a communist system. I come from a practical approach: if you want to do something, it needs to work under sterile laboratory conditions first (communism does this). then you can take it to smaller experiments (communes which survived for long, usually have a low hierarchy). after gathering real world experience, you can slowly increase the size of these experiments. so far none of the countries, which had a socialist government still have a (valid) socialist system.

{…} Communism, with central planning and whatnot.

seems like you are suggesting a more centralised form of government and stronger hierarchical structures than any of the communes i personally know. what is your suggested path to avoid the pitfalls of the past communist governments? what safeguards do you suggest to prevent a (group of) person(s) accumulating power and perverting the government into a dictatorship?

As you said: socialism is an idealistic system. however, humans are far from ideal beings. even if you find the ideal group that agrees on their flavour of socialism and manages to actually do it - there is no guarantee, that this will stay as it is. as you mentioned yourself: humans change - sadly not always for the better.

don’t take my word for it. watch a documentary about a bigger commune (small village, houses scattered through a forest and such), or even better: visit one. They all will tell you that heavy moderation is needed. not everyone is allowed to join, sometimes old members even have to go. if you try to scale up these systems to the size of even a small country, they will fail.

communism has not worked and won’t work at a great scale (not talking about small communes). as history has shown, it will fail at the human factor.

unchecked capitalism won’t work either, we would end up in [insert cyberpunk dystopia]. that is why we need the state to do a socialist job in a capitalist system (redistribution of wealth, healthcare, taking care of handicapped, …).

in my opinion, that is where the usa failed majorly. coincidentally, that is where i hear most communism support from. i have too little data points to make a conclusion. but it would be really interesting to see demographics of these statements made in the comic.

duckduckgo has an array of LLMs, which they take care of anonymity

do you need GPT4 specifically? If not, mistral has their large model for free available: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

You want an e2e encrypted public DNS? https://www.quad9.net/

You want to white- / blacklist IPs and domains? Configure your DNS

don’t try to misunderstand ppl on purpose

nothing to hide nothing to fear, huh?

And i thought at least after Snowden we learnt this is bs…

To me the problem is that you wouldn’t be able to buy a car anonymously anymore, while it leaves the really rich pretty much untouched.

Art is a well known angle for money laundering or giving someone a huge sum of money pretty much without any regulation. Contracts for construction or even consulting are another way.

I don’t have access to this kind of playground - chances are, you neither. But the people supposedly targeted by this kind of law (corrupt politicians, organised crime, …), do have access to these things and are therefore not impacted.

I am pretty sure the lesser part of corruption is cash. Probably more stuff like exchanging a lucrative contract for political support.

They are not stupid. Afterall cash needs to be explained, a good contract gives you cash and the explanation.

It really seems like we are looking at two sides of the same coin.

The coin has already ben tossed. Let’s see on which side it will land - I certainly hope it is the one you described.

I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.

Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.

If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don’t need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.

I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev’s reinvented XMPP: Matrix

from https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html :

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.

Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.

while I like the idea of Fairphone, last time i checked their flagship did not include an 3.5mm jack. This is simply not acceptable as i need it for my work. It is hard to find phones with a 3.5mm - even harder if you want to be able to repair them.

works pretty well - except on longer travels ;)

Considering that i have a free account registered to a 10 min mail and paying customers don’t seem to have that problem… It might be some kind of protection against manipulating the charts aswell.

Agreed that Spotify kinda sucks. That is why i am using it the first time towards the end of a 3W trip :-D

With the modded apk and a 10min mail account it is worth the storage on my phone.

While i agree with most of what you said, i think you might be falling into the trap of assuming the curve continues as it had.

Like most technology, ANNs will follow a sigmoid curve. Turing was already working with the same theories. While I did my education in IT, we had really interesting ANNs working, but only nerds would be excited by them. Now ChatGPT surprised the rest of the world and I would assume we are in the steep part of the sigmoid function.

But the problem is, that we can only determine where we where, if we look back. There is no way to say whether NOW is just the start, middle or towards the end of the curve.

What I can say is that now, LLMs and other implementations of AI are able to replace a trainee in my line of work. They still need a lot of supervision and are a tool, which can speed up work. This may lead to other problems: If companies decided to not take on the expensive task of training people and replacing them with cheaper AI - at some point we will run out of well trained veterans.