I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
eh to a degree. It leveled off at about 50% in 2018-2020 or so. And it’s not reasonable to assume that every person doing mobile gaming would have otherwise gamed on consoles/PCs, so how much of that is growth in “the gamer” population matters a lot. Part of the draw mobile gaming is it’s very accessible. Usually simple controls and everyone already has the hardware in their pocket. So the total population went up, of which a lot was claimed by Mobile.
Now I’m very curious to look into this more in depth as I’m doing a fair bit of speculating. If I find any good info I’ll update this
A small pointer, it's hard to do interpret statistics because most people play on multiple platforms. Roughly 75% of gamers play on mobile, 45% on PC and 40% on console.
I'm not 100% sure about the numbers, just off the top of my head about looking at market research, updated numbers welcome
It’s not “endless complaining” when the bot is functionally cheating. Yes if you let a computer use special mechanisms it will operate faster than a person who is using a mouse and a keyboard. A computer computers better than a person, what a revelation.
I don’t applaud people using aim assist in CS for the same reason. We literally don’t have access to the same tools. That’s why chess has been such a great target for years. One’s ability to manipulate the pieces has no bearing.
It’s possible yet many simply don’t do it. How many rounds of mass, unnecessary tech layoffs do we need to see? We literally just went through a phase of companies scrambling to bring people back because they were too eager to lay them off for AI promises.
Silicon Valley excels at two things: building moats and firing people.
“Before LLM’s there was_____” I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.
LLM’s are pouring massive amount of gasoline on existing issues and people just keep shrugging.
Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example from a few months back) at a scale previously unimaginable.
People could always die crossing a street. Still, cars changed the discussion about pedestrian safety pretty materially. People didn’t simply throw up their hands and go “people have always been able to die crossing the street.”
A guest on a podcast said, in response to open source and community websites being flooded with AI scrapers, "the internet has always had people scanning websites; get over it".
I still respect the podcast, but that was such a shitty take. The difference between before and now was that those websites started closing their doors instead of paying the increased hosting feeds.
I'll get over it when we stop giving people a pass for the damage they're doing just because they're a corporation.
I think we both know that it’s not just Uber who is violating social contracts. AI companies are routinely violating laws that would have the feds knocking at my door. Facebook? Airbnb? Uber? Every meal delivery service? The list goes on. They’re all like this.
It’s so amazing for the free software world yet every month I see another major community or project shutter out of sheer frustration because they cannot handle the number of people dumping their garbage “improvements” and ideas that their LLM spat out in 30min. It’s not right that so many maintainers are being chastised for not wanting to comb through everyone’s bloated, rickety code.
This extends beyond software. Nobody proofreads or otherwise edits what comes out. They dump it on the rest of us and demand that we thank them for their “effort.” It’s selfish behavior.
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