Well, I wasn’t going to see it, but now I guess I have to. :P

So the meek are dependent upon the benevolence and excess production of the strong.

Yes, society only has excess production to spend. This is true in any system.

That’s also my number. Anything over 1M$ should go out to supporting independent creators, mutual aid, or community-focused non-for-profit donations. Wish I had a job and was still making progress toward that number. :(

Yep, if I was given a billion dollars, I’d immediately start my work on making 990+ millionaires (or 1M$ donations to community service/support organizations).

Are we expecting everyone who feels that their rights have been violated to be responsible for their own justice?

No, you are called to defend not only yourself, but others as well. Everyone is responsible both for their own and everyone else’s justice. If you are more capable and willing to produce justice, you may produce more than you need. In many ways it is like all the other requirements of a good life: excess freely given, unmet need freely taken.

If someone wants to fit into some “heroic police officer” or even “hero vigilante” role, they will likely be celebrated and supported as long as their actions are heroic, but if they take any bad actions they will be reprimanded and resisted; they chosen role will not be a justification or mitigation.

How do you does anyone actually stop them?

Threats of violence are allowed to be neutralized by whatever means, including preemptive, defensive violence. All actions should be for the collective good, even as they are done by individuals. Collaboration, communication, and coordination are encouraged in whatever form the individuals find is best.

I think a lot of what is done depends too much on specifics to make general statements. But, anything from a strong talking to next time the offender interacts with the community to assassination to revolution-scale secretive, cellular, violent action might be justified.

Who judges this in an anarchist society?

Each person is their own conscience. Anyone may arbitrate, and others might comply or ignore it as their conscience dictates. Arbitration might call for violence, and if executed, that violence will surely be judged in turn.

But what about the more abstract violence? In modern times, who do we stop people from mining and burning fossil fuels?

Despoiling the commons is considered anti-social behavior and is subject to resistance. Generally this will start with a discussion, but if consensus can’t be reached, property damage (e.g. destroying tools and/or machinery) will stop the worst effects with no “crimes against persons”. But, persons or organizations that purposely and repeatedly engage in anti-social behavior will be treated as if they were the government and resisted potentially violently.

High marginal tax rates funding social programs has, historically, worked. Part of what is necessary for it to work though is the collective and organized threat of violence

I don’t disagree. I’m all for bringing back to 92% marginal tax bracket, getting rid of corporate welfare (particularly for petrochemical companies), and really building a safety net that ensures no one has to go without food, water, clothing, and shelter, whether they can work or not. I can defend anarchy while still working within the existing systems. Sometimes the best way to the goal actually is building up something you later will choose to tear down.

I’m not even a committed anarchist, but I know that all of your questions, and every “gotcha” question for anarchists I’ve ever seen, has already been considered and answered in anarchist theory, sometime many, many times – often even refined through the practice of anarchist societies.

If there’s no choice in this, it is bad. If “servers” are allowed to opt-in, and users are interrupted with a warning before posting on a “server” that has changed the setting, it’s possibly good.

I know Discord messages have never been secure, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a place people treated as private. Suddenly making messages accessible is like replacing all the bathroom stall dividers with transparent partitions: never was secure from a real threat, but there was a heightened expectation of privacy.

There are a lot of fandoms and communities and support groups with the intent to be public and having those indexed by your favorite search index will bring value, just like public web fora of the past and reddit (even ex-Twitter) before extreme monetization and slopification. But, changing any shared information or thoughts from inaccessible to accessible is virtually guaranteed to cause harm via unwanted disclosure and those harm could be irreparable and impossible to balance with the benefits of accessibility.

This news is mixed, with a side of anxiety. I’m not really sure what’s going to show up in my Discord history.

It’s simple to combine them then. First we institute people-rule, then we eliminate all the people, and it becomes no-people-rule, “andemocracy”. I am a human and not an LLM.

/s

I know I would hoard less if I trusted the system for my basic needs. And, if I just get a few more years of good job, I might be ready to stop hoarding (and continue working, just with a lot more mutual aid and independent creator support going out).

But, I just don’t think that’s true of my father (RIP), or some of the people I met during my time in Northwest Arkansas; none of them even “millionaires” but all having a real drive to squeeze another penny out of every nickel. And, as you say, we have billionaires: any of them that aren’t just handing out money every waking hour are not behaving ethically.

I just don’t know that one the scale of 8b people, or even 300m people, that there aren’t enough natural “hoarders” to ruin everything. But, I’m also sampling from as experience where everyone I meet is steeped in the “water” of Capitalism from the cradle, so maybe there’d be fewer natural “hoarders” in if Captialism hadn’t soaked into us before puberty.

“In the terms of public utilities, such as water and power suppliers, they could be self-managed by their workers in association with municipal co-operatives — based on one member, one vote — which would be a much better alternative than privatising what is obviously a natural monopoly” – https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full

I know I can’t speak for every professional, but a lot of them are more than willing to mentor the next generation of infrastructure maintainers, and many of them got involved in their profession because they enjoy the work, and would do it for the good of the community without pay, if only themselves and their family could live comfortably.

People that are currently doing what they are doing to maximize their income will likely not find a position like that in any anarchist society, but they also might find freed from the positional goods of Capitalism they might enjoy doing other productive things at least some of the time.

Syndicates would replace standardization organizations like IEEE and NIST and infrastructure that would benefit from intra-community compatibility will naturally benefit by alignment with those standards.

I prefer Kaizen (continuous improvement) but I’m also in a pretty damn comfortable position in the existing system. I can fully understand the desire for Kaikaku (radical change) and will mostly excuse (if empaneled to a jury, refuse to punish) behavior that rejects the status quo in favor of something better as long as “crimes against persons” are defensive and reasonably restrained.

I wouldn’t consider anarchy a “society which allows violence as a means to resolve disputes”. But, I can see how you might make that assumption.

I agree that the “most natural” form of governance is actually warlord-ism, the best people at violence raid from the worst people at violence, and often amass some level of power just a little beyond what a isolated community can wield. At least recent history seems to have this happen a lot when existing governments fall.

The the descriptions of anarchy I have seen, violence is only permissive in defense of the rights of self or others, in particular but not limited to bodily autonomy and is not used to resolve disputes.

Still, I’m uneasy about the leveling mechanisms I’ve seen proposed to counter the hoarding behaviors that seems to be not uncommon among humans, particularly those steeped in Capitalism like myself. I also probably have trust issues.

Anarachy is democracy without coercion. Specifically you should never be subject to violence for exercising your rights in contradiction to a plurality (or even majority) vote.

Or, it can be. There’s really no restrictions on how a group of anarchists reach (or fail to reach) a consensus.

(I am NOT an expert in anarchy, but this is my impression from my sometimes visits to the Anarchist FAQ.)

Yeah, I used to get nuts, but I go through them quickly, easily eating more calories at a faster rate than if I get grabbed some Cheetos^™.

Now, I air-pop my own popcorn. The additional effort is a helpful chance to ask myself if I really want to snack, and a full half cap of kernels (which is a lot of popped corn) and as much EVOO as I care to dose it with is still a lot fewer calories than I would get from nuts, and it takes longer to eat.

Disagree that it is totally orthogonal. What and when can and should be done is dependent on the presence of consciousness / sentience.

because she didn’t know any

That’s not what happened. She could think of many things but was having trouble with the vastness and complexity because the assignment was “(only) 3 bullet points”.

It’s still a lame reason to use the resource-hungry plagiarism machines.

consciousness / sentience are kind of side notes

I don’t agree. Without consciousness / sentience, we don’t have any moral limits on what acts we can take to eliminate any threat. With consciousness / sentience, any suffering is a moral issue.

Agreed. It’s a bit of both. There’s been people talking about the “alignment problem” in the right fora for like 20 years. And, if we ever have consciousness / sentience that is created by us, it will be something that it would be nice to have an answer to.

But, the most relevant AI issues today are not that. It’s about liability-shifting and other externalization by the powerful, misunderstanding and misuse by the well-meaning, and various cognitive hazards. These are not marketing, these are what the companies don’t want you to think about. There also lock-in and labor issues that the model providers don’t want to talk about, though these do have somewhat-known mitigations. You get plenty of people that are primarily concerned with these issues being dismissed a “AI doomers” which in, I think, wrong.

Yeah we used hs-opentelemetry at my last paid position. The company was an MS shop, tho so we were using ODBC to connect to MS SQL Server which doesn’t have great in-process profiling. But, at least we could figure out what quer(y/ies) were running long and then we could use the MS tools to look at the plan and fiddle with that. It was also a small org, so it’s not like there was a lot of internal services in one flow – basically everything either stayed in the Web Yesod app or in the IVR app. All our profiling could have been instrumented process profiling instead of having to use otel at all.

So, I haven’t seen how easy/difficult it is to actually use otel across multiple internal service calls to satisfy one external request.

There are no bad languages

Malbolge. ;)

Yeah, I long ago switched to ddg and I also turn off the ddg ai stuff. I hear the paid search is also out-performing Google for people that care their search results are accurate.