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Stallman is the Socrates of our times who will be appreciated only centuries later perhaps by a distant generation. So far, everything he has said and written

by pyeri 2y ago

Stallman is the Socrates of our times who will be appreciated only centuries later perhaps by a distant generation. So far, everything he has said and written about surveillance capitalism and Big Tech's monopoly has turned out to be true. The subreddit /r/StallmanWasRight has aged phenomenally and also turned out to be true and prophetic.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Stallman is the Socrates of our times who will be appreciated only centuries later perhaps by a distant generation. Speculation: I believe that there were many in the league of Socrates who were never known.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  > I believe that there were many in the league of Socrates who were never known. Yes. History is choosing random names for preservation. If every century had just one worthy name or event, in 1 million years there will be 10000 of them, way too many to remember. Eventually the humankind will forget almost everything that we think is important about our culture. The information may not be lost, but it will be buried in some scientific databases. I bet that Stallman won’t last even a century. He is a pioneer, naive and controversial, but the main works on ethics of software, copyright etc are yet to be written, and the names of those authors will shine brighter.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    Extrapolating tangentially along lines of what you just, overall people _think_ that there is an upward trajectory of overall wisdom because of events in the past. My observation is that it is not. Th average human memory is very, very short.
EGreg 2y ago
This is my cause celebre: http://laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ http://laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ I have also been right about a lot of things :-P from a left-libertarian perspective: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 and also lack the capital and clout to make a bigger impact and prevent huge mistakes: 2023: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=174 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=174 unfortunately, politicians and crowds don’t always listen to sensible rational arguments, including all their own top diplomats and cooler heads warning them for decades: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397 I have been warning about swarms of autonomous AI bots since 2015 for example. And saying that IPOs are toxic and should be replaced by regulated ICOs (of utility tokens). Both are hugely unpopular on HN. Some people may have knee-jerk reactions until they actually read the substance. But my other viewpoints might be a bit more palatable.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  >I have been warning about swarms of autonomous AI bots since 2015 for example. Veterans of the MIT-AI Lab, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L. Klotz, beat you to that by 33 years, in this article they published on October 1, 1982 in ACM SIGART Bulletin Issue 82, pp 23–25: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608 https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf >TURTLES AND DEFENSE >Introduction >At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...] >Guidance >The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability. >Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...] >Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...] >Munitions >The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death. >Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]

by pyeri 2y ago

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>Stallman is the Socrates of our times who will be appreciated only centuries later perhaps by a distant generation. Speculation: I believe that there were many in the league of Socrates who were never known.

ivan_gammel 2y ago
> I believe that there were many in the league of Socrates who were never known. Yes. History is choosing random names for preservation. If every century had just one worthy name or event, in 1 million years there will be 10000 of them, way too many to remember. Eventually the humankind will forget almost everything that we think is important about our culture. The information may not be lost, but it will be buried in some scientific databases. I bet that Stallman won’t last even a century. He is a pioneer, naive and controversial, but the main works on ethics of software, copyright etc are yet to be written, and the names of those authors will shine brighter.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  Extrapolating tangentially along lines of what you just, overall people _think_ that there is an upward trajectory of overall wisdom because of events in the past. My observation is that it is not. Th average human memory is very, very short.

EGreg 2y ago

This is my cause celebre: http://laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ http://laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ I have also been right about a lot of things :-P from a left-libertarian perspective: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 and also lack the capital and clout to make a bigger impact and prevent huge mistakes: 2023: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=174 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=174 unfortunately, politicians and crowds don’t always listen to sensible rational arguments, including all their own top diplomats and cooler heads warning them for decades: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397 I have been warning about swarms of autonomous AI bots since 2015 for example. And saying that IPOs are toxic and should be replaced by regulated ICOs (of utility tokens). Both are hugely unpopular on HN. Some people may have knee-jerk reactions until they actually read the substance. But my other viewpoints might be a bit more palatable.

DonHopkins 2y ago
>I have been warning about swarms of autonomous AI bots since 2015 for example. Veterans of the MIT-AI Lab, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L. Klotz, beat you to that by 33 years, in this article they published on October 1, 1982 in ACM SIGART Bulletin Issue 82, pp 23–25: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608 https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf >TURTLES AND DEFENSE >Introduction >At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...] >Guidance >The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability. >Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...] >Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...] >Munitions >The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death. >Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]