Totally agree. Microsoft has invested way too much in openAI to have a repeat of the Sam Altman debacle. They will formalize their control of te company. And Altman has already shown that in conflict between the board and MS, he’s on Microsoft’s side.

Also, any openAI developer who thinks that openAI currently is an independent company is kidding themselves. Microsoft is effectively already calling the shots, al be it in a roundabout way.

As long as Mozilla remains committed to a free and open internet, I will remain a faithful firefox user.

Even if every update after this one is a useless UI change. :p

Go for walks in the middle of the night. Like in a residential neighborhood, or an industrial district. It’s just so peaceful.

I really hope so too. I’m tired of Musk.

Out of my league means that there’s a high chance I’m going to get rejected. How do I know? It happened to me. It happened to my friends.

Does this guarantee that I will be rejected? No. Does mean that I’m putting the person on a pedestal? No.

It merely means that being rejected sucks. It’s not fun. And to avoid that sucky feeling I’ve chosen to avoid pursuing people with a high chance of rejection.

This behavior is not putting people on a pedestal. After all, if people of my league were truly that amazing, it would be worth it to pursue them. Kind of a high risk, high reward approach. Instead, it’s generally true that a relationship with of an out of my league person is just as fulfilling as someone in my league.

Tldr: out of my league means high risk, low reward

Excellent. Now, make a similar statement about corporate spyware.

Okay. That tracks. I remember him mumbling into the presidency and then just taking over.

So, my logic of proxies being a bad idea, because the proxy will double cross you, still holds. However, despite that, people are still dumb enough to push a proxy forward. And that proxy can turn out to be demagogue as well.

Fair critique.

I’m genuinely interested how Napoleon 3 used proxies.

My thinking is something the lines of:

In democracies, demagogues don’t get truly dangerous until they gain some form of state power. They used that little bit of state power to both fund their allies (state capture for capitalists, government hand outs for the people) and undermine their enemies (breaking down/stymieing democratic institutions)

Eventually, they accrue enough state power to take over the state, either internally (think putin, erdogan) or via an old fashion coup / fake crisis (hitler and erdogan again)

In my mind that real power is necessary to overthrow democracies. I have trouble finding good instances of demagogues putting themselves in a situation where their proxy has more real power than them.

I’d appreciate some examples that undermine that logic.

Note: I’m excluding cases of real popular revolt. I.e. you have more than 50% of population’s support.

I don’t know how old you are, nor should I, so I can’t do anything to stop you.

Representative parliamentary. If it’s a large country (both population and area) or geographically diverse country (eg an archipelago) it should be federal, if not unitary.

Proportional representation based on party lists. Getting on the ballot requires evidence of grassroots support. Silly example: you must have video evidence of you engaging with 5000 unique constituents in a 5 minute one-on-one conversation on the issues in the last year at their residence. The video must end with the constituent explicitly endorsing you. That means at least 5000 5 minute videos with 5000 unrelated people. That’s a lot of physical legwork were you must meet the people. There are better ways, this is just a simple example.

Choose a voting system that favours coalition building.

Elections should be publicly funded. Don’t ban political parties, do ban explicitly anti-democratic people. Antidemocratic ppl can’t work via proxies. They’re, justifiably, afraid that their proxy will steal the power for themselves.

Completely separate head of state (who should be powerless) and head of government. Lots of pomp, ceremonies, frequent press coverage of the powerless head of state. Let the portion of politics that is effectively a dog and pony show focus on him. Let people get emotionally swept up about him wearing a tan suit or sleeping with his secretary or get super proud about how totally not old he is. The head of state can be a show. The head of government should be a boring bureaucrat.

There’s more, but this seems a decent start.

Hey! My blob is quite morphous; thank you very much.