You are saying this as if you were flexing your old age to me, while so am I.

No. You can’t see their face.

Chat rooms and web forums were in some sense safe spaces. There would be intrigue, but somewhat limited by what concerns a specific forum, or even a specific part of it, or a specific chat. Even conflicts in one place between two people would often not extend to some other place.

And also, believe it or not, people frequenting same spaces would sometimes have offline meetings and know each other personally. Especially moderators and such.

But I agree that what you mentioned was like halfway there from today’s online communication which sometimes seems just useless.

I suppose. NOSTR-based Marmot is being developed now, it seems more interesting for me than XMPP or Matrix, but it’s still a new thing.

I get depressed after long periods of remote work, go to office, then remember why I didn’t particularly value the experience, get back to remote.

So here in Russia there’s such a thing as dachas, it’s small plots of land with non-winterproof (sometimes not) small houses (sometimes more like a chickhouse for a human) on them, people go there at summer to have barbecues, grow stuff, have fun.

We have that, it’s on a place with a lot of clay (good for growing apple trees, too) and I have always felt weird from eating and drinking anything with local water (from the well, boiled).

That is, I have ASD and BAD, and my mental condition is always different when being there a lot with that water, it’s both more intense emotions, but also less like BAD symptoms. Also that somehow makes me feel full faster. And stronger.

Honestly it’s as if in the city I had BAD, but there I had BPD. I become more touchy-feely there. Still it feels good and human, just not very safe.

But I’ve also read that water with such contents is not too good for one’s kidneys, shouldn’t overdo it. Better use filters.

The point is, I do feel as if my nutrition were better when using that water. Even a few portions of rice a day with lots of tea feel quite different there. But might also be the cleaner air, it’s a relatively low place, though not a swamp, and a very pretty one.

Because those who see each other’s faces coordinate closer socially and might eat you. We live in a society, not a friendly place sometimes.

Any ideas why it’s always Matrix? Not even XMPP.

With not very performant servers and not very rich choice of clients, and still work in progress. And notably more fit for group chats rather than anything private and secure.

It’s just Matrix being popular?

If you’ve read Lem’s Fiasco, then that’s the alternative scenario where “they” are the society lower technologically. It’s very well written and tragic.

Yes, convenience is often ruining discipline, not for me (ASD) and perhaps not for you, but social ties form between coworkers. That part about behind closed doors - see, they always will.

I mean, we live in a society. Not seeing the faces of the others is a weakness. It’s not all about work.

I’ve described a situation - where you’d want to talk something over a cigarette or a cup of tea with your coworker, for example. Or participate in sporadic conversations while walking around the office, help some colleague, get help from some other colleague.

It’s not that simple, there’s also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.

Yes, for work productivity right now right here it makes sense that working remotely is good.

That has always been known and normal for people who can work remotely. Writers, or anyone who can synchronize their work through runners with envelopes or, later, fax and telephone.

But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they’d prefer not to.

My sympathies with remote work are because I’m spoiled and because of retrofuturistic promises of (almost) everyone working like that, my concerns are because you’d want sometimes to see people you’re working with, and if many people work in one place and some work remotely, then even if the latter work well, they are ruining discipline.

And that’s one example of how one progressive goal (of reducing emissions, ecology, regulating industry etc) and another (of right to repair and tinker) can require a compromise.

OK, from where I am your problems in US are cool to read about, here that kind of customization is in the “fuck around and find out” territory with huge fines, but I see no concern about ecology either.

Except not, as the same movie shows, some of them will be crushed and not lost.

That was how USA used China against the socialist bloc after all. Of course they did.

If I were justifying my account name, I’d suppose, for the purpose of future appearing interesting, this might be a coverup.

Such a structure is useful for many things, and while a DC doesn’t have to be that big, a factory producing real things on scale or mass housing or a prepared company town all benefit from being in one place.

So perhaps it’s being built as a DC, but in fact is going to be like a drone factory, or something equally dystopian-futuristic.

Or a humongous supercomputer, whatever.

I’m starting to think along plot lines of science fiction and space operas I’ve seen and read before, they were saying it’s harmful for my development, I didn’t believe them.

Another option - it’s, yes, a scheme and it won’t get built. Just pump and dump.

If that’s going to be one humongous superstructure, zoned inside, then if this fails, they might get a new city. Superstructures like this are nice, just nobody usually builds them (after 50s and 60s, I suppose) for residential areas.

One can repurpose the space for multi-story apartments (I suppose ceilings will be much higher than needed), or malls, or literally everything.

Or factories, if there are problems with exporting orders to southeast Asia.

If this even gets built.

Or if it doesn’t fail, then heat and noise pollution, I suppose. And grid load. Not nice.

Yes, that’s what they are officially talking about, to reduce the amount of foreign traffic so to reduce the load on TSPU (which is the Russian alternative to China’s GFW). Pretty open about it.

If you’d seen the original statement in Russian, you’d realize this person has no idea what they are talking about at all, and with their job title, the purpose of it is just to present some kinda more liberal viewpoint for appearance.

And yes, it’s possible, Iran and North Korea are doing it, and there are plenty of countries with heavy censorship and regulation, and there’s a piece of good engineering advice I once got - “you get to your goal faster if you don’t pick up boss fights”, meaning that while it’s cool for a commenter on the Web to imagine them taking the hardest and most expensive path to solving the problem of censorship and control, they have different choices.

Less demand for actual children - lower prices for trafficking, which improves every pedo’s level of life, think of the pedos

Since it’s known how much water they’ve used, the problem is possible to rectify.

At the same time the accident’s father in local government should be in a place where you carry your soup very carefully.

a couple of the best keyboards

I like the blueprint font being used for engraving on that photo. Those fonts were standardized for a reason. Still love seeing things with those standard fonts used for engravings on physical items, like my Russian SNILS card (it’s about employment and pensions), but most things are unfortunately something ugly.