funny to think that there was a blip of people downloading software over the radio in the 80s, then the internet happened and it was all over hardwire, and now virtually all software is downloaded over the radio again
Even if most devices receive data wirelessly these days, the transfer to its last wireless transmitter will be almost entirely wired. Mobile masts are wired, wireless routers are wired, and so on. That being said, consumer devices are but a part of the much larger group of digital devices connected to the internet in some fashion, and a lot of them remains wired to the internet. "Virtually all software" being downloaded wirelessly feels like a big claim.
And this is not entirely an exercise in pedantry and semantics, since traditional radios were not wired, they weren't the "last transmitter" in a long chain, but were rather often _the_ transmitter. The data for download had to be physically moved _to_ the radio station. (I believe wireless extenders for radio exists, and maybe even some wired for larger coverage, but my understanding is radio still remains exceedingly local, and national stations are largely transmitted via the internet first.)
Though a quick aside; it's funny that you refer to wireless as radio, when in radio's infancy, it was most commonly referred to as "wireless" (e.g. "on the wireless").
In the UK transfer to the last wireless transmitter in radio are almost always wired (ISDN or similar back in the 80s). Wireless repeaters were used in the early days of TV, but rare for radio
Microwave links used to be used to transmit TV, calls and data before fibre became commonplace. Presumably also radio for nationwide stations at least.
my friend pointed out that Q5_K_M quantization used for the open source models probably substantially reduces the quality of play. o1 mini's poor performance is puzzling, though.
And the US price is also only $100 more than the nominal price of the base model of the original MacBook in early 2008, and $300 less adjusted for inflation.
I get that, and yet the root of my observation is simply that there are are already existing valid political boundaries. The core problem with legislative and congressional districts is that they are utterly arbitrary and subject to change based on political whims (yes I understand there is also a nominal census reasoning as well). My point then is simply: could there be permanent, non-arbitrary boundaries that would no longer be subject to political manipulation?
I don’t think so! Even permanent and supposedly non-arbitrary boundaries are subject to intense political contestation. Observe how in the first decades of this country’s history states were often admitted in pairs, one slave and one free (for instance Missouri and Maine), in order to maintain the balance of power.
I continue to think that /the/ critical problem with web3 as pitched is that users cannot be trusted to maintain private keys in the long run. Either the keys need to be in HSMs and easy to rotate (à la Urbit's identity-as-NFT scheme) or you need a social/institutional escape hatch when the cold logic of cryptography fails you so you're not completely hosed. Maybe you need both.
Definitely users cannot be trusted with private keys. Why? Because when I worked at Google on the Play Store I learned that even sophisticated developers cannot be trusted with their app’s publishing key. How could the end user ever be trusted with something similar?
This is a solved problem, but nobody realizes it yet.
We already have a decentralized system of unique identities, and we have since the '80s. It's called the domain name system. They're human-readable, they have strong guarantees about being able to own and control them (so long as you pay a nominal fee), and they have a rock-solid infrastructure behind them that backs everything from Google to the US government to your friend's blog. We even have a (somewhat less convincing) way of verifying that the server you're talking to really is the one that your DNS record points to.
What still needs work is getting from an identity system, which tells you which server to look at for a given name, to a system of authentication for specific tasks. Given that someone controls a given domain name, how can they use that to log in to a service or post messages that are verifiably theirs?
If you're willing to run a server for it, OpenID works. If you only want to send email, DKIM has you covered. The w3c's decentralized identity specs are really cool, and I think did:web [1] has the potential to bring us to a world where you can buy a domain, cname it to some host, and upload your public keys there so that you can sign anything and login anywhere. Making this easy for non-technical users will be important, but I think it can be done. The fact that ICANN policy requires companies to allow you to migrate your domain guarantees that you can sign up with some fancy startup that will manage everything for you and keep your identity if you want to move somewhere else.
There are many other related topics on indieweb.org and other related websites. What we need more of includes systems that make implementing such methods and protocols super easy.
This solves part of the problem, but not the whole problem. An important aspect of any general identity system is the ability to associate an ID with a specific human for cases where you need to hold the human accountable. DNS relies on banks and governments for this feature.
It's a mixed picture, but to me the fact that irangov.ir still resolves in spite of an all-out siege by OFAC tells me that it's decentralized enough for almost anyone.
