SynAck

For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about "hacking" something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of "petrol heads" and "tech nerds" clicked with me.

But the first "cyberpunk" movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing "Hackers" for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what "cyberpunk" was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that's how I acted with my friends when I wasn't around them.

I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical "console cowboys" was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn't.

Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.

There's an instakill bug in Pyramid Song? I've played through it 3 times and have never experienced that bug. How does it manifest?

Enh, government and business are so deeply in bed together that they might as well be one and the same in this case. Seems like a fit to me.

One of the dangers I can see is that their instances become supernodes that carry a lot more sway over the underlying AP protocol. They could use Microsoft's old "embrace and extend" philosophy and start making special extensions that only their nodes have. Then their critical mass either forces changes to the underlying protocol or bifurcates the fediverse into "Meta-based" and "not Meta-based".

Another issue will be what data they can mine from their users as well as other instances, and what tools they will build to circumvent any protections to mine all the fedi data.

And let's not even talk about the moderation issues (or sure lack thereof) that will make the fediverse much less safe for everyone. We've already seen time and time again that Zuck & co. don't care about moderation and user safety, and actually would rather manipulate data to their own nefarious ends.

There are so many more reasons why this is a bad thing.

This is the angry, raw, user side of what @[email protected] refers to as "enshittification". This is the user experience that I have had over and over again. This absolutely deserves a read, and will hopefully inspire lots of us to fight like hell to keep corpo interests out of our free exchange of ideas and fediverse.

I am not a product. I am not a program. I am a user.

A lot of my foundational impressions were based on movie soundtracks of the likes of “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Strange Days”, “The Matrix”, and “The Crow”. In my college days, I was really into the industrial genre and the likes of NiN (the Broken/Fixed era), Front 242, Sister Machine Gun, God Lives Underwater, and Machines of Loving Grace. Then I got into EDM for a while, as a lot of the software devs I lived and worked with were into that genre.

These days, I’ve been getting into darkwave and synthwave. I’m a big fan of our very own @[email protected], Dance With The Dead, Extra Terra, Neon Nox, Lazerpunk, and DreamReaper to name a few.

Yeah, and R.U. Sirius has an account on hackers.town on Mastodon. He occasionally posts some tidbits from these mags and some of his musical endeavors.

Glad you mentioned the hardening aspect, because that’s definitely something I would have to consider. My adoption of cyberware is based on the assumption that the systems have been hardened against run-of-the-mill hacking (although probably not immune to Netrunners), and they would have to be something that doesn’t require a warranty or ongoing “rental” fee. There would always be updates and new versions of course, but the original systems should work at the installed level until they are damaged or their owner dies. A “Repo Men” timeline (where organs are repossessed if you can’t pay for them) would make me very reticent to do cyberware.

I think I'd start with augmentations that allowed my body to realize it's full potential as designed - first, start with efficiency and longevity gains of major organs and then maybe dig deeper to gain control over my internal operating system to unlock enhancements such as pain center management, improved hearing and vision, faster reflexes, and maybe memory management augmentations. I'd also invest in organ replacements that solve some of my current medical problems. I'd probably start here, actually.

Once the full potential of my augmented standard human frame has been reached, then I'd explore more full limb or systemic replacements to become more than human (cyber legs, internal weapons/tools), and possibly explore any bodily self-expression modifications.

I think the speed of my adoption would depend on whether this tech were available as implants or nanotech, and what the potential for cyberpsychosis impact would be.

This is glorious. DO WANT!!!

I generally think that not having a karma count is overall beneficial. Based on all the negative outcomes of the variations we've seen in other services (Facebook's like, Twitter's follower count and blue check, Reddit's karma), I feel like overall it degenerates into negative pressure that causes people to choose clout and popularity over genuine, meaningful engagement.

That being said, I am not a member of a marginalized community and have not experienced the positive effects it can have, so I have no expertise in this area. Take my words above with that in mind. Using something like karma to keep out trolls and protect community members is a very valid positive use case. Using it not as an indicator of clout but rather an indication of safety or empathy (general "niceness") is, I think, a beneficial use of a karma-like tracker. There are good reasons to have a karma count.

Perhaps a better implementation of "karma" might be a metric not based solely on likes or upvotes, but rather something that is conferred by each individual community, and shared by like-minded communities. That way, the karma would be qualified in various spheres of communities as opposed to a site-wide popularity contest. That would make it difficult for people in a troll forum, who get lots of karma from like-minded trolls, to use that karma to get into other communities where their karma would be considered "bad karma". If I, as a mod, looked at a prospective user and saw that all their karma came from communities that are antithetical to mine, I could assume they'd probably not be a good fit for my sub.

If there is to be the idea of karma here, I hope that it would be more nuanced than just "this person knows how to get people to engage with them". I personally am not wanting karma to become a thing here, at least the way it was implemented on Reddit. I don't believe that the majority of people are capable of using it primarily for beneficial reasons as it currently works.

Welcome to the old man club! Come on in, the water's fine (as long as those damn kids stay off my lawn).