I don’t trust either, they’re in cahoots

I agree that our current priority should certainly be to implement a government that can be trusted to regulate things effectively

I don’t, limiting the danger it poses to us and guaranteeing civil liberties should be a higher priority.

Still, the ultimate goal should be government action on this topic because we cannot solve the problem at an individual level. Some people can have better outcomes than others but there’s no level playing field without government intervention.

To me what a level playing field would look like for social media would be mostly about the government no longer doing harmful things that prevent such equal chances, enforcement of the DMCA in particular comes to mind. Exercising more control over who can use which parts of the internet and how, is obviously incredibly dangerous especially given that we know it is possible for a government like the current one to come to power.

I accept that providing social commons which are largely independent from culture and belief is the legitimate purview of the government, but there should be a line right there because when governments manipulate their populations to think or behave a certain way it usually isn’t towards the best interests of the people.

Which isn’t to say that nothing should be done to prevent mega corporations manipulating people, I just don’t think that should come in the form of things like, for instance, what they’ve actually done with TikTok since this article was written, which is mandate the creation of a US specific version that is obligated to be increasingly friendly to the propaganda interests of the current regime. I think that any solution in the form of a formal government regulation will be subject to that kind of corruption, and real solutions need to be found elsewhere.

“Why the education system is horrible and needs to be dismantled and entirely reconsidered” is slightly off topic, but yeah you got me I do not think the argument is all that different wrt education. It is very different from those other things though.

Providing healthcare and social services is not inherently about controlling how people think and what information they have access to.

There’s no way ChatGPT would be creative enough to put a number on its side

That’s fair. I think if I wanted a larger screen I’d look into big monitors and some kind of expansion of my homelab setup to display things to it, but I can see why people might want a dedicated device with less setup required, even one where the setup is still pretty confusing.

I looked up some statistics and it seems, depressingly, that consumers are in fact buying more televisions and it’s projected to increase, so I guess I have to concede the point that what they are doing is successful despite all reason.

You can choose not to have a TV. I only know about the current state of smart TVs because of sometimes being around the ones other people have, I would never buy one myself, there’s no need. Any media you want to see can be viewed in other ways.

I don’t buy it, they would be better at whatever nefarious crap if they didn’t take a full second to navigate between menu options, or had a UI designed by someone competent. Even people who have subscriptions to the services the TV is a gateway to have a hard time figuring out how to use them. These things aren’t even good at exploitation, they are decaying technology.

“Smart” TVs. Somehow they have replaced normal televisions despite being barely usable, laggy, DRM infested garbage.

Beat Saber and VRChat are genuinely cool at least. I think what it comes down to is that the illusion of physically being somewhere is cool and can be useful for some stuff but not as cool as everyone used to assume. More abstract entertainment and art works basically just as good or better most of the time because it doesn’t require specialized hardware, acclimating to nausea, and learning novel control schemes.

Really hate this, the article focused on other platforms but I want to call out the stuff Reddit and many of its moderators did to actively prevent debate from happening, like generally regarding disagreement as something to be moderated away, the way the updated block feature works, and locking any thread with a contentious topic that people wanted to argue about.

IMO verbal debate is a poor substitute for writing, where you can take more time to consider what is being said and look up or cite information. Anonymity also helps a lot in various ways, when in person social considerations normally trump the interest of crafting good argument. Also personally something about speaking and interpreting speech makes it harder to think.

Is MeshCore a separate network?

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS

“Monetize direct user engagement”, does that mean their argument is that AI makes it so people don’t need to pay devs to handhold them through using very user unfriendly software?

Fuck Bill Clinton for passing the DMCA

Is this why the Spotify section on their torrent page says “Unavailable until further notice.”?

To me it entirely hinges on what kind of features. The Firefox local website translation feature is cool and useful. A chatbot reading my emails and giving me dialogue options, a program harvesting data on everything I do on my computer and sending it to a server, those kinds of things I do not want and will go out of my way to avoid. Normal rules of what makes software good or bad still apply.

The scariest aspects of SOMA apply to everyone regardless of scifi brain transfer/copy technology if you think about it. In the years immediately following the release of the game I followed discussions about it which largely converged on the comforting explanation that the idea of a transfer is a delusion, and continuity of consciousness must be always tied to the original body. But unless you somehow rule out the idea that it is an emergent property of the information being processed in our heads, there isn’t a lot of reason to think that would be the case. A copy of you with all your memories and brain patterns has equal claim as an original. But we don’t even have quite the same pattern as a moment ago, so maybe our own claims to continuity or self aren’t as strong as we rely on them being.

It calls into question basic intuitions about the nature of our existence that people have a very difficult time bringing themselves to question, something the game pretty brilliantly depicts with its robots that are deeply offended, hostile and defensive about the suggestion that they are robots.

Yes, I once lived in an apartment where the dryer would sometimes snag my clothes on the edge of the spinning part and they would get these spots at the point where they got caught that were stained black and stretched out or ripped.