We’ll just wait to be picked up.

Or not.

We need to concern ourselves with what the corporations do.

Who gives a shit how they explain themselves?

Once the corps do something egregiously bad, we should not ask for an explanation. We should insist they change how they behave. Period.

Apple welding their phones to their own store, exclusively, is just like paying workers with scrip instead of dollars. This used to be a common practice for capitalists. The scrip is spendable only in the company store.

We have to stop all such anticompetitive practices.

Just a reminder, to stop the practice of getting paid in scrip the American workers had to take up arms and shoot some people. Look up Battle of Blair Mountain. It’s not like the capitalists stopped the practice just because it was unpopular, lol. Nor did the anticompetitive practice of paying wages in scrip stop because people called their senators and wrote angry letters.

Can’t the MIC just use any existing Linux distro?

I am trying to understand what the injury here is?

Is it mostly about reputational damage from association? Kinda like why are we eating the same food as MIC and at the same table? Is there an injury here beyond this that I am not seeing?

Couldn’t the MIC shut down every FOSS project by declaring they love them and use them? I hope no FOSS dev is so simpleminded as to knee jerk like that.

We have to accept living in a dirty world with dirty people, to some extent. People we don’t like will use our favorite projects sometimes. That’s par for the course.

Where I would draw the line is implemeting some change into the distro that is either only or primarily useful for nefarious purposes, and is largely useless to 99% of normal/ethical use cases. Now THAT would be a real problem, and a real red line, imo.

Bad corporate behaviour is a political problem.

Here we are talking about technological solutions for political problems. Why?

I mean quality, and giant, compendiums for their industries/themes.

If some store sends me their catalogue, they’re soliciting. That’s the practice I want to go away.

Instead, say I am in the market for suits, I pick up a giant men’s apparel catalogue which has ads from every source imaginable. This can be a website too, paper is optional. I come to them when I need something. Every apparel store, vendor, and dealer is in there. It is competitive and neutral. The owner of the catalogue may not sell their own things in the same catalogue (amazon breaks this important rule). The owner of the catalogue is regulated and may not reject ads for any reason in order to avoid bribes from the vendors to silence their competitors. The ads themselves are regulated and must be truthful and informative, without the psychological manipulations. Talk about the product and do not talk about how I will feel after the purchase.

That’s the vision I have. Computer Shopper was pretty close to this.

Bring back catalogs.

Who here remembers Computer Shopper?

When I want something, I’ll come to you. Don’t come to me.

I think extremely large wealth accumulations must be banned altogether. There must be a ceilling on personal wealth.

That’s not necessarily an issue. The mob is often right.

I’ll take the mob over the despot any day, unless I am the despot.

Words are sufficient only in a system that prioritizes broad wellbeing (as opposed to prioritizing the billionaires), when such a system works well, is healthy, is valued by most, etc.

We don’t have it. We have a “every man for himself” and “got mine, fuck you” system.

I hate to say it, if anyone wants something in our system now, they have to take it by fiat and force. The fascists get it. They use the methods that work, it’s just that their desired end state is intolerable shit for most. If their end state had freedom and human rights for everyone, most would forgive the methods.

That’s what happens when the billionaires donate to all the political parties.

Right wing influencers and pundits are calling for war and killings as we speak.

We’ll see how they will be investigated.

Truth and “Truth social” are different things.

Truth is good.

Truth social is an orwellian social network that is at war with the truth.

Elon sieg heilling twice and then signal boosting facists and illegally cutting democratically approved and institutionally valid spending, that hasn’t radicalized anyone.

Totally normal behavior.

It’s gotta be the video games and the dark web. What’s dark web? It is any web space I don’t know about. Duh.

I am not a fan of a few billionaires locking up every freedom we used to have so they can keep trucking toward the world’s first trillionaire.

I think the concept of moderation by an individual needs more scrutiny. Why not build a software algorithm to allow for subscribers to vote on moderation actions?

In other words, instead of vertical top heavy moderation, privide a more level, more horizontal process, where our peers play a significant role, or even act as co-moderators.

We are recreating in software all the top down vertical hierarchies we tend to be sceptical of in the real world. Why?

Imagine if there were no jury trial? How much worse would things be?

So why do we build an online world with a lower standard than we use to build the physical world. That’s just sloppy.

You need to own a few copies of face recog software, and practice with face restructuring latex makeup which gives you a new realistic face with a new bone structure.

Change walking gate. Get shoes with small platforms to change height, learn to walk naturally on those.

Change mannerisms.

It’s doable, but a major pain to pull it off.

Like imagine quickly applying the latex makeup, walking in front of your own identical face recognition camera at home, take everything off, rest, repeat, 10 times a day, 300 days a year, for 10 years. Until it is second nature. Now you can rely on this to do serious work.

You have to create a new person, basically. Assuming you practiced well and tested everything against real software, you can now be a different person for some hours in a reliable way. Once your secondary identity is exposed you’ll need a new tertiary identity. Never do anythiny fishy as your base identity.

The real solution is political, like everyone else has said. Because you won’t be able to fool the system casually without a massive effort and practice, practice, practice on your own property first, before you rely on this for real work in the wild.

More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.

They already squeezed the open net for all its worth.

Can’t prove anything, but I have always had trust issues with Youtube’s numbers. Youtube is a for profit company with horrible owners at the top, and would they distort the numbers for political or financial reasons? I think they would.

I think Youtube and Reddit inflate and deflate vote counts and view counts when something is important to the owners.

Granted that is what I think. Can’t prove it. But Google, Alphabet, Youtube, and the new entrants like Grumble, they are black box for profit companies. Can they pass an independent audit for their view and subscriber counts? We should not trust anything from these bad actors. Certainly don’t assume good faith. Audit them by five (more than one) independent and transparent auditing companies to prove their numbers are legit. Every six months. Every year. Forever. Until then I take all those view and subscriber numbers with a fistful of salt.

Linus from LTT was ostensibly really popular. I never watched it. Lets say their old numbers were legit. Is it possible some nephew of Youtube’s CEO is starting a competing channel and Youtube fudges the numbers to help push the nepo channel ahead? To me, yes, it is possible. I have very little trust for those black boxes. “Trust me bro” is all they got so far, and I have little reason to trust these entities.

So basically Google/Alphabet/Youtube reports a new number to Linus. Are the old and the new numbers legit? Can we ascertain it beyond the Youtube’s “trust me bro” nonsense? We need to start there, and don’t jump to conclusions about the viewership habits.

I don’t want to eat paint chips. Dating AI is even less appealing.

I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.