Almost like voting with your wallet doesn’t actually work. Or only works in same way ‘communism’ and ‘well regulated free market capitalism’ concepts work… in theory only.

Agreed. If we just set this issue aside and focused solely on everything that contributed to making someone want to shoot up a school we’d save far more lives more quickly. I do believe that we need gun control, but like you I don’t think we’ll get it so why waste our time trying for something that will never happen?

This feels like shutting down road access to the local stripmall just because the bar there doesn’t properly handle it’s drunks. Oh and leaving that decision up to a private, not elected and not accountable citizen

Exactly. I’m tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that’s more than a private company. And don’t even get me started on ‘voting with your wallet’. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule ‘trickle down economics’.

To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn’t be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn’t be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn’t totally up how one CEO feels that day.

Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?

I very much appreciate the self publishing that’s been possible, but I do know that the way they enable this is pretty exploitive and I think we still have massive room for improvement. My understanding is that it relies heavily on exclusivity agreements to force the majority of players onto their platform. I think we would’ve seen the Amazon self publishing business smacked down by anti trust lawsuits ages ago if we lived in a more sane timeline.

Despite the exploitation going on now, it’s still better than the old monopolies the traditional publishers held, but I hope we can eventually see self publishing flourish outside of the Amazon ecosystem

I’d be more open to a cashless society if (at least in America) that didn’t mean relying entirely on private credit card companies that offer effectively zero protection under the law.

What do you do for contractors, Doctors, etc?

Yep. Between ad blockers/sponsorblock and my content choices it’s actually extremely rare that I encounter any traditional advertising. I don’t even know how I used to sit through the old cable TV ads. Now I’m already searching for something else to do 5 seconds in

Wonder how they plant/harvest. Seems like the panels would block a tractor

I did not say future AI is limited. I said our current approach is flawed and very unlikely to ever result in a true AI. Whenever we do build that AI, it won’t be with a better version of the tech were using now, but a very different approach will have been taken.

It’s the same way we realized you couldn’t build a true AI by just trying to create enough if/then statements. You can make some fancy software, but the approach was inherently flawed.

People are also waaay overestimating how close we are to the classical AI shown in media. They see ChatGPT and understand that it has problems, but also know we went from dumb phones to super fast smartphones really quickly, so apply the same logic to AI, when it’s closer to the ‘bird in the picture’ xkcd comic. (Ironically that problem can now be solved by ‘AI’, but the point still stands). End users are bad at estimating the complexity of a given task and taking something like our current AI models to something like Cortana from Halo is a completely unknown amount of time away. Most likely decades if not centuries from now. The current approach to AI will most likely never work like that, because it has no true ability to learn and grow. At least not in the human sense.

Wife got caught with a similar phishing attempt, except this was a text. She had legitimately had a missing package and was in the middle of dealing with it and was waiting on a communication for a fix when the fake text came in. Just incredibly unlucky timing that made it all feel ‘right’. Realized it like 30 minutes later when the real communication came and cancelled the cards, but at the scale and frequency of spam these days they’re bound to find people in plausible situations where their scam doesn’t feel quite so out of place.

Systems do what they do, and that is their purpose.

Working in IT I’m not sure I agree with that. I mean I think you’re basically trying to say, ‘listen to my actions, not my words’, but still. People screw up designing systems all the time. Both bugs and design gaps exist. This doesn’t imply the system designer somehow intended those to happen, even if they built it that way.

I think there’s definitely an argument to be made that old, well established system are most likely doing what the controllers of those systems want. Otherwise they’d change them.

It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.

I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.

Does this work with the paid subscriptions? I figured that would require multiple subscriptions. Plus in my experience Google is really hostile to being logged into multiple accounts at a time. I wouldn’t want to have to constantly switch my Gmail for example.

I really don’t know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It’s just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it’s not on a desktop or TV.

I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.

Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It’s less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn’t exist.

I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don’t feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.

Really feels like we need a Reddit community, or at least a ‘other social media’ community to contain all the reddit news in one place.