jolshefsky @jolshefsky@librem.one
Building on what Heather Cox Richardson @hc_richardson wrote a few days ago ( https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2024 ) I thought I'd categorize Trump's campaign promises.
I accidentally said “hey Shirley” instead of “hey Siri” to my phone this morning and now it is stuck in airplane mode.
As I said earlier, true conspiracies are boring and mainly referred to as "business models".
Google and friends collect huge amounts of data not neceesarily because they are founded by CIA, FBI, reptilian aliens from Nibiru, whichever the case may be.
It's because they are capitalist companies in the capitalist society. They are not beholden to technical experts, they are beholden to bean counters who are beholden to shareholders who demand not just perpetual revenue stream, but perpetual revenue growth at any cost, and are pressured by the dog-eat-dog market environment. So they just HAVE to collect more and more data in order to sell more and more of it, lest they be either bled out by shareholders or devoured by the competitors.
Alphabet agencies just knew a good data source when they saw one, and politely asked to join in on the fun, which is easy for them, because they speak softly and carry a long stick.
This is surveilance capitalism in the nutshell.
Today, I was trying to find (using commercial search engines) information about a topic. Maybe 9 out of 10 or more "relevant" results was about purchasing items related to the topic. Not ads placed in the result page, no, the actual results.
I remember how, when I was younger, I used to marvel at all the information out there on the web. How it was like a giant library.
I scarcely recognize the place now. If you want to search information about a topic you don't go into a mall. But that's what it feels like I'm forced to do.
I remember going to the library and pulling out drawers of index cards to locate the relevant non-fiction shelves with good content on topics I wanted to learn about. Imagine if those index cards had been mixed with cards with advertisements on them. Increasingly diluting the content with junk. That is the web of today.
The whole e-bike categorization seems so simple to me. Omitting the "automobile" category (e.g. large-ish, enclosed-ish, fully motor-propelled, more than 2 wheels), a vehicle that is wholly self-propelled is a "motorcycle", one powered from a motor and/or pedals is a "mo-ped", one that powered only when human power is added (i.e. pedaling) is "bicycle" (or, more broadly, "human-powered vehicle") and one with an a boosting electric motor is an "e-bike." DMV categories already cover the first two.
The computer hardware industry’s job is to make networks, disks, CPUs, and memory faster and bigger. The computer software industry’s job is to squander as much of that improvement as possible by making software as slow and massive as they can.
If Elon Musk is worth $36.5B in 27 working years, that means he can do the work of 48,000 workers earning $28K/year. Why doesn't he just reopen Tesla all by himself?
Friendly reminder: "X as a service" is just a misleading corporate euphemism for "pay forever for not owning it".
"Software as a service" actually means "pay forever for not owning the software".
"Games as a service" actually means "pay forever for not owning games".
"Infrastructure as a service" actually means "pay forever for not owning the hardware".
And so on.
There is no "cloud", it's just other people's computers
I sometimes think I'm the only one who is annoyed that "STEM" has three letters other than "T". My niece-ish got a drone with the "STEM" label on it for Christmas—and it's not even hackable, just a closed sensor-based flying doohickey. Maybe I'm biased in seeing mostly media from Adafruit and Sparkfun touting "STEM Arduino this" and "STEM RPi that". But what about research, or design, or calculus?
As far as I have determined, the only purpose of adding an anti-class-action arbitration clause to a company's Terms of Service is because they intend abuse.
@ben @Gargron I kinda doubt people use underscores to separate words in hashtags, otherwise you'd have the #mans_laughter vs. #manslaughter problem
