Most users don’t care about any of the spying. I’d expect a competitor of similar size to do the same. If there’s any improvement competition could bring, it would be for the creators, giving them a larger slice of the ad revenue that otherwise goes to the owners of the platform. I guess that would mean better quality videos for users. Though, I don’t think allowing anyone to make boatloads of money by getting millions of people to sit around for hours and hours watching videos has been a positive for humanity. Incentivizing creators with more money will just make this worse.

Right. Except you can’t influence the Chinese government. Whereas you can, if you are American, influence the American government (through elections, say). And the American government can, in turn, possibly influence the tech companies. And they do. See: the antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration.

As an American, I can’t say I’d be terribly enthused about using a YouTube competitor based in a foreign country. And China is quite foreign to us as far as countries go. And I use YouTube constantly.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.

Using reddit’s stock price to estimate what fraction of the users are people. Sounds like a plan. The stock price is like a CAPTCHA for social media platforms. Are you authentically human or an empty husk of clankers gabbing at each other?

Now I can read the Atlantic for free while also DDOSing people. The future is now.

Throwaway culture exists with software but without the waste that comes with physical things. If one distro doesn’t work, try a different one. It’s only bits. The only thing wasted is your time.

Also, even though people claim to be happy to answer your questions, I think there’s a strong likelihood that if you said what issue you had, nobody would be able to solve the problem due to how complex any modern operating system is, and due to not having direct access to the machine to troubleshoot. Seriously, they’re so big and complicated that they’re approximately black boxes. The easiest way for you to resolve the problem is to try something different until it works.

It’s a challenge to find a case where it really is a Hollywood thing.

Do Americans really eat lunch and mingle outside in high school or is that a Hollywood thing?

Is the last thing you hear before going under anesthesia

The first one has an awesome score by James Horner and will make any adult cry. The rest (a whopping 13 sequels) are cheap movies to put kids to sleep.

What should just be a little plastic box containing ink has a tiny computer inside to prove to the printer it’s not counterfeit. All so that the manufacture can have their give-the-razor-for-free-sell-the-blades business model, enforced by the anti-circumvention part of copyright law.

Prediction markets and recently-legalized sports gambling says hi.

Another example is Coq, the interactive theorem prover, named after CoC, an abbreviation for calculus constructions, the type theory on which Coq is based, and the co-creator Thierry Coquand in whose native language (French) coq has no sexual connotation and is simply the word for rooster (male chicken).

I have just now seen on Wikipedia to gather this information that it was renamed to Rocq last year after 41 years.

https://github.com/rocq-prover/rocq/wiki/Alternative-names

Lemmy is licensed under the AGPL which was created at the Free Software Foundation which was started by Richard Stallman who made controversial comments about Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Don’t breath or you might inhale an atom once exhaled by Adolf Hitler.

Citation needed. When you hover over a video’s progress bar, there is displayed a little graph showing something resembling a probability density function for timestamps users most frequently skip to. Advertisers can use this information to determine how likely a user is to sit through a sponsorship for a given channel.

Not that that matters. Don’t feel like you need to watch ads. Advertising is bad in all its forms.

If the internet had been around back when the U.S. Constitution was written, instead of post offices, the framers would have put in ISPs.

If I understand correctly, Android already has something like this: the Play Integrity API. It’s responsible for rooted Android devices being unable to use banking apps. iOS might have something similar. And the term for this if you want to learn more is remote attestation. It’s far more insidious than devices with locked boot loaders.

public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL

Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.

As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?