Why think they don’t? Amazon web service is, well, Amazon, so it’s like a Bezos-funded library - if he or other execs wish so they can preserve whatever they wish for as long as they can afford electricity and maintenance. The same goes with google or facebook … the real question is what will be chosen for preservation when inevitably the reaper comes for these corps in their current form.

There’s probably much more. Half of them only recognised in their village somewhere in the middle of South Asia, the other half too burnt out with work and continuous crises to notice they could be good at something.

The endgame sounds scary, classic enshittification scheme but deployed to authentication and security: make it flashy and smooth at start, get adoption (this time it’s different b/c it’s not the masses that need convincing, but website operators), hold the entire internet hostage by threatening to pull the plug on the mode of access to everything. Also more obvious and coming sooner: exploit your handle on the tech to disable Passkeys to someone who “violates ToS” of Google services by, idk, running adblock or logging in with Firefox.

The hubris of thinking that a random driver-exploiting app is some kind of godsend utility and we’ll be scared of losing it.

At this point the old school taxi companies have their apps too, you’re not the cool kid anymore, uber

when dressing for a ranch I usually put on worn-out jeans, a leather vest and a wide-brimmed hat, not sure why these things should be white

SALAD DRESSING?! Are you Americans going to a restaurant and ask the waiter to bring you a salad with clorox?

If I was to guess I’d say it’s the only way they can do anything meaningful. If the goal is to curb google’s monopoly on the internet it would be neat to break it down and apparently search was a case that can be credibly pursued on antitrust grounds. Web integroty hasn’t yet reached its intended scope, even if everyone with minimal knowledge know where it’s going, “everyone sees the writing on the wall” is not a valid ground for legal persecution.

every now and then, even on this community, I see praises towards the new leader of FCC (IIRC) who’s taking a hard stance agains big tech and elsewhere (Doctorow’s blog IIRC again) about the wider “bidenomics” of going out against monopolies and trusts by empowering existing laws and agencies. Guess the answer is “because now there is an administration in power who at least pretends to care”.

Because for the last 15 years or so the agencies responsible for figuring it out and enforcement were toothless, corrupt, incompetent or all three together.

You better start enjoying them anyway. Unless we get really good at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere it will be only getting worse. The atmosphere-ocean system isn’t at equilibrium yet and we keep pumpin’ every year.

E-ink is great for this kind of experience, but it has one big problem: abysmal refresh rate. Enough for books, irrelevant for price tags so this is where it succeeds. Movies or fast typing? No.

I heard a rumor that an eink display can be oveclocked to reach reasonable rates, but it would probably wear it down rather fast.

Because you can’t argue that. Any other ground reason for policy can be challenged or counterargued or relies on values which are arguable.

No one is going to plainly argue “ok but how about we do not protect children?”. And if someone tries a different angle such as “this law is not really going to protect anyone and will bring a lot of problems for children and adults alike” it will be easily dismissed as “you insidious snake, why do you want to hurt children?! Don’t sabotage child protection!”. Which autokills conversation.

Well I’d also flag a Russian spyware app as suspicious if I had a say in it.

Ah yes, the trickle down economy.

When pathological exploitation of children’s every day for attention money trickles down from Hollywood to common people.

even fairly modern ones are slick, LG G4 (ok not exactly modern) is light and thin and with replacable battery. Gigaset smartphones are quite the bricks but it’s actually quite hard to open the batt compartment, that’s how well they’re fitted.

Maybe not yet, but…

• Spez will turn Reddit into a bot farm and sell this as training data
• Musk turns Twitter into a bigoted cesspool and will sell this as training data, which will subsequently be flagged for low quality (also: a botfarm)
• Threads is a corporate ad dashboard (and we already know how easy it is to GPT copy) and Zuck will sell this as training data
• Facebook is either dead or only good for boomers and Poles
• blogs are dead
• Fediverse is out there waiting to be scraped but possibly too small to sustain a big model

We’te getting there, hopefully.

You are obviously aware that “we” do it all the time as well - but no sane intelligence agency will go out shouting in press “WE DID STEAL CHINESE OFFICIALS’ EMAIL FOLKS, OUR AGENTS ARE TOP CYBERCOMMANDOS AMD LAST WEEK WE TOOK OVER A COMPUTER IN IRAN AND RECORDED THEIR MINISTER’S SECRET MEETING” Though actually Americans did go out shouting once recently, calling out Russia before they invaded Ukraine and making sure everyone gets the message “we know what russia is up to and we’re ready”. It was considered an extraordinary strategy when the sitting US president effectively broadcasted military intel.