willington
@willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 1 week ago:
We’ll just wait to be picked up.
Or not.
- Comment on Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 4 weeks ago:
Bad corporate behaviour is a political problem.
Here we are talking about technological solutions for political problems. Why?
- Comment on Marketing Doesn't Work on Nerds 5 weeks ago:
I mran 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 matket 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 thete. 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.
- Comment on Marketing Doesn't Work on Nerds 5 weeks ago:
Bring back catalogs.
Who here remembers Computer Shopper?
When I want something, I’ll come to you. Don’t come to me.
- Comment on Mods react as Reddit kicks some of them out again: “This will break the site” 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Right wing influencers and pundits are calling for war and killings as we speak.
We’ll see how they will be investigated.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Truth and “Truth social” are different things.
Truth is good.
Truth social is an owellian social network that is at war with the truth.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
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.
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.
- Comment on Mods react as Reddit kicks some of them out again: “This will break the site” 5 weeks ago:
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 was no jury trial? How much worse would thing 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.
- Comment on Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ 1 month ago:
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 1 month ago:
Can’t prove anything, but I have always had trust issues with Youtube’s numbets. 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 ther view and subscriber counts? We should not trust anything from these bad actors. Certainly don’t assume good faith. Audit them by five indepencent and transparent auditing companies to prove their numbers are legit. Every six months. Evert 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.
- Comment on Half of Young Men Would Rather Date an AI Girlfriend Than Face Loneliness or Rejection, New Report Reveals 1 month ago:
I don’t want to eat paint chips. Dating AI is even less appealing.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 1 month ago:
I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.
- Comment on Uber and Lyft drivers in California win a path to unionization 1 month ago:
Legal, yes.
Literal, no.
- Comment on Uber and Lyft drivers in California win a path to unionization 1 month ago:
Corporations are people too, friend.
/s
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
Jesus, how the heck is this called “sideloading is so easy on an iPhone”?
That’s a nightmare procedure, and completely unnecessary.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
You probably didn’t do it on purpose, but you made a comparison on Apple’s terms, thus implicitly priveleging Apple.
Last thing Apple needs is us priveleging it.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
Openness isn’t just a nice to have. It is essential.
The difference between general purpose computing and gatekept walled garden computing is night and day.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
Not a solution to our problem, but this is a crumb in our favor.
- Comment on Tesla sales plunge 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple 1 month ago:
If the problem we want to solve is how to consolidate wealth and power in a few private hands the fastest, the unregulated free markets is the solution.
- Comment on OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police 1 month ago:
The owners of the AI are centering their personal iterests first.
Who here thinks buisenesses and CEOs exist to serve the public interests? I have a bridge to sell you.
If we want buisenesses and CEOs to serve the public inerests ahead of their personal interests we have to FORCE them to.
This problem is so bad it even has a name as a “principle agent problem”. The CEOs and other execs routinely steal from even their “own” publicly traded companies, but it is hardly ever litigated as it is hard to prove without violating the privacy of the CEOs. The most obvious method is via kickbacks. They get under the table payments from the contractor companies when deciding which contractor should get the contract.
The business world is rife with scum and villainy. If we ever want some guardrails around buseness practices we must grab the CEOs by their genitals. Because taking their word for anything is worth the sound that the word makes.
CEOs need to see jail time, and capital punishment in states that allow it.
Instead we lionize these psychopaths and call them “buiseness leaders”. We brought all this on ourselves by uncritically believing the buisenesses’ own way of describing themselves.
- Comment on Trump is building ‘one interface to rule them all.’ It’s terrifying. 1 month ago:
“We will build one concentration camp less than the Republicans!”
Signed, Democrats.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 2 months ago:
Elon turned Grok into Mecha-Hitler.
Trump is telling the Smithsonian museum to ignore slavery, or to cover slavery as a positive.
The domestic appetite for propaganda is huge. Pragar U is American.
Let’s not center foreign countries when we have so much work to do at home.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 2 months ago:
How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.
- Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing 2 months ago:
As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.
I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.
But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.
If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.
- Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing 2 months ago:
A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.
- Comment on Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal 2 months ago:
The “owners” of our world want us to be passengers, not drivers. They own the carusel, and we rent our rides.
They say we have no skin in the game. Truth is, SKIN is ALL we have in this game. We must have assets in the game as a birthright to make it worth playing in good faith. If most are landless and assetless, sorry, the game sucks. That means untill we get the rules that protect all of our interests, as opposed to protecting massive wealth accumulations at everyone’s expense, we will ignore the rules, the norms, decorum, civility, etc.
If the hoarders break the social contract repeatedly, like they have since 2008, it takes people some time to internalize and digest the fact of what it means for none of us being bound by a social contract. Once people catch on, there will be hell to pay.
- Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then? 2 months ago:
Of course the power dynamics cannot ever be eliminated (either by breeding or enculturation) from the interpersonal relationships.
Instead, power can be regulated and managed, to maximize distributed decisionmaking, and to protect those decisionmakers who could not or would not protect themselves.
In a free for all, feudalism will always result. The strong and the willing will rule over the weak and the unwilling.
There have to be limits to the power dynamics. Those limits will have to be enforced to protect the vulnerable, the gullible, and the unwilling (those who have the capability to exercise power, but refuse by choice), etc. This requires advanced democratic governance with a very strong government.
Doing away with the government is just a speedrun toward technofeudalism.
- Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then? 2 months ago:
When democratic gornance withers what fills the power vacuum is feudalism.
Technofeudalism is feudalism with computers.
Ironically, to create a space that selects for and protects distributed decisionmaking (the desire of most sane anachists), you need a strong government!