💸 (and control) is the reason.

I hate that every known company has to suddenly exploit their “brand recognition” and expand into unrelated areas. It’s completely logical from a short-term-profits-from-uninterested-in-anything-besides-profits shareholders but destroys the value people ascribe to a certain brand in the long run. My favourite example: Marshall. They’ve been known for loud and DISTORTED guitar amplifiers for decades. They shaped the sound of so many famous bands. Their amps would last a lifetime and sound great! So someone thought "Hey let’s make shitty headphones and Bluetooth speakers that will - by nature - not be durable, will have to excell in an area that Marshall never was interested in: amplifiers that do not distort the source material and that sound neutral. They had to rely on completely new technology like Bluetooth (which changes it’s standard over time) or be dependent on shitty Internet companies like Spotify (who decide suddenly to brick devices by not supporting them anymore). It’s almost the complete opposite of everything Marshall stood for IMHO. The only thing they have in common is that they make sound. The effect is that people buy products that break, decay or deteriorate on timescales much much shorter than the original brand would be expected. The thing that Marshal will be known for in the future is these speakers or breaking headphones with OK-sound quality. But a few management people will have made a lot of money of course.

The big difference that I see is that they investes in people for a long while now. They did what they can so people can get a decent education. That’s also the reason why they don’t allow kids to use tiktok and so on - it’s hindering the next generation’s ability to think. They know that you need many intelligent people to drive whatever other innovation you want to have later. That’s why they’re pulling ahead so fast while we are collapsing. I am not even living in the US, but even here the education system is crumbling.

The west has trapped itself in the thought of technology without people. The idea that few clever people can design perfect systems that drive everything for us. That we just need to support those few individuals to get maximum return. China is supporting the broad masses. It’s like creating a fertile soil.

Who knows what all the asterisks are causing in the future. But at the moment it’s just no comparison. We’ve gone backwards, while they’re so far ahead we barely see them.

Sorry, but you’re wrong. That movie is in fact a solid 10/10.

There’s even the next iteration already happening: Cerebras is maling wafer-scale chipa with integrated SRAM. If you want to have the highest memory-bandwith to your cpu core it has to lay exactly next to it ON the chip.

Ultimately RAM and processor will probably be indistinguishable with the human eye.

How big are your hands???

“Meteor” by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.

Edit: it’s called “Deception Point” in the original.

AI in general is a shitty term. It’s mostly PR. The Term “Intelligence” is very fuzzy and difficult to define - especially for people who are not in the field of machine learning.

Maybe you can dip your toes into using lineage os or graphene os?

Everybody has to support the new new underdog Intel.

Why do they have the data in the first place?

Your communications on telegram are not encrypted by default. You can have e2e encrypted 1on1-conversations, but group chats are blown for them to do everything.

They had a hilarious argumentation where they claimed that the key to unlock your chats is stored on a different server than your chats are and therefore they cannot access it. A company that argues like they (“trust us”) isn’t trustworthy.

Signal has been audited over and over again by internationally respected cryptographers. They cannot decrypt your chats by design. No need for “trust us bro”.

Yes

… for now.

We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.

I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.

Can Brazil rent out that judge to Europe for a Sec?

yeah that’s just ridiculous. omg

It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?

Amen

I quit netflix recently after almost 10 years of continuous subscription. When they raised the price again it was a good Occasion although not the reason. I think so was done with it for a while now.

I guess I’ll start reading books again - or watch a few films instead of stretched out series.