Beat me to it. Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI.
The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.
AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
He’s not wrong but screw Glenn Greenwald. I assume his solution will be to back the current or next strongman, because strongman rule will save us?
It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.
Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.
I don’t see where you’re coming from. Greenwald is constantly pointing out abuses of power and hypocrisy in government. Have you actually read what he writes? He is in no way a fan of totalitarian strongmen.
Greenwald defends totalitarian strongmen abroad by his reflexive and universal opposition to American power. His stance on Ukraine, for example, is as extremely pro-Putin as any writing can get without saying "I love Vlad and I will kiss him".
Greenwald is a vocal and consistent anti-institutionalist, and this creates the conditions for strongmen to take over. Whether he is aware of having this effect is not relevant.
What’s been dismantled? The major impact of his recent work was helping elect Trump twice and get tech companies to drop anti-disinformation campaigns. The military-industrial complex not only isn’t dismantled, it’s growing!
he not only not criticizes but is the most war-loving president we’ve had in a long time. at least he did right but making DoD what is actually is. america knows nothing but military and he’ll grow it to even more epic proportions once we invade iran and 10 or so other countries as we approach november
Greenwald supports both Putin and Trump, for starters.
He's either insanely clueless, a propagandist who is being dishonest about his goals, or an accelerationist who thinks making things worse will make them better after (magic happens here).
The magic never happens. Any political program that boils down to (1) break everything, (2) magic, (3) things are better, really goes (1) break everything, (2) either things stay broken and you end up a failed state or someone worse takes over.
It’s a network. You can move but will your community?
We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them?
Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]
We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.
Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.
> you can even change which app you want it to be.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat
I agree that it would take something catastrophic for people to move off of the service they currently use. I disagree however on the premise that the move will be from one proprietary service to another. Us tech savvy people can and should self-host the things we believe can be valuable - now or down the line.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
Because nobody ever lied in print media or in person?
What we are seeing is the consequence of a formerly high trust society collapsing into a low trust one. There is no place to hide from that. The Internet is made of the same stuff as print media and in person. It’s made of people.
The internet didn’t cause this. It just reflects it.
The LLMs are made of people too inasmuch as that’s where they get their training data and prompts.
Why would anyone not think a Sparc server could host a web site?
An old IBM PC or even a Commodore 64 can host a web site. I think there’s a few online. I’ve seen them before.
I’ve seen a lot of younger “cloud native” age developers who have these insane distorted ideas about how much power is needed to do simple things. You’d be shocked at how much traffic a modern mid range laptop can handle with efficient software. The Ethernet card you can plug into it would probably be the bottleneck, since I’m not sure if they make USB-C cards faster than 5gbps.
A mid range laptop will also handle hundreds of gigs in a SQL database just fine.
If the mid range laptop happens to have a Thunderbolt/USB4 port there are a number of Thunderbolt adapters built around Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx SFP28 NICs.
It's amazing that the algorithms are so universal rather than personalized.
You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
I understand why FB/IG do it; I _occasionally_ give in and get sucked into a couple. But that NEVER happens to me with YT.
> You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
Oh they've noticed, and they just haven't found the right recco just yet to get you to watch. Bear with them, as they will eventually find you something. Even if it is just a video you would normally watched cropped to format.
Shorts are treated as a privileged feature; they aren't going to simply hide them just because a few of us have the unmitigated gall not to watch them. That's not to their benefit. Youtube and the other platforms want to manipulate users into getting on that particular hamster wheel, and the app's UX reflects that. In that, it's not dissimilar to how streaming services routinely prioritize engagement maximization over user experience. If it takes you a few more clicks to find your continue watching list, that's your problem.
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
I would expect (but cannot prove) that these hostile patterns decrease engagement on the individual level.
But maybe the effort to cater to people who avoid this stuff isn't worth it, or maybe they find it doesn't really discourage us from finding what we want, or the value of this stuff is so high that they find a sufficient number of converts over time.
As someone that pays for YouTube premium (and isn’t served ads), I don’t understand why they push Shorts to me too. Presumably they should want me to spend the bare minimum amount of time on YouTube necessary to keep me subscribed, as any further use just contributes to higher infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
AI as a tool to make health care cheaper and more scalable is not an inherently bad idea, but I would not let these fools anywhere near it. Anything they touch is going to be a pure grift.
“We will do literally anything to make housing more affordable except build more of it.”
Forget where I first saw that but it’s absolutely true.
The left will try rent control, subsidies, taxes and prohibitions against speculation, banning AirBnB, etc. The right will try mass deportations and population caps.
Nobody will build more housing because that would work, and home owners are incentivized not to do anything that would work, and homeowners vote in much larger numbers.
The problem won’t be solved until renters out vote homeowners and until everyone who wants more affordable housing stops advocating the solutions that will not work.
How? I can't seem to affect any control the factors that constraint housing. I want to build more, but short of becoming a developer myself, I'm powerless. Even if I were a developer, I'd likely be subject to the same structural forces.
In Switzerland most people rent, in Zurich/Geneva it's more than 80% of inhabitants, doesn't help one bit. I kid you not, we have the renter association that is working tirelessly to prevent new construction.
I guess the motives are not just financial. They’re also just general opposition to change.
There was this weird period after WWII where we built tons of housing. It was a major factor in building the largest middle class in human history. Then we stopped.
Depends on who you mean. Some of them are nodding and smiling while they count the days until Trump dies. Some of them are “pilled” and totally on board.
And ultimately the consequences of both group is the same. The only way to get rid of fascism is to fight against it, there is no "neutral" position possible unfortunately.
We're not talking about public companies being "fully aligned culturally" or not though, we're talking about individuals who have as much choice as everyone else, if not more, to align themselves or not.
Large corporations, especially publicly traded ones, have zero power to resist their sovereign government. Publicly traded companies are heavily regulated and dependent on their stock price, making them trivially vulnerable to political retaliation.
I’m not sure why people look to corporations for political resistance. It’s the wrong place to look. They’re not structured for it and it’s not their purpose.
Corporations are people and money is speech, making corporations the strongest forces in politics. Obviously they're not on your side but there's no mystery why people would want to influence them.
All the more ironic when those selfsame corps act as arms of govenment agaist official enemy governments/people. See the recent brouhaha by Facebok over getting banned from Russia and years previously from China over pretty similar demands.
And the way they all fell inline with sanctioning the ICC (Microsoft/Google) when the only laws in play were US domestic ones being pushed globally.
Sure corporations have to respect the LAW in their juradiction, even if said law is unpopular or unethical.
But they don't have to, and shouldn't where ethics and human rights are involved, go beyond what is required by the law. Since Trump has come to power a lot of big organsations seem to be reversing their previous positions to gain political favour, which is wrong.
The solution is probably for them to appeal to the public. "We stand up to ICE abuse" would probably help them in the markets.
Something interesting happened recently in France where it turned out that the American subsiduary of CapGemini was selling serives to ICE. They were forced to sell that subsiduary after public outcry.
its not just the tweets. this administration came out of the gate swinging with its extortionate demands. it claims the power to redirect, cancel, and append conditions to congressional funding. its has as its disposal all of the departments who ostensibly exist to serve the populace, and use them to file lawsuits, charge people with crimes, remove or establish new regulations or targeted taxes, all in service of whatever the president might desire.
Again and again with the fascists, the accusation of weaponization of government was really a confession of their own crimes.
Same with the Epstein files, same with the accusations of groomer while their ranks are filled with rapists, same with the Jan 6 insurrection, and likely this fall, accusations of election fraud and intimidation.
I wish I understood how that works. Retail investors are so small, compared with hedge funds and whatnot, that "average people" cannot move a stock price significantly. So, when Trump tweets about a company, how does the stock move? Who is actually doing all that selling to drive the price down?
And, since the price almost always recovers within a week... does it even matter?
Trump has big money friends that control non-retail investment. The tweet is just signalling.
That kind of access and "control" is why they think they can just tweet at Coke to stop using artificial dyes instead of, you know, changing the rules at the organization they run.
The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.
AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
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