There was a time I wanted a Tesla, but I don’t anymore. This is just another reason why.

Does Tesla care about making a “neat thing” or do they care about making “a car that can drive me places”. The doors clearly show they prioritize making a “neat thing”, but I want a reliable car.

Opening and closing doors was a solved problem. Somehow Tesla made it worse.

Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

I was thinking about why a small landlord might be better, and I know there are exceptions, but usually a small landlord is is not going to squeeze every penny out of their rentals, sometimes out of the goodness of their heart, but most importantly, a small landlord has other ways to be productive.

A small landlord who has a normal job, if they want to improve the world, they do it through their job or personal projects, they build something or create something or whatever.

A big landlord who does nothing else, they aren’t actually creating anything, they’re just rent seeking and the most creative way they can imagine to improve the world is to rent seek even harder.

Our economic system gives greater rewards to those who move money around than to those who create things or cure cancer or anything else. The ways of turning a lot of money into even more money are taxed less (usually not at all) than more common ways of earning money like working a job or creating physical goods. The richest people didn’t get rich by creating something that improves everyone’s lives, they got rich by moving money around.

Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it’s the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I’ll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there’s something better I should be doing.

Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?

The market is filled with products people hate.

Explain to me again how free markets and competition are supposed to work?

Maybe.

Like, if I could type “extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks” in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.

LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.

Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.

We often make laws without a way to enforce them 100% effectively. For example, my road has a 25 MPH speed limit even though we haven’t yet installed speed limiting chips on every single car in the nation, we still went ahead and put a speed limit on our road though, and it mostly works, but sometimes someone drives 30 MPH.

It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.

Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.

They are doing extra work to change the product in ways that customers don’t want.

Can someone explain to me again how “free markets” and “competition” are supposed to work?

A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?

Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say “I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare”; if you respond “no, there is no right to healthcare” you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.

I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about it with a regular ban; make it clear what they are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don’t apply to companies performing shadowbans.

US auto makers were like “we love the free market”, then people bought cheaper cars from China and they said “wait, not that free!”

You can tell how important working from the office is by the fact that they can’t tell whether or not people are working from the office.

Maybe people need to start talking about unionizing while in the office.

Criticizing the Israel government is okay (until our government outlaws it at least). Suggesting the people of Israel are some special kind of corrupt is not okay. Our corruption is our own.

Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.

Our government seems to be moving towards an “we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers” approach.

Y’all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn’t show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?

I just can’t stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we’re focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.

We do need to help kids with social media, but there’s a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we’re ignoring.

Birds aren’t real according to sources that make claims that birds aren’t real.

Karma.

The young treat the old however they do. But then the young grow old and get treated the same.

A neat programming project would be to migrate YouTube videos to PeerTube for content creators. If a YouTuber decides to put their videos on PeerTube as well, it should be as easy as possible.