Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.

This won’t last long. It’s too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.

Linus himself just seems to give off that “nice guy on camera, exact opposite behind the scenes” kind of vibe. I’ve seen him get a bit riled up on podcast videos and it really comes off like he’s holding back. Perhaps the employee’s story was all too believable from others who get that perception of him. So I could see how the defamation threat would be like him/the company to try to show “we’re really angry and could do more but we’re gonna hold our temper”.

Seriously, if I hear “X, formerly known as Twitter”, one more time… It’s been over a year. If people don’t know the name has changed by now, I don’t know what will help them.

The term “dark pattern” refers to any deceptive practice, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, that online websites, apps, etc use to get people to do the site/app’s desired behavior, such as in this case, not cancel their Prime subscription. Not all of these examples may apply in Amazon’s case, but some examples would be making the fields or buttons for canceling or keeping your subscriptions different colors or sizes, making the default choice to keep the subscription, making you view a bunch of ads to keep the sub or go through a bunch of other pages before canceling, or hiding the cancelation option in fine print in a corner of the site. The “dark” part means that the average person usually doesn’t notice the deceptive nature of the practices.

I think the Fediverse is an ideal platform on which to experiment with things like this. There will always be a difference here between those who want to see the Fediverse grow into a dominant platform and those who prefer things more quiet. Fortunately, the nature of it means that in this case we can actually have our cake and eat it too. Instances of Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, Lemmy and FreeTube (likely the three that have potential to grow into a significant market share), especially the larger general audience ones, can attract and bring in the high profile users/accounts, such as brands, that can bring in a larger general audience that some current users are looking for, while those who want to keep away from that can move to smaller or more niche instances, or create their own, that can then defederate from the larger instances they don’t want to interact with. People who like aspects of both types of environments can have accounts on multiple different instances, even if those accounts or instances can’t interact with each other due to defederation. Seems like a win-win to me, and part of the beauty of the Fediverse. Don’t like something where you are? It’s easier than anywhere else to move to a different part of it and maintain a presence on the platform overall.

That’s my thought, these are worldwide numbers, so while the “premium” VPN services are popular in developed countries where most have the disposable income to afford them, those in developing countries may find the free services much more accessible, even if they aren’t as reliable. Income may not even be too much of a factor, sometimes software or services can get popular in places like India where there’s just a very high population. India played a big part in worldwide desktop Linux growing to 4% market share, for example.

A VPN run by Google is like a bank run by Bernie Madoff.

The previous times these types of issues have actually gone to court (Nintendo v. Tengen back in the '80s and Sony v. Bleem in the '90s) pretty much all ended in the same way: the emulator/bypass maker won the suit, but the copyright holder drowned them in so many legal costs they had to fold anyway. And these were larger companies with much more resources than any indie emulator dev can muster.

EDIT: also, it should be noted that Tengen and Bleem were able to win their cases specifically because their chip/software were complete reverse engineers and did not contain any Nintendo/Sony proprietary code. It’s not to say that if an emulator like Yuzu that requires a cryptographic key from an actual console were to go to court that they wouldn’t still win as long as that key is not provided, but it does give the console maker more leverage, and without a lot of resources, indie emulator devs would likely not want to take the chance.

In discussions of this issue I’ve come to the conclusion that a not-small portion of those participating in said discussion would probably be doing the exploiting. I guess I’m just too old (as in, over 25) or too “normal” for Lemmy.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…

He is in the third-party repair business, so it makes sense for him to promote right to repair to protect his industry.

That, and as he often says, in an ideal capitalist world for both producer and consumer, the best way to retain business is to keep the customer happy, and an easy way to do that is to produce a quality product and not screw the consumer over, lest the product break or total itself and the customer go elsewhere for repair or replacement of the broken product. Satisfied customers in the first initial sale can lead to those customers returning often and recommending the business and product to others, leading to much more business (and profit) overall.

This is how it has to start in the US. Subsidizing free college in other countries is much easier because colleges there keep their costs under control, focusing on education and research over the “college experience”, so the costs per student of running said colleges is much lower. There is SO much wasteful spending, brought about by the greed of many US colleges for the near unlimited flow of student loan money coming from lenders especially prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, that can be thrown out to cut those costs.

Not to mention that fewer people in free college countries actually attend a university, with education systems in those countries designed to steer many students towards places like trade/ag/other schools if they show aptitude in areas they really don’t need a 4-year degree for or really just don’t meet the academic standard to get into those universities. Millennials and Gen Z were all told in the US that we HAD to go to college to get anywhere in the world and we were all pushed in that direction whether it was a good direction for us or not. Now there’s a big labor shortage here in the trades and other blue collar jobs because so few younger people have the proper skills, which aren’t really taught in four-year institutions, or the desire to take on the training or effort to gain those skills. Fewer students spending four years in an expensive university and more in two-year schools or trade schools has the advantage of both lowering overall education costs and providing a workforce with more diverse skills, regardless of the time needed to train them.

In actual negative impact on society, his companies are really no worse than any other big tech company, IMO. He just puts himself in the public spotlight more than the other CEOs.

Just wouldn’t be popular here on Lemmy, where we’re supposed to actually believe Musk is worse.

In other words, it’s really easy to make your AI chatbot join in your echo chamber.

I hear you, but this is Lemmy, we’re all supposed to be CCP shills and think free markets are the worst thing ever.

Yes, because a Native American nation couldn’t possibly have existed before the Australian version of pick-up trucks. If it’s meant to be a joke, didn’t quite land.

One thing both political “sides” can agree on: cancel culture sucks, unless they’re the ones doing the canceling.

It sounds like there could be some changes made to the initial hardware/design to make it work better out-of-the-box, but the modularity concept is a good one, IMO. It’s still a new concept, so things are going to be expensive at first and the issues can be worked out over time. Might not be something to pick up right now with the current models for many (including me), but there is potential in the idea down the road as things like the hubs/ports and other hardware quirks get worked out.