We are in uncharted territory here. There is no crystal ball for what comes next.

That being said, this is not sustainable. Society is a contract. The contract goes away when parties to that contract begin to disagree on what that contract says, and that is inevitable when people are fed garbage without results. Most empires have collapsed under their own weight. I suspect this will happen to the US as well, which has always been the purpose of all this disinformation: not to consolidate power into a dictator, but instead to sow division, and rip apart the social contract. The fact that Americans are so polarized is proof of that division. You ask if people will ever wake up. Clearly half the the US has.

The only question is how that collapse will happen, and how peacefully it might be.

This situation has come to be, through the ignorance and inaction of ordinary people. Your attitude is part of the problem.

Corporate censorship. These companies are too powerful and tyrannical.

The article is ambiguous. It states “use IPv6” which at face value could simply mean support it together with IPv4. On the other hand, it states that they are running out of IPv4 addresses beyond what NAT can solve, so perhaps they may not have a choice in the matter.

If this is the nudge needed to transition, then great.

“Fragility” is the typical descriptor for this sort of thing. Advanced technology is very powerful, and that is obvious to see, but it also tends to fail readily without long-term planning, in disaster and war, of course, but also in more benign ways, like when a consumer becomes reliant on the technology for a way of life, and a corporation abused their unique ability to maintain the technology, and the consumer has no recourse.

Man, I’ve been trying to migrate to Linux as my daily driver desktop over the last week. I love Linux passionately. But multi-monitor and 2.5Gb/s NIC support is just a disaster, basically to the point of completely unusable. It’s so frustrating. It keeps pushing me back to Windows, because Windows just works when it comes to hardware.

This is what we get for no longer being the paying customer (that and a quasi Monopoly).

The point, in one sentence:

If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.

I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.

However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?

I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.

The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is the people losing their minds about it.

We don’t need immortal billionaires sucking up everyone’s oxygen.

Open the tv and rip out the antenna. Y’all already forgot the classic secret agent trope of checking the hotel room for bugs? Now we all get to play that game!

I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It’s an awful choice, but you could still do it…

The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn’t really a choice.

Here in Canada, I find the prices pretty neck and neck. Small items tend to be a bit cheaper at the stores, since there is very little overhead for them to carry small items compared to Amazon’s picking and delivery logistics. Big items tend to be a bit cheaper on Amazon. For tech specifically, Best Buy price matches items, so it’s not that bad… Memory express and CC sometimes have lower prices than Amazon too (see PCPartPicker).

The main reason to use Amazon is you can easily find some really obscure stuff. Then again, you can buy direct from manufacturer, like Vevor, for often cheaper.

Did anyone stop to ask themselves if we even would want to watch AI videos?

Of course not.

I, and I suspect many other people, watch YouTube for the people in the videos and their experiences (or at least the illusion of that). Watching fake videos defeats the whole purpose.

YouAITube sounds like nothing more than a kaleidoscope with extra steps.

That’s what happens when you aren’t the (sole) paying customer.

I think anyone familiar with the laws of thermodynamics could have predicted this outcome.

1 can be solved with regulation or nationalization. Services online should be public services. Like school, police, roads. You can still have private alternatives too.

It’s funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Sophistication often creates fragility. The human mind marvels at sophistication naturally; appreciation for resilience usually only comes after that fragile thing has broken. Of course it’s too late by then.

All them young whipper snappers will continue to learn these life lessons the hard way, it seems.

This is not how patents work. At all.

For one, patent owners are generally more than happy to license their technology to integrators, and even competitors, if there is money to be made.

More importantly, patents cannot be used to get exclusivity on products. Rather, patents can only protect novel approaches to how a product is made or served.

The patent system is designed to protect R&D costs exclusively, not some get out of jail card for anti trust. Of course, the patent office isn’t perfect, the system does get abused in anti-competitive ways. But in the end, it’s rare that that results in less consumer choice, because of licensing deals.