cyd

Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.

Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.

This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.

It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.

How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.

That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.

Spez won’t agree to the API demand, because it’s a matter of ego and credibility for him now. His whole big shot tech-bro CEO shtick depends on ramming this through, like his hero Elon.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

They’re okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can’t use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids’ trinkets, because they contain lead.

Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.

The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to “design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content” and “publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training”. The devil is in the details, and I’m not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.

Well, here’s my sorry. From my understanding, the EU wants (say) foundation model builders to certify that their models meet certain criteria. That’s a nice idea in itself, but there’s a risk of this certification process being too burdensome for FOSS developers of foundation models. Worse still, would the FOSS projects end up being legally liable for downstream uses of their models? Don’t forget that, unlike proprietary software with their EULAs taking liability off developers, FOSS places no restrictions on how end users use the software (in fact, any such restrictions generally make it non-FOSS).

One major issue that concerns me about these regulations is whether free and open source AI projects will be left alone, or whether they’ll be liable to jumping through procedural hoops that individuals, or small volunteer teams, can’t possibly deal with. I have seen contradictory statements coming from different parties.

Regulations of this sort always bring the risk of entrenching big, deep-pocketed companies that can just shrug and deal with the rules, while smaller players get locked out. We have seen that happening in some of the previous EU tech regulations.

In the AI space, I think the major risk is not AI helping create disinformation, invading privacy, etc. Frankly, the genie is already out of the bottle on many of these fronts. The major worry, going forward, is AI models becoming monopolized by big companies, with FOSS alternatives being kept in a permanently inferior position by lack of resources plus ill-targeted regulations.

I run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (both workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.

Public companies have a duty to protect value for their shareholders, among other obligations. This is actually not an unreasonable rule of thumb, because public companies have a multitude of owners (the shareholders) who can’t always be polled on what the company should do, but one thing they have in common is that they want their investment to make money.

Private companies can do whatever the owner wants. In Twitter’s case, the only other party with standing to sue Musk for destruction of shareholder value is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (Kingdom Holdings), which declined to relinquish its stake when Musk took Twitter private. The Saudis probably don’t want to raise a public stink (i) it’s a loss of face, and (ii) they have more money than they know what to do with, anyway.

That’s very true. That’s why Musk was talking up his plans to turn Twitter into some kind of super-profitable super-app (a la WeChat)… but that’s definitely not materializing, because how many people would trust Musk’s Twitter enough to use it as a super-app?

I think Twitter will have to end up defaulting on those loans. The banks will be pissed off, but they’ll have to work out some kind of face-saving deal with Musk to write off the loans, because at that point only a masochist would want to run/own the company. But who knows.

A lot of stories like this have been coming out, but it’s not clear that they foretell the doom of Twitter as so many people are assuming (or anticipating).

Donald Trump’s various businesses showed long ago that large companies aren’t necessarily harmed by shitty practices like not paying bills. And mid-2010s Reddit showed that a social media platform, once established, can survive terrible technical deficiencies (remember when Reddit was crashing daily?), simply because people tend to be too lazy to move.

Most likely outcome is that Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego.