Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we’ve proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don’t cut it, so I’m in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I’m essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

• Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
• Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
• The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
• The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

I am unable to speak using contractions.

Same. I am anxious that the alien dopplegangers will figure this out, though.

Decent sometimes wins over indecent. And sometimes (certainly far too often) it doesn’t.

To those of us spared, when decency won, it was worth it.

You make some great points.

For anyone having trouble wrapping their head around doing this analysis for themselves, I’ll share mine:

1. I seriously doubt my personal operational security (OpSec) has kept my own federal government out of my business. I might be one of the few people who could have a chance, but I’m not interested in spending my energy that way.

I like to think my OpSec has kept foreign governments out of my affairs, but I’m honestly not sure. I know my government’s rules, because I read my local laws. There’s a lot of governments whose rules-of-engagement I don’t even know what are, and I’m confident that some of my “someone could probably” conspiracy theories are science fact somewhere in the world. Guessing which/how/when is a lot harder, than just suspecting/assuming I’ve missed something.

2. I’m confident that my OpSec is good enough that large corporations know that I exist, but are confused about me. I like it that way because I’m 90% sure they’re colluding to keep my salary lower, and that pisses me off. Thankfully big corporations aren’t motivated to do much more than make it inconvenient for me to evade their net.

3. I’m less confident about smaller businesses, honestly. Like anyone, I use a local dentist and barber. I didn’t choose my dentist or barber for their Cybersecurity practices.

I’ve run almost every OS.

My daily driver is Debian. It’s practical, efficient, stable, and with just a few commands clipped out of blog articles, it morphs into whatever weird silly thing I happen to need it to be, this year.

I don’t believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations… Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.

Exactly!

And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.

I’m inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I’m not selling anything, I’m allowed to say “if”. Heh.

Yeah. Current generation learning models can do impressive things in the hands of a skilled engineer, but Elon is leading a round of class warfare against skilled engineers right now.

Shareholders need to decide which they really want to bet on to win.

Makes sense. I’m not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.

I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.

Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.

That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better.

It’s almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.

Buckle up folks, we’re going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.

It’s so great.

And the scene is even better on a rewatch.

Yeah. They do still sell Frisbees, though, at least.

Does “Breaking News” on Dropout.tv count…

“There’s no shortage of air!”

Yeah. This is such a better experience than past community tools I have used.

In particular, I hope we can attract the Do-It-Yourself repair community, before the current platforms lock all of that content away.

Yeah.

Annecdotaly, Dropout.tv has a good number of LGBTQ employees, seems conscious not to shit on people, and has a growing library of stand up.

Why would Microsoft fire an employee for holding a vigil, it’s not like they …

…called “No Azure for Apartheid”

Oh. Thanks for drawing attention to this, Microsoft! I appreciate that they’re so willing to invoke the Streisand Effect.

I hope those employees land somewhere where they build something that costs Microsoft a lot of profit.