I’d say history. But it’s not even that. The US is at war with venezuela and always has been. Just kidding it’s eurasia. Nah haha but they are waging economic warfare. Well Trump did and Biden continues to.

So should you believe the US claims? You’ll have to as your ideological master programmer of course. It’s not like you could just use historical facts and make some clear logical deductions!

So yeah it’s ONLY a matter of ideology and opinion /s

Oh btw Trump also really won the last US election and Biden isn’t even President. It’s not like these things are different in any way - one side is right, the other is wrong, and it’s only a matter of opinion.

I’ve recently read a comment saying the great Chinese firewall somehow “learns” that you are using a VPN. So people doing quick tests “yep VPN works” but then a little later it doesn’t work anymore. No clue if that is true though.

I think people are going a bit overboard with the reddit hate. I used the site for over a decades, learned a lot and had a lot of laughts and fun and gripes. To want to “burn it down” now because of api and ai stuff is understandable, but seems just vindictive. What public good is supposed to be achieved with this?

Using IP laws to legislate this could also lead to disastrous consequences, like the monopolization of effective AI. If only those with billions in capital can make use of these tools, while free or open source models become illegal to distribute, it could mean a permanent power grab. If the capitalists end up controlling the “means of generation” and we the common folk can’t use it.

Hmm 😇 The afterlife might be a good way to make it up. Have you seen “The Good Place”?

I agree somewhat with that but: only if the starting conditions were completely random. Otherwise if you set the conditions to be similar to what we know about humanity, you’d have to anticipate both cooperation and competition and parasitic behavior leading to wars and atrocities. And that also assumes that they actually have a chance to grow up for the suffering to have any meaning. If you just turn it off your science experiment at some point you have invalidated the argument.

Either way when you’re playing god you’d have to morally justify yourself. Imagine you create a universe that eventually becomes an eternal hell where trillions of sentient beings are tortured through something like “I have no mouth but I must scream”.

You’d look at things like the holocaust or million other atrocities and say “this is fine”. Also you can’t assume they’d die out naturally in 5 billion years, they might colonize other planets and go on and on and on until you pull the switch. They might have created beautiful art and things and preserved much of their history for future generation and then poof all gone. What if they would find out? Would you say “I created them, therefor I own them and can do with my toys as I please”. Really?

My main argument would be that it would be incredibly unethical. And any intelligent civilization powerful enough to create a simulation like this would be more likely than not to be ethical, and if it was this unethical it is unlikely to exist for long. Those would be two potential reasons why the “infinite regress” in simulation theory is unlikely.

The Starmaker is an interesting exploration into simulation theory.

DDG recently started to exclude terms from my search query and returns more random garbage and a “search only …” link. So often I search, find nothing, then realize DDG messed up again. Really not sure why it’s doing that.

Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.

Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.

So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.

You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.

Rip INTERWEBZ 2023 just preserve it how it was before it got sick

what do you think when you read stories like these

Honestly they are so fucking sad I try to avoid reading them. Another example is this one: She Was Denied an Abortion After Roe Fell. This Is a Year in Her Family’s Life.

The monsters have been trying to do the same things in Europe though, UK has underfunded the NHS and healthcare in Germany is in deliberate decline too.

We need the equivalent of keeping the phone lines and phone numbers compatible though. So that all the vendors that are on amazon can use a commonly shared internet protocol to also sell on other platforms, otherwise the network effects are lost and make splitting them up and true competition impossible.

Yeah. I think social media should be seen as virtual worlds that created new types of “alternative nation” that are controlled by these “cloud capitalists”. They decide the rules of conduct and eCommerce and the shape of society.

Cloud serfs and cloud proles pick up your digital pitchforks and techno-rampage!!! 🤑

Interesting, it seems so, but the DMA isn’t “marketed” as such or explains the problem and doesn’t suggest plausible solutions. What is needed I think is a kind of federation for marketplaces, so they need to use some kind of open protocol that allows others to use the same network of vendors etc. But it seems you could build on top of the DMA.

I do think a new term makes sense because these platforms both scale ultra large so “explode” in market power, and also can’t just be broken up using anti-trust laws because then the network effects of large network effects vanish (this is true for amazon and social media). So it is something different because of those new properties. I think federation and open protocols might be the answer to this.

Federate Amazon! Imagine a kind of protocol / standard to exchange prices, descriptions, images, sale conditions, guarantees etc similar to activity pub. then you could use the same network of vendors as amazon.

But it probably needs more regulations because amazon is so huge and powerful to destroy competitors.

Maybe also federate / split up fulfillment warehouses.

Have you read his book? I’d be curious what he suggests. I’ve just thought that if you could legislate to make marketplaces use some kind of “activitypub” protocol, you could federate them similar to social media. A protocol and open standard to exchange prices, descriptions, order conditions etc. So people could use alternatives to amazon/ebay and still have access to the large network of vendors. That would break the digital fiefdom. Is that something he discusses?

The new EU payment directive also finally created instant wire transfers, so it’s now possible to directly and instantly pay vendors without having to pay a tax to paypal.

Maybe the next thing is going to be delivery services with drones or self driving “micro vans”.

I’d think that large countries and groups of countries (e.g. USA, the EU) could implement their own mega marketplaces, leaching off much less money

Exactly! I’ve been saying this for a while that certain market places like amazon and ebay should become more public utility. I think craig’s list is the rare example of something actually owned by a person that is not just optimizing for profit. Social media should similarly be federated, which now with e.g. lemmy and mastodon seems much more plausible.

Another example is that the recent payment service directive has finally created instant wire transfers - e.g. I can wire money instantly to a shop without having to wait a few days or needing a payment processor. It’s insane that it took 30 years for instant payments. So maybe the 1.5% to 3% tax that paypal sucks out of ecommerce economy can finally end.

So maybe marketplaces could be federated as well and supported by regulations. For example some kind of open standard to exchange price info and order conditions etc. so that different services can use the same network of vendors and the customer can easily move from amazon or ebay to other alternatives without loosing the market network.

So if there is techno-feudalism it definitely can be dismantled politically. Thanks for your comment, and thanks to Varoufakis - this is actually a very valuable insight I believe. I remember like 10 years ago people started talking about the monopolies rising out of the internet and how they should be broken up. But it was clear to me that classic anti-trust measures wouldn’t work, because there are network effects that are incredibly valuable. You don’t want to split up facebook because 10 separate social media are much less useful. But maybe now we’re at a point where we have the arguments (techno-feudalism) and the solutions (federation and regulations like a protocol like activitypub) to suggest actual policy! 🙂