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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

    Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

    Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

    In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

    Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

    These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.


  • Big difference is a modern sailboat like a ketch or sloop can maintain a straight course as much as 45 degrees into the wind. A Victorian era square rigger is greatly more limited with a range about 60 degrees off either side of downwind. A kite would be even more limited, probably within 45 degrees so it would only be useful when going mostly downwind. Still if it’s cheap and easy to deploy it’s free energy when it can be used. An interesting parallel is the spinnaker sail used on a typical sailboat flies much like a kite and can only be used within a similar downwind range. It’s a very powerful sail when it can be deployed.






  • Old English from a millennia ago sounds like a foreign language, even early modern English from Shakespeare’s time sounds pretty odd. So it depends on when the translation was done. With English it’s common for newly invented words to get popularized and end up in the dictionary. The same kind of thing happens with grammar. Conversely people still sometimes use obsolete words from early modern English as a way to emphasize a statement.

    The grammar of that quote may be due to the English translation of the time or something he simply interpreted in his own way. It sounds grammatically off for contemporary English, but that’s relative to the time frame. I imagine the English we speak today may sound odd to someone a few hundred years from now.


  • I mean that’s all I can really do.

    Unfortunately when my bank or other critical institution rejects Firefox for failure to use attestation, I can’t even do that. I’ll be forced to use Chrome. Firefox would have to adopt WEI to remain compatible. In that case I can use Firefox, but it would be the same as using Chrome.

    I’d say the monopoly Google has with Chrome is way more threatening than in the early 2000’s with MS and IE. That threat resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit, but not a peep from any government about the destruction Google is doing.




  • This is the problem for me. If my bank or other critical institution decides to refuse me access with Firefox, I can’t use Firefox. This is the crux of the issue. Google is creating a browser monopoly with it’s market dominance and attestation scheme.

    MS tried to exert control in the early 2000’s with its IE dominance and was thwarted by an anti-trust lawsuit. Google will probably skate on this one. Nowadays the consumer is only a resource to be plundered. The customer is shit.



  • What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

    Biggest tool in the history of tools.

    Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

    When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

    I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.


  • Relying on “the people” to uphold consumer rights usually doesn’t make much ground. We’ve already lost so much we’ll never get back. People are just too busy dealing with their own lives to be concerned about it. This is how corporations get away with what they do. The public lets it happen. As sure as the sun rises every day, corporations like Google and Apple will continually extend their reach.

    It think it was unusual the US government perused an anti-trust suit over the MS browser monopoly early 2000s. The climate is much more forgiving now. I’d be surprised if we ever see a lawsuit like that again, as deserving as it may be.


  • I think we need to read between the lines here.

    I honestly think he’s intentionally driving Twitter into the ground. Thing is he can’t just fire everyone and shut down the servers or he won’t get the tax write-off. He’s burying Twitter in a way that maintains tax status. So in a way that’s smart, but also stupid he spent what he did only out of spite.

    What he’s doing to Twitter is like a jumbo jet pilot that commits suicide by crashing the plane (that’s actually happened). Why do you need to take all those innocent people with you. Just go jump off a building, same end without killing a bunch of innocents.

    Really his destruction of the platform is about control, he has some kind of personal beef with Twitter so he used his power and money to kill the whole thing. He’s taking his bat and ball and going home.


  • In the last few years he’s done stuff in the public eye that made people question their feelings about him. When he was only known by the companies he ran he seemed like a decent guy. Then the public got to know him better through his ramblings in the media.

    I think this latest business with Twitter was about using his money and power to intentionally kill it for personal reasons and take the tax write-off. That’s created a lot of angst for the users and inspired a lot of hate.

    Personally I feel the guy is a total wingnut, always has been. I just didn’t have enough exposure to him to make that determination. They say there’s a fine line between genius and insanity, but there’s little doubt now which side of the line he falls on.


  • Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.