You clearly haven’t read the full essay.

So long as the capital markets were willing to continue funding loss-making future monopolists, your neighbors were going to make the choice to shop "the wrong way." As small, local businesses lost those customers, the costs they had to charge to make up the difference would go up, making it harder and harder for you to afford to shop "the right way."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/

Food for your thought.

I don’t know, to quote someone I read here: “The world shits when the US farts”

US electing an authoritarian might encourage authoritarians all around the world (even more)

My rational side wants to see Harris win, but the anarchist in me wants to see Trump win, just to see what would happen. Not living in the US, obviously.

Trump winning could be a disaster for the whole world since US is such a major player in basically everything, but my anarchist side does not listen.

“Vote with your wallet” means more money gets you more votes.

Some users leaving Reddit/instagram/twitter is not a problem, especially considering network effects, but some advertisers leaving is a crisis.

Safari, until apple’s stance on privacy worsens.

Someone should start a rumor that this is an in-game screenshot from GTA VI

If you’re a fan of the idea, you’re either a nazi or really really ignorant/naive/misinformed.

So I’ll assume the latter and try to briefly explain to you why it’s so bad: people bad, authoritarianism inevitable, results in ‘oops you’re not “human” because you lack/have X, you must die’

Humanity, just like nature, thrives with diversity. Eugenics starts with “getting rid of nasty diseases” but it’s always 1 bad classification of “disease” away from genocide.

It’s a cop, not a child. All it takes is for them to connect your phone to an external device.

Good points, you made clear this is no black/white case, it depends on how much we can trust cloudflare. It’s a US based for-profit company so the answer is “not much”.

However, if you check the link, you’ll see that they’re able to distinguish AI bot scrapping from other forms of scrapping. They also give the website owners a choice, so if it’s about principles, owners can choose to boycott, as most are already doing with robots.txt, which AI bros have no respect for.

Cloudflare does not benefit from a handful of websites getting all the traffic, and their track record is good so far. They also don’t profit from people visiting websites with a browser, they don’t show/own ads. To me, they have enough credit for me to believe they can protect open web.

We’ll see how this take ages though. I still won’t put all my eggs in a single basket.

https://www.theverge.com/24121399/cloudflare-matthew-prince-internet-free-speech-8chan-ukraine-aristotle-decoder-interview

Ikea’s are nice too

“We can scrape open internet” is such a CEO take. I’m no fan of Cloudflare but what they’re doing here is good for open web and bad for AI bros

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/

It works well for me. But let me paste it here anyway:

Chat control is back on the agenda of EU governments. EU governments are to express their position on the latest proposal on 23 September. EU Ministers of the Interior are to adopt the proposal on 10/11 October. Latest update of 12 September…

In June we managed to stop the unprecedented plan by an extremely narrow “blocking minority” of EU governments: Chat control proponents achieved 63.7% of the 65% of votes threshold required in the Council of the EU for a qualified majority.

Several formerly opposed governments such as France have already given up their opposition. Several still critical governments are only asking for small modifications (e.g. searching for “known content” only or excluding end-to-end encryption) which would still result in mass searches and leaks of our private communications. Therefore there is a real threat that the required majority for mass scanning of private communications may be achieved at any time under the current Hungarian presidency (Hungary being a supporter of the proposal).

That is why we now need to get involved and raise our voices to our governments and raise awareness in the wider population.
→ Previously supportive governments must be convinced to change their minds
→ Critical governments need to be pushed to demand comprehensive changes, as proposed by the European Parliament, and not just minor changes to the proposal.

In the absence of such fundamental revision, the proposal should be rejected altogether.

JARVIS is AI. LLMs are superpowered autocorrect. We don’t have anything close to AI yet.

This seems more and more like an uphill battle. It’s proposed, somehow rejected, and comes back again after 6 months. Rinse and repeat until it’s accepted.

I’m not European so I don’t have a vote in this, but it’s pretty concerning

The last link in the post explains it well

He’s voicing what every billionaire and government official already thinks. Call me pessimist but I believe it’s unavoidable. VPNs are seen as “tools to overcome government bans to access illegal websites” in so many countries, hence getting banned. Access to mainstream websites also getting harder and harder when on VPN. People hosting Tor exit nodes are living in fear of police raids.

Even with some little amount of privacy protecting measures, websites start to act strangely or do not work, and the amount of websites like this increases every day. As protecting our privacy becomes a bigger and bigger effort, more people will give up, strengthening the arguments against it. Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

My favorite character is Goku from original DB. IMO he got dumber and dumber as the series went on, and he lost his original character a bit too. DBZ is cool and all but original DB was on another level.

RIP Akira Toriyama.

This. To make the claim in the title is to not get what steam deck is about.

The solution is to have two steam decks! When one is gaming, the other can be streaming

You probably realized I love steam deck