The past is a good reference to learn from, but it can’t be a blueprint for the present. There are different circumstances between then and now which complicate things, like the aforementioned big money in politics.

I think the worry is that they are capable of doing to Lemmy what they did to Reddit: regurgitating content or producing astroturfed content while appearing like authentic users.

The real TIL is always in the comments. Cheers!

There are definitely bots mining fediverse content as well. When the Reddit exodus was ongoing, there were entire Lemmy instances with no users but bots. Not posting or reposting, just…watching and waiting, I guess.

Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.

For what it’s worth, both can be true. An economy can be both strong and precarious, such as many world markets in the 1920’s right before the great depression caused the economic collapse of the west.

The tariffs thing though is a joke. Not to the people who will be hurt by it, of course, but the idea that it will accomplish anything meaningful. It’s just a scapegoat tactic to blame foreign powers for a weakening dollar.

There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.

But your normie friends and family would fit in a lot better if they simply read some T H E O R Y.

Until they change the name and voice and have a whole fleet of elderly AI chatbots.

Depends on how one frames it. It’s not the Stallman-defined “GNU+Linux” pureblood OS, but it nevertheless is built from a modified version of the Linux kernel.

And like any OS it can be made private and secure with the right components…or it can be cracked open like a data-farming egg without them.

I guess I can just take the low-hanging fruit and invoke Ubuntu as an alternative example, which was once something of a Linux entry point but has become more than fine collecting user data.

Ironically a Linux-derived OS.

It’s always good practice to be careful who you trust with your data. Open =/= private. More choices helps, though.

TSMC hates this one easy trick!

Well…you’re not wrong.

It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.

Just build one, cheaper to boot.

Sure, not arguing that. But there’s no ideology that can completely preclude violence.

Quakers are just an extension of Christian ideology. Jainism I don’t know enough about, but any religious identity will eventually develop the concept of justified violence when faced with the existential threat of a larger opposing religion.

I don’t think any ideology has not had brutality committed in its name.

There are definitely some bad actors on here who are trying to manipulate the election in Trump’s favor. The sort that claim to be leftists and come to every US politics-related thread (or even ones that aren’t related to the US until they make it so) with their list of talking points about why no one should vote for Harris, but conveniently have no answers for who deserves votes more.

The popular argument I’ve heard is that they have a vertical integration model which has been deemed monopolistic within other industries in the past.

The common example that would have been used is the old Hollywood studio system, when studios not only owned their lots where the movies were made, but they handled all of the distribution, owned most of the theaters where the films would premiere, owned their own film formats, and locked their big-name stars into contracts which had strict non-compete agreements.

It wasn’t impossible to be an independent theater owner and have the ability to choose what films you wanted to show, but it was very hard and required accepting a number of conditions:

• You will pay more for movies than the studio-owned theaters effectively do, which means your tickets need to be more expensive to pay your costs.
• You are subjected to “block booking”, where you can’t show only popular movies, you are also forced to buy a studio’s less popular films as bundles and give them appropriate screen time or the studios won’t sell.
• You also need to buy a studio’s proprietary projection equipment, because it is made intentionally incompatible with the formats of other studios.

The studio system was eventually deemed monopolistic by the US Supreme Court in their ruling US v. Paramount, and that allowed independent theaters to thrive and for artists to switch to contract work without the strict non-compete agreements. But I have to say “the common example that would have been used,” because the conservative-stacked Supreme Court revisited their ruling in US v. Paramount that banned the vertical integration model in Hollywood and decided it was no longer needed, so studios are once again free to resume those old practices if they wish.

So in the case of Apple, the monopoly criticism applies to their vertical integration model which draws some parallels to the old Hollywood studio system that was once deemed monopolistic:

• Apple designs and produces their own devices.
• Apple produces their own operating systems, which are exclusive to those devices.
• Apple produces their own suite of core apps, which are given preferential treatment by their operating systems.
• Apple develops their own technology standards, which are not available to third parties without additional licensing fees (e.g. the Lightning connector, up until the EU forced them to start adopting USB-C).
• Apple hosts their own app store, which is the only app distribution method allowed on their mobile platforms.
• Apple requires third-party apps to agree to their store’s terms to be published on the platform, which prohibits any pricing model in which Apple does not get a cut.

For third-party app developers, it means that even if you have your own revenue model beyond Apple’s involvement, you are not allowed to extend that to your iOS app without giving Apple their cut, which is why you see so many apps now just declaring that they are “for subscribers” without allowing you to subscribe in the app or giving instructions for where to subscribe. And it’s not possible to publish an app on iOS without going through Apple’s store and agreeing to their business model because Apple does not allow third-party app stores and heavily restricts sideloading.

Because Apple also gives preferential treatment to their own apps, it is hard to be “as good” as their own offerings, and there will always be a risk of Apple deciding to make some new category of app for a use case that third-parties currently satisfy but may get shut out of.

I guess it could be said that Edge has an unfair…edge?