Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

There’s some truth to that. Unions got us the 8 hour work day, after decades of strikes made bloody by companies and cops. Unions were also working on establishing a “weekend”, for decades, and only making slow, incremental progress.

When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was able to make cars more efficiently and quickly. But, it was backbreaking work. Many of Ford’s workers quit after only a few months. Because training new workers was inefficient, Ford decided it was in his company’s best interest to offer the workers more pay and more time off. Workers liked that deal, so his turnover rate dropped and his factories ran more efficiently.

Eventually he settled on a 40 hour work week with 2 weekend days. He claimed it was for a more noble purpose, of giving workers more money and time off so they could spend more money on everything, including his cars. Maybe it was just a purely selfish calculation though, that to run his factories as efficiently as possible he needed to make the conditions and compensation such that people would stick around and not force him to train up new workers so often.

The history of that is pretty straightforward:

• In 1886, the Chicago labour unions organized for protests on May 1 to demand an 8 hour day
• On May 3rd strikers tried to confront strike breakers, police fired into the crowd of strikers, killing some
• An anti-police, anti-big-business rally was organized for the next day in Haymarket Square
• The May 4th rally was mostly peaceful, but there were police standing by
• At 10:30 the police moved in en masse to break up the rally
• As the police advanced, someone (it was never determined who) threw a homemade bomb into the path of the advancing police, killing 1 and injuring many
• There was a huge gun fight, involving some protesters and a lot of police, many more people were killed, including police, many shot by their own fellow cops
• The bomb throwing was blamed on the anarchists, the anarchist leaders were rounded up, found guilty in quick and massively unfair show-trials, and hanged
• There was massive backlash against the unions and the anarchists, and the cause of the 8 hour work day was massively set back
• Labour unions kept fighting for an 8 hour day, and decided to keep the May 1st date for their actions, with the first being 4 years later on May 1, 1890, but this time it was international, with strikes in Europe, Central and South America
• As a movement representing workers, communist parties around the world adopted May Day as a significant day
• After WWII, the US was in full-on anti-communist mode, and May Day came to be seen as a communist holiday, so they moved it to September 1st and made May 1st “Loyalty Day” instead.

Somewhat relevant: when I first searched for those videos I searched for “robot that tests Ikea chairs by sitting on them” or something. I got lots of results, but every one of them was about robots that were building furniture, not testing it. To actually get the results I wanted I needed to say “furniture testing machine”.

So, I guess the Internet doesn’t think those are actually robots, so they don’t worry about their purpose.

Here’s a video from 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_gyzshNPQ

And another one from 2012 testing cupboards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW6RsT4w2hY

Ooh, here’s ine from 2018 where a machine hit 9,999,999 tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMB-qG_x8o

On the subject of devices lasting a long time, does anybody remember when Ikea used to have displays in their stores where you could see a machine testing a piece of furniture over and over? Like, they had one that simulated someone sitting down in a chair over and over again, or one that simulated a drawer being opened over and over again.

Those machines were great. They should bring them back.

Start a tech company. They spawn garages as part of their “backstory” stage.

Nice.

Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.

They’re not going to patch the game with an update that removes the TOS, privacy policy and code of conduct now that the multiplayer elements are no longer relevant.

It makes it easier for your lawyer to organize the briefing document she prepares for you when she’s suggesting whether or not you agree to the terms of the contracts.

What, not everybody has their lawyer look over contracts they’re about to agree to? What, so they just act as their own lawyer and carefully review these legal documents without the benefit of a law degree? That sounds risky!

OP says it’s a single-player game, but it looks like that’s not the case. If it is multiplayer, a code of conduct is 100% necessary. The rest seems pretty standard for something online: privacy policy, EULA and TOS.

I wish EULAs would go away, or at least be heavily restricted in what they can force you to agree with, but they’re standard.

TOS is useful to define what you can expect out of their online service.

I also wish there were privacy laws, so the Privacy Policy didn’t force you to agree to absurd terms, but here we are.

Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.

NFTs were bought with crypto, which had various hidden costs, scams and thefts, so it’s basically the same.

True, but while you’re still paying those timeshare fees, you still have access to the place.

The real difference is that a time share is never thought of as an investment where you buy low and sell high. It’s thought of as getting a good deal on something you plan to use. For it to be similar to an NFT it would have to be something like a dude in Nebraska buys a time share in Australia and then tries to make money from Australians or something. AFAIK almost everybody who buys time shares does it because they plan to use the place as a vacation property and actually do use it that way, at least for a while.

Yes, any journalist who uses that term should be relentlessly mocked. Along with terms like “Grok admitted” or “ChatGPT confessed” or especially any case where they’re “interviewing” the LLM.

These journalists are basically “interviewing” a magic 8-ball and pretending that it has thoughts.

No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.

If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.

Gambling / FOMO. The more informed people at least realized they were gambling. The less informed thought they were missing out on a big money-making scheme and that everybody else was getting rich except them.

The two aren’t even remotely comparable. A timeshare may not be as valuable as you thought it was, but it exists and you can use it. An NFT is basically an entry in a star registry, but the people think (or at least thought) they actually own the stars.

Pop: I have a crush on a boy. World broken? Sorry, um… I don’t follow the news.

Gangsta Rap: I’m the king of this 'hood, and don’t give a shit about anything happening outside of it.

Country: My truck is my whole world, and the world is broken.

Classical: I will describe the great forces at play that are breaking the world using music.