We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.

Holes and dots.

For some reason I memory holed the first distro I used. There’s only vague recollection. I think it was SUSE or something. When Ubuntu came around I tried Linux again. That’s when I started to get the hang of things.

It’s a rich peoples game. Those with mere pittance to invest will not end up with much even if they live a very long natural life and do not touch a penny of whatever they could invest until their death bed. Even then they’ve have to wait until the very end for that pittance. The whole thing is based on having a enough wealth such that small percentage returns equate to a lot in absolute value. A small or even larger than average percentage return from relatively little wealth is still very little.

To change any of this would be to change the underlying issues of unequal distribution of wealth. The stock markets are derivative. If more had wealth then obviously they’d be investing more. It’s not the other way around.

Some believe they can cheat code their way to the other side by gambling which is not investing. Seems to have become popular again in recent times after certain cultural phenomenons. That again does not change underlying issues. A few lottery winners and many more silent losers only serves to amplify inequality.

I’m pretty sure Shield happened because the Tegra chips were used in infotainment designs. It wasn’t just because of Switch as oft repeated.

He’s sleepy from all that hard work.

The internet made a whole lot of things a big deal. Then convinced guys they were the victims. Then filled their heads with extremist ideologies. What a wild past 10-15 years.

Isn’t this generally how the big tech firms generate dark profiles on people? Of the people who don’t explicitly exist on their database. Take the intersection of data from family events. The people not in their database of known profiles are also likely family. Do the same for friend events. Take the intersection of those peoples interests. You’ll be knowing a lot about someone who never told you anything about themselves.

You can run but you can’t hide. Crazy times we live in.

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

Reddit is inside the walls of enshittification. Reddit kowtows to the techbro narrative. Dissenting voices do appear there as they aren’t a full blown censorship. By and large the reddit userbase has historically been in aligned with big tech.

Same shit different era. Always gotta be persecuting somebody.

Also when Silicon Valley copies and steals they get praised as revolutionary innovators.

What are they doing that makes software in the Mac universe that much more memory efficient?

I went from 8GB to 32GB on my laptop. It was second only to going from HDD to SSD. The difference was nowhere near as apparent though. My usage experience went from being able to tell when the kernel was hitting swap space to not having to care at all anymore about the how the kernel is doing with memory management.

You’re assuming your own country is impervious to climate change. It’s the dirty poors bringing their problems to you, right? How dare they.

They talk as if they’re protecting our privacy when it’s really a global surveillance net. The spin doctoring is insane.

Why does this have to be a two sides thing? Is this underpinned by the culture war bullshit? I can’t tell and I can’t be assed to deep dive into every spat to untangle all the reading between the lines.

I’m surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is “rewiring” children’s brains. Wasn’t it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children’s brains but everyone who uses it? So the evidence now shows that these are benign after all? Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Huffman never had us trapped in infinite scroll fine tuning the knobs to keep us teetering on the brink? There’s some discrepancy here.

I don’t see what the divide is anyways. Social media is all about things like violence, structural discrimination, sexual abuse, substance abuse. It’s odd the book author is saying these are non-issues. Seems like he is taking a rather shallow view.

Also teenagers have been using the broader definition of social media for decades.

There is a fascinating cognitive bias where people seem to think because we live in current times it means that history can’t happen to us.

No politics was a rule on many forums. One of the things social media did away with.

The great feedback loop is inevitable.