In a two party world where one of those parties has been captured by a fascist movement, there is no "political neutrality". You're either pro-fascist or anti-fascist. And if you care about rights at all, including free speech, then the correct alignment is anti-fascist.
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.
Github's two biggest selling points were its feature set (Pull Requests, Actions) and its reliability.
With the latter no longer a thing, and with so many other people building on Github's innovations, I'm starting to seriously consider alternatives. Not something I would have said in the past, but when Github's outages start to seriously affect my ability to do my own work, I can no longer justify continuing to use them.
Github needs to get its shit together. You can draw a pretty clear line between Microsoft deciding it was all in on AI and the decline in Github's service quality. So I would argue that for Github to gets its shit back together, it needs to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.
I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.
It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.
To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.
Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.
It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.
The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.
So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.
Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.
The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.
I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.
Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.
Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.
Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.
Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.
It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.
One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.
But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.
This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!
See, now this is an excellent use of LLMs (if we're going to be using them at all). Low stakes if it gets shit wrong, but can provide some really useful and surprising answers!
One request, it would be nice to not have to add Goodreads, since I don't use it. I've love to be able to enter a couple of book titles or an author and just get recommendations!
This all comes down to "We can't have nice things in America because of our toxic mix of individualism and capitalism."
Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.
Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.
It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.
This is really unreasonable entitlement. Expecting perpetually free cloud services of any kind is wholely unreasonable. Clouds have monthly costs. The only reason companies like Apple can offer them is because they are very well capitalized. They offer them to addict you. Small companies and startups that don't have access to cheap capital cannot afford to do that, and it's much more honest for them to not do that!
Do they sell one that is functional without the cloud though.
I’m not buying any device that requires a paid subscription to a cloud to get full functionality since if that goes away so does the ability to use the device.
A policy that’s served me well having friends IRL who keep getting bitten by services/IoT changing/going away/end of life.
Sell me a functional product with a subscription and I’m interested, everything else, no way.
I feel like the real opportunity for e-ink displays is white boards. I would love a 4 ft x 3 ft e-ink display that I could mount on the wall with calendar and note widgets and that I could also draw on like a white board.
Plus, remote teams would really benefit from a shared whiteboard device. A device with infinite scroll in both directions and shared editing. I mean, really adding infinite scroll and collaborative editing to existing remarkable devices would cover that use case.
It also matters whether we are considering it a static $10 million or considering reality.
In reality, if you have $10 million, you put it in the S&P500 and make an average of 10% ($1 million) per year. Far more than inflation and more than enough to cover those things you're talking about unless you have a pretty extreme medical condition or very expensive hobbies.
I agree with this directionally, however I think you'll make more like 7.2% per year, and inflation will be about 2.5% per year. You'll also likely pay about 30% in federal and local taxes in the USA on it since you're actually selling it to live on it (more on taxes later). So you'll pay 2.2% in taxes. So on average you'll get 7.2 - (2.5 + 2.2) = 2.5% of income. If you have $10M, you can withdraw about 250K a year in today's dollars every year. i.e next year you can withdraw 256.3K or so, and keep doing this to keep your current standard of living. In down years you may want to adjust / tighten belt a tiny bit to not veer off track too much. And you can get cute with taxes but not recommended. That loan interest will add up over time, and when it's time to actually pay those loans, you'll still sell stock and pay taxes on it, unless your offspring inherit both.. and who knows what the laws will be then.
Agreed, but would caveat that the historical market returns happened as the world's dominant economic and technical powerhouse. The current trajectory is looking different, to put it mildly. The US is undermining nearly every advantage that led to such strong growth. Barring some massive pivot in the near future, medium term economic growth will most likely be lower.
despite some pretty amazing technical innovations
pocket calculator and microcomputer (Altair 8800), first email, pong, floppy disks (they were the standard for 20 years), VCR, cell phone (1973 Motorola), barcode scanners, rubiks cube, ...
Nominally S&P500 did 23% in the 70s, and 2.08% annualised, but financial returns are not just the stock prices, they're also dividends.
If you include and reinvest dividends, you'd have made 83% in the decade and 6.2% per year.
Its true inflation was high though, and an investment in Jan 1970 would've in real terms returned -1.1% a year after adjusting for inflation. If you continued investing equal amounts each year from 1970 to 1980, it'd actually be about -0.5%.
But no investment would've meant you lost half of all your money due to 7% average inflation, so investing would've been a pretty good idea, offsetting almost all inflation in the worst decade 50 years ago.
Also it's common knowledge to do a stock/bond split. Bond returns fared a bit better. -- and it should be said, the following decade inflation came way down and in nominal terms the S&P500 did +364% with dividends reinvested.
I do agree with your general point though, you can't just rely on a 10% annual average and spend that amount. The commonly referenced safe withdrawal rate (WR) of 4% is 2.5x less than the average S&P500 return for a good reason (based on a ton of monte carlo sims that indeed would lead to disastrous results at 10% WR in the 1970s).
Except the market is a bubble. It's going to pop within 10 years as the boomers retire and die. Thats assuming low inflation. With significant inflation the younger folks might afford to prop it up.
The same, in theory, applies to social media. But they've all enshittified in very similar ways now that they've captured their audiences. In theory there is intense competition between Meta, Twitter, TikTok, etc, but in actuality the same market forces drive the same enshittification across all of those platforms. They have convergent interests. If they all force more ads and suggested posts on you, they all make more money and you have no where to go.
People are reasonably worried that the same will happen to AI.
Note that the comment you are replying to is speculating about the (not so distant) future. Be assured that companies will try their best to lock customers in.
One option is to add adverts to the generated output, and making the product cheaper than the competition. Another is to have all your cloud data preprocessed with LLMs in a non-portable way, so that changing will incur a huge cost.
More and more of the social networks are just the algorithm though - tiktok, X, Facebook, etc. How much of your feed does the average use personally know now?
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.