They were kicked off the internet for ideological reasons in that they do not support the entirely corrupt establishment. The major tech corporations consider themselves above the law and petty little things like constitutions, when they can buy the government and the courts to interpret laws in any fanciful way the lobbyists interpret.

Those fucking arseholes really did forget who kicks who off the internet, the people kick the corporations off the internet by starving their cashflow.

Don't need to tackle all at once, just wipe out one as a warning to the others, starve them out of existence. Besides they are not social media corporations, they are advertising corporations and social media is simply bait and switch, the bait your communicate with other people you like, the switch a corporate main stream media mass marketing, propaganda, manipulation and control, selling wasteful consumption (whilst in the most slimy fashion pretending to be greed 'er' green) in a time of catastrophic climate change, no shits given, the ideological high priest of mass consumption, cheering it on to our shared destruction but psychopathic greed MUST be served first.

Google represents the most interesting target for a mass boycott, shutting down service after service for lack of customers, the bait no longer working.

Me, I'm looking forward to similar tech in the upcoming iRefrigerator.

Unless your friends are C level execs, you will be in the same competition as every other candidate. Otherwise, at best networking gets you is initial interview. And since everyone wants to move there, you are basically in competition with the best in the world. After 10 years there I found little advantage to actually being in the Valey vs someone who wasnt.

Certain other countries are going to have a hard time mimicking the sucess of SV, because the US is a free society with a pretty open immigration policy. Theres also alot of wealth to throw around. China has the wealth, but not the freedom, and while they can copy what US co pqnies have already done, such as AliBaba and WeChat, they havent yet really innovated, Europe might have the freedom, and may some day get there but they lack a cultural homogeneity of the US and alot of companies are tied to their countries of origin.

I think the only real point I woukd agree with here is culture. VCs in places like NYC want to see immediate profitability and ironclad business plans. The investors in SV are more than willing to take a chance on crazy ideas like search engines and social networking sites. Of course the flip side of ths is you get silly ideas like Juicera and cons like Theranos.

But i do think you are going to see some shifts within the US. To a large extent its already happened witn Amazon choosing to locate its new headquarters outside outside of the Valley. And with all the remote work going on, its going to be less important for you workers to have to be in the same physical location. I still think there will be the startup culture but as the suceesful businesses mature to justidy the large premium they bsve to oay their workforce.

You mean enrichment, not refining. Also, I doubt this has anything to do with that. Enrichment isn't all that power intensive. Enriched U-235 isn't even the best way to make nuclear power and its the most intensive and least effective way to make a bomb. In short if you know what you are doing, you don't enrich Uranium no matter what your goal is. Its old tech at this point.

Since humans are infinitely able to deceive themselves, the best you can do is basically the things that allow people to challenge one another's biases. This looks a lot like science (peer review, free exchange of ideas, experimental repeatability, etc). It also looks a lot like democracy (free exchange of ideas, elected representatives, decisions by popular vote). The basic idea is pitting different interests against one another (business against government and vice versa, the press as a check on both of them). Since none of us is able to counteract our own biases (as individuals or groups), if we really want optimal solutions (or to know the truth), we need to have people with different biases weigh in on the matter. Overall, that's the central achievement of liberalism (in the enlightenment sense of the word).

What we are seeing here is one powerful group (big tech) standing up against another powerful group (Trump and associated politicians). Overall, system seems to be working as intended.

"However actions such as gambling, and bit coin mining. Isn't so much a factor of providing something for someone else, but just using resources to try to get money without any real benefit back to society"
Be sure to include Big Tech, Pro Athletics along with the Entertainment Industry and a bunch of others I am forgetting.

No.

They have simply protected themselves from a whole bunch of Hater posts about how "iOS Apps in M1 Macs are a joke."

You know that is exactly what would happen; when the real reason would be that some iOS Apps require some amount of tweaking to be reasonably usable in macOS, and more importantly, that some Apps are really dependent on an OS designed from the ground-up with a touch interface in mind, and really require a separate macOS Application.

Apple didnâ(TM)t have to allow iOS/iPadOS Apps to run on Macs. Afterall, this could suppress sales of iPads somewhat (though probably not iPhones). So, I can hardly blame them from wanting to nip millions of tech support calls and dozens of "iOS compatibility is a joke" Articles and thousands of Forum Postings, just because some Devs. have no intention (or ability) to invest the effort to meet Apple halfway by using the tools that Apple has created for making iOS/iPadOS Apps much more compatible with macOS.

It's hard to keep the scale of big tech in your frontal lobes these days...

''I don't want tech giants tracking my internet usage to where I'm getting creepy as fuck targeted advertising on my computer.''

Then either opt out, or be more selective with the manner or methodology you use to access network resources. It's really not that difficult. It requires you to also read the TOS for resources offered specifically as to who actually owns the data once it leaves your network.

Generally if you aren't paying for a service, you are the product. But I do agree with you that the bloat is unacceptable. Loading a network resource that has 1-5k of consumable content but is 15mb is asbsofuckinglutely ridiculous and has become the norm.

 

You say they are not monopolies and then use the definition of a monopoly to describe them.

The people rarely speak in one voice, and I'm quite certain that this view is only that of a vocal minority. I don't want tech giants tracking my internet usage to where I'm getting creepy as fuck targeted advertising on my computer.

Not only are these advertisements creepy as fuck they are so highly targeted to the point of worthlessness. If I buy a pair of shoes online then I get just bombarded with advertisements for shoes. Those advertisements are creepy and worthless. I bought the shoes I needed, I'm not going to buy another pair for a while, no matter how many more adverts I see.

Wrong.

They are monopolies and there are rules that apply specifically to monopolies. Part of that is to keep them from getting creepy as fuck knowledge about how we live our lives.

As we've learned with the whole free-speech section 230 fiasco; they aren't monopolies. They just hold the largest customer base to a point that using any other service is practically pointless.

The people have spoken. We don't want the government to limit what tech giants are allowed to do. Companies can go else-ware to advertise. It may not reach the largest audience, but that's the price that is paid for freedom. Keep big government out. These social media companies have a right to run their businesses however they want.

Right?

Two of the biggest privacy rapists in tech conspiring together to kill off their competition? I'm shocked!

Catch up? Huawei got the jump on everyone with 5G tech.

China already has world leading tech companies. Phones, semiconductor fabrication, electric vehicles and self driving cars, all sorts of stuff. Huawei laptops are as well made as any Macbook and feature upgradable parts.

It's already too late, not that there was ever much chance of stopping it.

As populations become extremely dense and tech makes it ever easier to disrupt a delicate high tech society normal (which means savage idiocy) human behavior will require high levels of cooperation once limited to small tribes. The only way to scale that cooperation is social coercion, and the best way to deter bad behavior is certainty of apprehension, not harsh punishment which is socially toxic.
The "American" idea of freedom works in the vast spaces of the old US, not in urban hives which are more like submarines where everyone is trapped together intimately. Coming to terms with this and figuring out how to make it less shitty will be difficult.

Technology solutions for social problems are poor solutions. Until a tech can function at or above a conscious human it will never provide a solution; humans themselves largely fail. Fools are ingenious at finding alternative paths around tech solutions; leaving out the clever humans.

People self-"like" or "dislike" without tech helping them protect their fragile egos which the society has made a priority; the tech has helped automate what is already a problem. That is, tech multiplies what is already there; for better or worse. The 80% with the optimist gene tend to only see the better side.

I don't know the solution to the wicked problem that you've posed, but as a HAM radio operator for the past 25 years, I wonder if there are aspects from the amateur radio community that could be referenced as a model. As I listened to one of the evening local nets on 2 meters this evening, I realized that on-air conversations follow strict rules which are enforced by the users themselves, such as no profanity, no commercial use, etc. The discussions are refreshingly civil regardless of topic - although that may be because operators are sensible enough to avoid conversations about religion, politics, and other win-lose issues. All users are licensed and infractions are reported to the FCC who has the ability to levy substantial fines for violations in this code of conduct. So the bottom line is that I'm opposed to externally-imposed censorship, but I am in favor of community adopted standards of behavior. Those standards should cover HOW we communicate, not WHAT can be communicated - which I think is the big problem right now. Much of the discord today and the de-platforming actions take to date by big tech are based on efforts to prevent what can be said online, even if how it is said is delivered respectfully and with civility. That is a path that will lead to a very dark place.

Given the ecological disaster slowly unfolding in California, and really much of the western US, it should come as no surprise people are getting out. Sure the rent is high and the homeless issue is real, but that is also true of many other places. These people make lots of money, they can mitigate those issues. What they can’t is the smoke and diminishing fresh water. Among the persistent drought, bad air from smoke and inversion, earthquakes, and bad government planning I got out of another tech satellite, Salt Lake City, and moved to Chicago. I miss the mountains as well as open space outside of the cities (even more so friends and family), but it just seems more sustainable here long term. The biggest disasters here are neighborhoods you should avoid at night and high property taxes. I can deal with those. You do actually get more service and infrastructure here than in my old haunt for your taxes.

Actually, what the article states is that

So not lies as such, just discussions about election fraud. Like Nancy Pelosis.. https://www.foxnews.com/media/...

Was there election fraud. Most asuredly from both sides. But from a democracy point of view, its amazing that a 1st world country cannot count its votes on the day of the election. They counted for days, new votes. Makes no sense.

All votes should be received by the end of the election day. Its not like people didnt know the deadline for the election. Its been known for at least a 100 years.

Maybe if it went hand-in-hand with tort reform so that suing the pants off of users who slander me online is as easy as posting slandering content. 230 reform is a trojan horse meant to protect the big tech monopolies by burying new startups in legal liability. Its naive to think you are going to be able to out-lawyer google or facebook when a 3rd party slanders you online.

Most "creative" people that are throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks are essentially creating "pop music" of their domain. The flaw people make with AI is that they compare AI against something someone has already done and says "I can train an AI to do that". No shit. The types of people you're replacing aren't being "creative" in the fullest sense, they're just producing variations of existing stuff. Getting an AI to make something new without the benefit of training.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying AI won't be useful and not saying they can't do what "artists" do, but I am saying that I doubt given a training set of chorus music, they could come up with the music of Queen.

AIs are bounded by their training sets. Once they start to leave their training set, it starts to go to crap fast. And we still need humans in the process to post-validate the results. My sibling worked with some PHDs in AI for a bit because of their extraordinarily gifted talent. They came back after a summer "internship" where they fixed the blunders of the PHDs and described AIs and the PHDs that train them. The AIs are no better than the training data. The training data has to be carefully curated and designed, and is fundamentally flawed because some idiot designed how the data is collected in the first place. Every step of the journey from real world event to the dataset has some bias added to the data. The type and amount of bias is determined by the people involved and represents the collective stupidity of everyone involved. An AI doesn't "understand" the data in the training set, it just regurgitates the patterns and no one involved understands what's going on, they just keep "training" the AI until it seems to give useful results. Current AIs are aking to humans seeing patterns in random data. At least some humans recognize that the data is random and attribute any observed "patterns" as biases and the such. An AI will blindly make connections and pretend like the random data has meaning.

This is nothing like creative problem solving. I don't know about others, but I don't throw shit at a wall and see what sticks. I need it to work the first time. I have to train myself. I have to research a problem and anticipate issues not by experience, but by reasoning. We are no where near this.

The way I see it is current AIs are going to be more like fixed function accelerators. They will dramatically reduce the busy work required to do a job. This will displace people. People who accelerate at the busy work will be the first to go. What is classified as "busy work" will keep going up over time. The truly creative won't be replaced until the singularity.

This discussion did start off as talking about job displacement. This actually will be more difficult to anticipate. While the talent of creative people won't be replaced by AIs, not every business needs a ton of creative people. Even the Google's of the world with all of their "talent", don't really have much going on that requires new ideas. I could see a world where AI enhanced "programming" could get to the point of 10-100 software engineers operating a Google sized tech company. We could see supply outpacing demand, and that would still indirectly cause true creative types to lose their jobs.

We have a long way to go before then. There's the elephant in the room during this transition. Until AIs get smart enough to do all of the coding by themselves, AIs will be limited in coding responsibilities by the amount and type of code a human can support. It is not viable to have an AI create a huge code base and then ask a human to debug and fix an issue. The AI will have to do this and somehow learn from the fix.

I agree with this, but I disagree with your reasoning.

It used to be that to be not held accountable for the things your users said you had to be a "common carrier", solely the transporter and nothing else. You didn't meddle in the content, lest you are no longer a "common carrier".* The "communications decency act" (well before Cameron came up with his "good and clean internet" infamy) turned that on its head. So now, to not be held accountable, companies must play content police on their users.

This is stupid on many levels. It is also a subervsion of the US constitution's first amendment: Instead of making a law to curb freedom of speech, which the government shall not, it made a law to make others curb freedom of speech. That is unconsciable.

Also note the sophistry: "Decency" is not something for politicians to impose on other people's Communication. Nevermind that the US constitution's first amendment already ougth to have informed said politicians that they're being more than usually stupid and petty. There is a reason for that amendment and if you don't understand the reason, you have no business being a federal politician.

So I say, if you really want to avoid the entire moderation (censorship) debate, you simply do not moderate (censor). Certainly not in the sweeping world-wide manner that, say, twitter and facebook de facto do. They should have implemented a killfile for individual readers their personal use and nothing more.

They aren't there to protect people's sensibilities, they're there to convey messages regardless of content. Moderation, if you wish it, ought to be done USENET-style, on topical groups and by and with the consent of the users of said groups. Anything else is external parties imposing their editorial views and therefore censorship. This is a point lost on quite a few people and even the companies doing the censoring themselves. But that failure is the root of the problem.

As to the US Capitol mob, the important point is that these people feel wronged, and that at least the "election was stolen" part needs addressing. Instead I see politicians mobbing up on the vanquished and I see calls for more censorship, because addressing grievances from your political opponents is just so not done.

* Notice how ISPs injecting advertising in user http streams, and ISPs fucking up DNS, for which the tech-wankers at mozilla came up with "DoH"-non-solution, would fall afoul of the "common carrier" notion. That is, if you take "DO NOT MEDDLE WITH CONTENT" seriously.

Hmmm. playing Devil's advocate here, rather than "They Live" merchandise, how about... are they going to stop selling the Quran? Some fundamentalist Islamic extremists have conducted acts as bad as (or worse than) invading the Capitol building. I've always been taught not to judge an entire group of people based on the acts of a handful of idiots, but it seems you're suggesting we should. Why is it acceptable to ban absolutely anything to do with QAnon based on a relatively small number of Capitol-invading crazies, but not dish out the same treatment to other groups? I don't agree with their idiotic conspiracy theories, but I do wish these big tech firms would treat everyone equally.

Austin already had the tech credentials. It also had an excellent culture and sub-culture that co-existed peacefully with the rest of Texas.

Sadly that Austin is no more.

You mean the dems/libs? Most of em can be considered rightwing yes. Socioliberal sure but most of american politics is slanted right economics wise and has become somewhat crony capitalist in nature. Consequently whenever an idea is put forward by these people that plays lipservice to economically leftwing ideas it tends to do so mostly in a way that puts a bandaid on the consequences rather than address the cause. For example. Don't touch the disproportionate profits made from healthcare and insurance. Throw taxpayers money at it instead! Otherwise it'll never pass!

Like has been the case with bond buybacks to satisfy stockowners with money that could help the company longterm, fund r&d and boost wages? I wonder who deregulated those? Hmmm

How can anyone be motivated to work on old tech that will soon be redundant ?

Serious question. Surely anyone working on the SLS must realise it is a waste of time and money ? Surely anyone talented ( and not near retirement age ) has already left ?

A lot of people agree with that sentiment. Here's The Atlantic, journal of the American elite class: "In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

"eginning in the 1990s, the U.S. government and powerful young tech firms began promoting nonregulation and American-style freedom of speech as essential features of the internet. This approach assumed that authoritarian states would crumble in the face of digital networks that seemed to have American constitutional values built into them. The internet was a vehicle for spreading U.S. civil and political values; more speech would mean better speech platforms, which in turn would lead to democratic revolutions around the world."

But then a funny thing happened along the way: the internet turned into a threat to the power of American elites. They had the media sewed up and nobody could get in a word edgewise. But then social media blindsided them and produced the worst possible result. So now we're going to copy Chinese censorship to make sure the status quo remains and we don't have any change in favor of the people.

America was ruled by a pseudo-democracy of one bicephalous party with two names. The Only Party consisted of blackguards and Quislings and pickpockets bought and paid for by the plutocratic oligarchy of large corporations, AIPAC, and the very rich. These told the two halves of the One Party what to do. Every four years there was played a great tournament in which candidates of the Two Names of the One Party engaged in the most savage combat imaginable. This was to distract the people outside the walls . Afterwards nothing changed and all went on as before, though the division of the spoils shifted a bit.

A week later they did come for me because they found something transphobic I said 20 years ago, and nobody said anything because they also said something transphobic 20 years ago.

You're talking about twitter, right? I assume you're talking about twitter.

You could not be on twitter. It's a hot mess of a garbage fire anyway. Despite the howls of "muh censorhip" from Trumpers, it's really not: I've survived up to now without a Twitter presence and plan on keeping this up indefinitely. I mean I'm free to stick my face into a garbage fire, and it's nice to be free to do so if I wish, but holy hell why would anyone want to to that?

I think the yoof of today has it right moving to messaging apps that delete messages after a short period of time. While we as tech heads know it's not foolproof, i.e. someone can take a screenshot or photograph the phone, it is safe by default. Unless you have someone out to get you right now then the chances of anyone recording your daft ramblings is low. If in 20 years someone wants to find something to hang you, well, trawling through 20 years of drunk-posted public messages is a lot easier than finding the stalker who obsessively screenshotted if that person even exists.

Fortunately back when I was a yoof, when my schol got a net connection in the 90s (95? 96?) I and all my classmates assumed everyone else online was a lying troll because we all were. We sort of intuitively realised that using real names was a terrible idea and so on, probably because we mostly used chat rooms to get a rise out of people, being bored teenagers. Once too many real people got on the internet, that vibe wet away.

But anyway, regarding Twitter, as SNL said "one mistake and we'll kill ya".

Are you arguing that every judge that made a decision that lead to the expansion of the interpretation of Section 230 is right-wing> I guess that would mean all the left-wing politicians who say big tech should do more to censor people are also secretly right-wing? Usually, when people criticize Reagan-Thatcher they argue the idea that companies' first goal should be to make money. As we can see from the markets big tech has no problem making decisions that lose them money. If you think current events prove yourself right then declaring, 'I told you so,' seems like the wrong move. However, the fact your PS is declaring an absolute suggests your goal isn't to improve anything.

Who mentioned anything about an election. We're talking de-platforming by tech companies.