Yes.

Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.

On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.

On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.

Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.

With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.

Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be so ethically bankrupt that your response to your company’s failure to safely implement a new technology isn’t to redouble your efforts but to lobby to get the safety standards lowered and to try to hide your crash data.

See - actually, we all misunderstood. He didn’t say he was going to eliminate fraud - he said he was going to eliminate protections from and punishments for fraud.

Only available in 3/16", which is almost certainly too big to drill the pilot hole for whatever screw you’re then going to drive with it.

This is actually a pretty simple issue, about which too many Americans are (not coincidentally) fatally wrong.

The government WILL spend money. That’s what they do. And in fact, it will spend too much money - through negligence, corruption and simple inefficiency, it will waste money. Again, that’s what they do.

So the whole notion that we can get the government to stop wasting money is foolishness.

And note this and note it well - THE MONEYED CLASS RECOGNIZES THAT FACT. When their represenstives run for office promising fiscal responsibility, they’re lying, every time, without exception.

The issue that actually matters is for whose benefit that money will be spent. Some portion of it will necessarily be spent for the benefit of the officials and bureaucrats in charge of spending. That’s unfortunate, but unavoidable.

The rest of it, broadly, will be spent for the benefit of the common people or for the benefit of the wealthy few.

And that’s where the US has gone fatally wrong.

All too many Americans have been successfully indoctrinated into reflexively opposing money spent for the benefit of the common people - characterizing it scornfully as “handouts” and condemning it immediately and entirely.

They’re (not accidentally) under the impression that by opposing such spending, they can limit the reach of government and stop it from spending so much, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The simple reality is that the government is going ro spend that money (and more) anyway, and freed from the responsibility to spend it to benefit the conmon people, they will instead spend it to benefit the wealthy few.

And it really is just that simple. Governmental fiscal responsibility is a fantasy, and every dollar that’s withheld from social programs is NOT a dollar saved - it’s a dollar that’s going to go to the wealthy few instead of the common people.

Back when Google still had something resembling principles and integrity.

…we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.

My assumption would be that “singular” is understood to only refer to quantities of one, so “plural,” though it’s commonly thought to mean more than one since that’s far and away its most common usage, actually necessarily refers to any quantity other than one.

Of course it’s unconstitutional.

And that doesn’t matter in the slightest - the Supreme Court has already made it clear that they are now motivated by corruption, ideology and expediency, and rulings and arguments will be shaped however necessary to accommodate them, entirely regardless of the actual law.

It’s not even the least bit surprising.

Humor rests in large part on communicating some relatively easily understood idea in an unexpected way. It’s setting off on a statement or a story that seems like it’ll end up at some predictable and humdrum place, then suddenly veering over to some unexpected place that reveals some hidden insight.

And that’s something that LLMs just can’t do. By design, if they start heading in one direction, they will and can only continue in the most statistically probable way. And statistically probable is the one thing that humor very definitely is not.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

Just be patient.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.