baltakatei

don’t let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years

I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.

To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

If he doesnʼt die from COVID.

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

• Nest Labs (home automation)
• DropCam (home automation)
• DoubleClick (advertisement)
• FitBit (wearables)
• Waze (GPS navigation)
• Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
• Like.com (shopping)
• Meebo (social network)
• GrandCentral (VOIP)
• Picasa (photographry)
• Tenor (GIF search)
• PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Donate to Mozilla Thunderbird. Free software isn’t free.

Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.

And for some reason some software developers decided to base their MMORPG company there.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

When they were allowed to buy YouTube because their Google Video couldn’t compete was the turning point.

Unless anti-trust law changes, Google will just buy ChatGPT and Stability to reduce competition and form a new monopoly.

Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.

Google will just buy such a competitor like Facebook did with Instagram.

“shunned” by their church

Take that as a compliment and move on.

Being shunned in Amish culture is VERY aggressive. You’re basically cut off from the community and family. You can’t get rides, you have to eat alone, etc. It’s pretty fucked up.

Mormons also have versions of this that are notoriously fucked up. Stay in line or lose contact with everyone you love.

(Comment by squaresinger removed by mod: “reason: Part of a white nationalist cult, defending said cult”. Comment summary: A Mormon clarifies that excommunication doesn’t ban attending church activities, but tensions arise when ex-members aggressively try to convert others away from the faith, citing their ex-Mormon returned missionary best friend as an example of someone who isnʼt hostile towards Mormon Church members.)

I also was raised in the Church, served a mission, but left (you can too)!, despite Church roadblocks. To illustrate why I left, let me provide you with what my self-righteous past self would have written for an audience of priesthood holders regarding the apostasy of a best friend:

Your best friend knew the truth, got their endowment, yet apostatized anyway. Better that your best friend had never been born (D&C 76:32). You shouldn’t associate with them because Satan will find a way to weaken your testimony through your sympathy for them. Instead, unfaithful such as your friend should be cast out from your community as salt that has lost its flavor (Matthew 5:14; see the 1838-06-17 Salt Sermon). Since they committed the unpardonable sin of denying the Holy Ghost, the best case scenario for building the Kingdom of God is that they don’t corrupt anyone else or die early (side note: killing an apostate in order to save their soul even from an Unpardonable Sin was a loophole called “Blood Atonement which was used by the Danites to justify murdering enemies of the Church; the idea being that Christ couldn’t spill their own blood to atone for someone who denied the Holy Ghost but someone could atone for their own sins by being their own blood sacrifice; the requirement to physically spill blood in order to effect the ritual is a plausible explanation for why Utah still permits capital punishment by firing squad). Better to dedicate your time and efforts towards sharing the Gospel with people who haven’t had a chance to properly hear it in this Second Estate than with someone who heard it, lived it, yet rejected it.

The above text would not be found out of place in a Sunday talk, especially one given by an Area Authority, although many in the congregation would likely feel uncomfortable. Church leadership would likely minimize such discomfort by restricting such fierce and arguably cruel teachings to private Priesthood Sessions of unbroadcasted Stake Conferences or missionary Zone Conferences. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, I hope you reconsider your membership to an organization in which such cruel and inhumane talk is considered acceptable.

• Edit(2023-10-10T20:05+00): Include context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:13+00): Remove some context that was removed by mod. Summarize the offending comment for context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:29+00): Add statement explaining the example of cult rhetoric is meant to explain the cruelty, not to promote it.

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