"You trade good salary for your name in the credits"
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
I love comments like this, mostly for the unbridled optimism and historical ignorance they embody. If you truly believe that a loose collection of small arms is the kryptonite that the command and control apparatus of the US is vulnerable to I recommend familiarizing yourself with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Both cases vividly display what a few Suburbans full of motivated feds can do to an entire compound of well-armed civilians over the course of a long weekend.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
Well lack of age verification definitely isn't fixing anything either so what's they play here? We all just collectively as a society just shrug like oh well, no fixing any of that?
No, we should take measures that actually address the problems that exist. Problem numero uno: the Big Tech companies are creating systems and digital environments that are hostile to everyone (of which children are a subset), compelling everyone to use them, and punishing those who attempt to get away. We cannot fix that by merely dictating terms, especially if those terms are such that only the Big Tech companies themselves could possibly know enough to enforce the terms.
Ok we might be in violent agreement here but so far I've yet to see anyone put forth anything like a serious plan to dismantle Big Tech, which clearly indicates that "triage legislation" half measures are the only thing currently on the table. I see little sense in letting perfect be the enemy of good.
https://airesistlist.org/ (currently down: see the Internet Archive) has links to several concrete projects, including https://di.day/en (see also, https://european-alternatives.eu/, https://switching.software/). The IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/) and the Fediverse[1] are both movements to take back parts of the internet. We can all make small changes in our lives: what would you do, if you refused to acknowledge the existence of Big Tech, and needed to choose another approach? And can you do this, in practice?
Low-tech Magazine (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has enough articles to publish a thematic book, “How To Build a Low-tech Internet?”. There are other books with concrete proposals: pretty sure Cory Doctorow's published a few (Chokepoint Capitalism, also by Rebecca Giblin; Enshittification; possibly others). You can read these if you would like. But the important part is using and maintaining credible alternatives, reducing both our dependence on and support of these companies.
[1]: although more work is needed to reduce the addictiveness / increase the user empowerment of Fediverse UIs (which are largely modelled on the corresponding Big Tech social media systems): websites are still the way to go, if you can.
Additionally, the fact that Democrats took a pro-corporate conservative policy package and rebranded it speaks volumes about how much daylight actually exists between the parties when you ignore the culture war rag waving.
You call that "the uniparty", while other here at the same time say they want less polarisation and more bipartisan consensus.
Make up your mind.
(I am old enough to remember that Obama convinced the Democrats that it was better than the existing system, and that small progress was better than keeping the status quo or waiting another decade to have maybe, someday the numbers to pass a better bill)
It's hard to care much about how software is written when superpowers are invading their neighbors, democracy itself is under attack, the food supply chain is failing, and the world is hotter than it's ever been.
software plays a big role in enabling 2 (arguably 3) out of those. Least we could do is not make it worse. But it seems most of us are still just children. They give us something shiny that makes pretty lights and we happily burn the world to keep it.
"It’s definitely a better Google for most searches"
This is dangerously incorrect. AI summaries of search results consistently return incorrect information and grossly oversimplified and thus misleading summaries, neither of which are detectable unless one either has prior domain knowledge or spends time drilling into search results to validate the AI output.
My experience with ChatGPT as a search engine - it is totally paranoid about checking and re-checking its answers by referencing them in multiple places (I usually read its thinking output). I have not seen an outright hallucination for at least a year. (It is of course a different situation with Google's "AI summary" which is wrong half of the time.)
Ironically I quit using ChatGPT a while back. I decided to run it through it's paces and asked it some rather detailed questions about a range of topics that I have significant domain knowledge on. Without exception the responses I got back where glibly superficial to the point the responses were almost totally devoid of meaningful information. The AI summary on Google search results is so bad it represents an assault on reason.
Through what mechanism does dissatisfaction with our for-profit healthcare system lead to support for eg. expansionist foreign wars or aggressive policing policies?
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
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