Had this happen on Reddit, and the kafkaesque injustice rankles.
No reason, no communication, just one morning 10+ years of posts and comments all gone as well as anyone who had ever replied. The "appeals" page said my appeal (for ???) was granted, but it's still broken, and the appeals page lies and mocks my by claiming my account is in good-standing as a reason not to let me contact anyone. And good luck contacting anyone with a new account when it infects the new one!
Especially on the tail end of COVID isolation, it was a social sucker-punch, a whole online identity gone, with no reason or solution. I considered responding to their pre-IPO email offers just to contact someone...
Yeah that sucks. Social media shouldn't have this power. I don't recall phone companies banning people by the thousands after listening to their calls.
These sites also wait until they are very large to act this way. HN has been pretty good I guess, but it's not quite social media.
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."
Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?
With respect to bikes (with or without pelicans) there's a strong natural bias because people displaying bikes tend to want to show off the side with the gears.
More-generally, I suspect an influence from how left-to-right languages (i.e. English) affect comic layouts. Overcoming that bias often means using vertical space to exploit the top-to-bottom habit instead. (Consider the rarity of an English-language comic panel where action is from bottom-right to top-left.)
There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance.
In particular, I'm thinking of textiles and agriculture. It's no coincidence that both were prime targets of industrial mechanization, occupying a huge proportion of all human labor.
What I mean is that today "technology" connotes activity in certain fields (and not others), and this leads us (normal people, today) to discount large less-in-vogue fields of human endeavor as... just stuff that is done, but not, y'know, like, technology-technology.
Suppose someone leads with: "I'm investing in new technological improvements to my farm". Most people are going to think that means robots, GPS tractors, or special pesticides... Rather than a new procedure allows legumes to be planted more-densely and harvested more quickly. So even when the context is literally a farm, somehow "technology" means electronics/genetics/chemistry rather than agronomics.
Give the average person a booklet with an algorithm for toxic-vs-edible mushrooms developed over generations of careful study and experiment. "Is it technology?" Probably only once you port it to a minimally interactive phone-app.
Didn't the people that we today call ancient historians mostly just write about their own time? The very few who wrote about events that preceded their time were not using archeological methods.
They did, but they were not writing about clothing production for the most part. This we lack insight into what they did except what we can make educated guesses on.
That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work.
Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.
But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
> There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance.
> Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future.
Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies).
Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).
Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :)
As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.
Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
Who is underestimating the importance of food and clothes in history? Certainly not the historians. Agricultural output is literally what made and broke empires.
Modern historians, yeah, but ancient historians, they tended to ignore both. Ancient kings were aware that starvation was a problem and had some interest in agriculture, but the textiles seems to have not appeared much in history.
Also: Creepy surveillance, and a delivery mechanism for malware/viruses.
Online advertising has completely broken from anything resembling the traditional social-contract of magazine ads, billboard, signs, etc. They're preying on your safety and privacy, not just your attention.
> they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.
Another factor (which can also be seen in the "metaverse" business) is that how our investment/economy system makes these companies "need" [0] to always be a "growth stock" with something even bigger, even after they're already enormous quasi-monopolies.
I just had a crazy idea: Are there any ways we (consumers) could leverage the (bad) DMCA "anti-circumvention" laws?
Ex:
1. The noise happening in my house is copyrighted.
2. I protected my copyright by blocking the TV from transmitting it to known manufacturer domains.
3. By switching to obfuscated domains or alternate transmission paths, the manufacturer started circumventing my copyright controls.
... I suppose the boring answer will be that the literally-unreadable stack of Terms Of Service has some "everything we ever do is permitted by you" clause.
A quixotic legal dream: All consumer data-surveillance must take the form of an opt-in monthly payment plan, which either side can cancel.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind the market [0] can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
[0] "Markets are good, use them." -- "OK, fine, you must price this on a market." -- "NOT LIKE THAT!"
> $$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back.
Well, such thing has kinda appeared for mobile phone contracts. You can save and entire buck, if you agree for your data to be used for marketing purposes. Except, after accepting the deal, you still pay exactly the same monthly amount, as before they introduced that option.
No reason, no communication, just one morning 10+ years of posts and comments all gone as well as anyone who had ever replied. The "appeals" page said my appeal (for ???) was granted, but it's still broken, and the appeals page lies and mocks my by claiming my account is in good-standing as a reason not to let me contact anyone. And good luck contacting anyone with a new account when it infects the new one!
Especially on the tail end of COVID isolation, it was a social sucker-punch, a whole online identity gone, with no reason or solution. I considered responding to their pre-IPO email offers just to contact someone...
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