brucethemoose

Yeah.

I don't get obsessing over a single quote, only to miss the theme the book obsessively hammers in, which is what you said.

Eh, I'm afraid its doing more than nothing. Same with basically every giant app that sits in the background.

They're datamining the snot out of you. With the ostensible excuse of "analytics" and being able to send notifications.

And this is why they want to defund NPR, poison Wikipedia, and enshrine Twitter in its place.

Can’t manufacture outrage with so many pesky fact checkers.

I mean, Android isn't just Java, and iOS has plenty of bloat. They both run gnarly cross-platform frameworks.

A bigger factor is probably their approach. iOS started life as "one app runs at a time" and gradually grew sleeping and background jobs as features. Android (mostly) allowed apps to do pretty much anything in the background, and only recently started cracking down on the worst abuses.

"Scam the rich," perhaps?

Literally.

And for those songs with too much dynamic range for a car, well, that's what the volume knob is for!

They’re also talking about data centers in space, yet are too cheap to use anything but evaporative cooling + supplemental gas generators on Earth.

I did some math on, amongst other things, launch costs for an Earth-data center sized installation, or the area needed to radiatively cool it, and it is fun:

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php

See that power of four? Areas get very large, like kilometers wide, if you want your coolant below a typical 300K (~30C), and apparently no one told Bezos that little detail.

Those space construction startups know what they’re doing. They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.

He is an antivax icon, he married Elle McPherson, he does podcasts and documentaries, speaking engagements, etc. he is paid far more than many doctors with none of the stress and liability.

Similarly the Monsanto and Coca Cola ghost writing research, everything involved in tobacco, Purdue and OxyContin addiction, etc. the last one was treated as a civil matter but are these not criminal? Countless lives were destroyed.

Attention is all you need.

Philosophical questions of liability don't matter anymore; optics do. Wakefield didn't just win that game; he blew it away. Monsanto, big tobacco, even Purdue drug their public sentiment battles on long enough not to win, but not to lose.

I mean no offense, but I keep seeing scientists ask "why is all this happening?" on Twitter, as they presumably pass mobs of folks glued to algorithms and influencers gaming them on thier phones, and politicians now emulating thier behavior.

Hence I hate to sound so cynical, but I think your question:

What’s a viable consequence for these people? Life in prison?

Is pointless.

Science and journalism aren't front-and-center anymore. Frames of reference are intimately manipulated. To quote AOC, "everything feels increasingly like a scam." And pondering what these massively wealthy entities deserve is a waste of energy until that festering problem is addressed.

It’ll be interesting to see how Discord enshittifies.

It’s the default destination for the niche-interest “cozy web,” and they could go down several paths.

Yeah.

People harp on Onlyfans, but how sexualized and “softcore teasing” Insta and even TikTok are kinda creeps me out. They’re literally entry points to OF.

I have a parent who’s blissfully off of social media, and it was interesting to see their reaction to what they’re like now.

Its more VRAM heavy servers. They’d have to take the GPUs out, or even put the whole motherboard in a new case.

I hope some of it hits the used market, so tinkerers can play with them.

But yeah, knowing them, they will probably just throw the hardware away :(