...well, if you build a large enough trebuchet...

You sure yawn quite a lot.
Has your doctor checked you for sleep apnea?

Yup, thanks. You the same on your favorite platform.

Nah, sorry.
Am busy having fun with my actual science job.
Not enough time left to pay much attention to eloquent idiots with too much money on their hands.

I am sorry if you're unable to see the difference between moderation and censorship.

I got Covid for the first time at the end of January and I haven't slept right since. Trouble falling asleep, and when I do fall asleep I either wake up multiple times during the night or I get really really shallow sleep- kind of like twilight anesthesia where I am asleep- but I am aware that I'm sleeping. I feel terrible, both mentally and physically. Irritable, short-tempered, lots of body aches, appetite is all screwed up, and so on.

Sorry I'm from the otherside of the Atlantic pond (a.k.a. an Evil Euro-Communist), so I didn't get your "Canada" joke.

As a matter of fact, yes I do have a great time on the Fediverse.

I don't feel missing out on Xitter (I haven't used really used that crap in 2023).

Yes, the real world doesn't much care about Xitter. Only a few tiny communities on it care. Do you how often serious largescale marketing and public communication campaign want to include "Xitter influencers"? Answer is never.

They are only interested in the larger players:
- that have 1 or multiple billions users.
- that can publish a little bit more information than an SMS.

(My significant other is a consultant at a company that subcontracts large public communication campaigns, her experience also matches my above statements)

Oh, I am sure the Melon Husk is fine! He is absolutely not going through a divorced dad's midlife crisis, blowing stupidly money on pointless projects that can't be turned profitable, manufacturing a meme-car that would make Homer Simpson's car jealous, torturing apes because he thinks that this will somehow allow him one day to upload his consciousness, etc.
He likes to fancy himself as some kind of genius inventor, but in practice is just a not too bad bullshit artist with way too much money who managed to lucky on a couple of projects (usually by joining late projects that were already on a successful track and pretending he invented them, then eventually pushing his crappy ideas, unless said project have dedicated people at managing the ego of the Melon).
How do you really think he is CEO of several companies? Does he really work 100% at each? Or is he merely the guy with tons of money and tons of connections whose ego needs management?

Xitter was already headed in the direction of becoming a dumpster fire of misinformation, conspiracy theories and a whole rainbow of various forms of hatespeach, before the acquisition and firing of mods. The new CEO has merely started to speed run the enshittification process.

but hey, Xitter is owned by the richest man in the world, he can surely keep losing billions on his new toy without ever turning a profit, right?

oh, poor snowflake, show us where the evil woke moderator hurt you! Oh, did they/them hurt your feelings and your freeze peach?

I merely noticing that over the years Twitter is increasingly full of all of the worst of the gutter of humanity. If you enjoy the crap on Twitter and find it better than before, I guess our interests and values are on polar opposites.

"Mastodon" isn't a social media company, you know, right?
It's a piece of microblogging software (written by Mastodon Gmbh), that one can install on their own server to host microblogging, optionally intercommunicating with other servers who do so.
Whether there is advertisement installed on any same server also running mastodon is entirely left at the discretion of the people who had said server deployed.

Some Mastodon servers decide to only rely on donations. Others might decide to rely on advertisement (Truth Social and Gab are example of servers running mastodon and receiving money from some form of advertisement).

But, no. I doubt that "Mastodon" (As in servers on which Mastodon code is deployed) will "take over" the advertisers of Twitter at any time.

A per your own source, it's 500million pairs of eyeballs.
The same source liste more than a billion for each of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, Linkedin, ...
Even Snapchat has more users. Fucking Snapchat.
X is peanuts.

Oh, poor you! Still didn't get over for that time you got slapped in the face with a large trout when you tried to tweet your opinion about the great replacement?

Yup.

Sucks so much that in fact I'm wondering if CEO John Pettigrew isn't overly optimistic in expecting the current crop of "Just make the datacenter even larger and AGI will surely emerge out of the next 5.0 version of CludeGPT or BingBard or whatever..." money burning bullshit "start-ups" will still be around in 10 years.

On the other hand bullshit like Tesla's "Full Self Driving" has constantly been promised for "next year" for approximately the last decade, so it's not impossible that by 2034 the same usual suspect will still be around, still promising that AGI is just right at the corner if we "just" let them boil of a few more lakes to cool their newest nuclear-powered "Zetta-scale" data center. (While, please, ignoring the Habsburg level of inbreeding of their models due to all the botshit leaked on the internet).

As John Maynard Keynes famously observed: markets can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

You can rant and rave all you want, but it was the white business bros running the company who ruined it, not anyone on the production line.

Hell, those same bros are the ones who shipped the 787 production line to South Carolina so they could get rid of a lot of the highly paid and experienced union workers in Washington. But sure, let's double down on the racism!

The standardized version of RCS lacks a lot of features like encryption. Google added it to their proprietary version, but it was not in the basic one so why should Apple have supported a less secure protocol? And since Apple has already agreed to extend RCS via an open standards group so it will support encryption and other features, what is the purpose of this lawsuit?

How would dropping DEI help when the people who are responsible are all white? A bunch of business bros got put in charge after the MD merger, then sold off the Wichita factory, cut R&D and quality control spending among other cost-cutting measures, and then used the money to initiate stock buybacks to drive up the stock price for the investors. Those same senior folks then pressured line workers to ignore quality issues and threatened them if they tried to blow the whistle to the government.

It wasn't DEI hires that caused the Pentagon procurement scandal under Philip Condit. It wasn't DEI hires who caused Harry Stonecipher to focus on profitability above just about anything else leading to engineering lapses or his own personal misconduct. It wasn't DEI hires who caused James McNerney to botch the 787 project through absurd outsourcing. And so on and so forth.

Besides, the DEI policies you're talking about came along well after Boeing's problems started- so maybe turn down the racism just a bit?

Seriously, Boeing's problems are incredibly well documented and have everything to do with business folks trying to extract every last ounce of profit at the expense of everything else. Stock buybacks, cost cutting, selling off the Wichita factory- all stupid decisions to drive up the stock price while sacrificing investment into R&D and quality control.

And yet that never stops the racists coming out of the woodwork to blame DEI or anything else they think of.

No. It was not punitive damage.
Apple dropped their lawsuit and was settled out of court.

(Among other, because if Apple persisted in court, Microsoft was menacing to completely with draw MS-Office from macOS which could have completely killed Apple. So that's why Apple accepted to settle even if in practice they would probably have had a ground to sue. Of course, it was also Microsoft's best interest to settle instead of completely crushing Apple, with all the FTC shenanigans happening).

Technically they didn't get caught stealing they mere were alleged to be stealing, with the lawsuit being dropped.

(Yes, Microsoft probably stole tons of shit as they usually do. They just managed to avoid having a judge confirm it this time.)

Sorry, but you read too fast. I didn't say "invest"(*), I said "investigated":

Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990

Microsoft was in legal troubles due to monopolistic practices.

This is probably what led them to decide to settle out of court and pay those 150$ million you mention (as part of the settlement) rather than try to completely crush Apple. Given the warchest of Microsoft, they could probably have been able to go to court and extended the legal battle for long enough until Apple goes bankrupt and disappears (with Microsoft buying up the remnants).

But doing so (killing off Apple and ingesting it) would probably have looked very bad in their other lawsuit about monopoly. Letting Apple live another day (and, as you point out, spinning the public opinion as "Microsoft investing into Apple to save them!") was probably the smart move to reduce the antitrust troubles.

Regarding the long list of products destroyed by Microsoft's ruthless practices:
Yup. There's a reason why the Microsoft Cuisine joke is so funny: it definitely close to how most of the Microsoft related accident happened back then.

(Was using Stac' Stacker during my DOS days back then).
(Of course a pirated copy, because as a teenagers I was too broke to either afford a bigger disk or even buy the software).

---

(*): though yes, the source I point at does mention the 150$ millions, without expanding on their context (as an out-of-court settlement).

Actually you raise a good point.

YT swears that humans are involved in the "review" process associated with demonetization or community guideline strikes but there is an overwhelming mountain of evidence that points to the fact that a "manual review" consists of running the content past another AI system (which invariably produces the same result).

Surely, if users of YT are now required to honestly disclose when they use AI then YouTube itself should do likewise and stop lying about it.

As someone who enjoys using VFX in some of my videos, where will I stand?

Some of those videos portray events that never actually happened or create an illusion by compositing hand-crafted images or models into real-world scenes.

This is *NOT* AI but for all intents and purposes it has the same effect.

So will VFX artists have an exemption or do they risk being falsely accused under YT's new rules if it's alleged that their videos involve AI rather than just good old hard-work and VFX?

Speculations cross my mind:

One of the explanations I've heard about why Win95 merely only "nearly did kill Apple" instead of "completely killing" it, is that Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990 and definitely needed to still have a somewhat not completely dead Apple around to point at whenever the word "monopoly" came in the discussion. (see: this article)

If Microsoft had launched an Apple-crusher a bit earlier, they would still have launched it during their antitrust lawsuit era, so they would still need to keep Apple on life support.
They would still need to put efforts in keeping Apple alive to avoid getting accused monopoly.