That's not actually a meaningful difference as far as antitrust law is concerned. With the possible exception of the monopoly being created by doing something illegal (which then becomes a separate violation on its own), it does not matter *how* a monopoly came to be, only that it is, and whether it causes harm to society, to customers, to other companies in the market, etc.

It's actually not. Any jacka** can buy a block of phone numbers and set up a trunk line. That's exactly why we have so much Caller ID fraud these days. I mean yes, ostensibly, but in practice, no.

Ah, but most phone companies these days don't even have a physical presence anywhere.

Entertainment monopolies have *lots* of government restraints. It really doesn't matter whether the company is an entertainment company or a toilet paper manufacturer. A monopoly is a monopoly, and subject to antitrust laws.

Except that email is surprisingly bad as a sharing medium, and 1000x as bad if you want to share large content like photos. But regardless, that's kind of moot.

Sure. None of that changes whether having basically one giant platform that almost everyone is on makes it difficult to impossible for any other company to meaningfully compete, though. And when your own platform buys another platform, that's where governments *do* start to have the right to deny a company from doing as it pleases.

There's something called a natural monopoly. Social media is likely to be a natural monopoly, in much the same way that the phone company was a natural monopoly before it was forcibly broken up and forced to provide interconnections to other phone companies using shared standards, etc. There's not a whole lot of difference other than the phone company having a higher physical infrastructure barrier to entry.

Regardless, Facebook is not blameless. They bought Instagram, effectively consolidating the potential players in that space from two down to one. And antitrust law does sometimes break up natural monopolies. It isn't about fault or blame. It is about actions taken while in that state that harm competition, harm users, etc.

Doesn't matter. Antitrust law isn't just about the users being victims. It is also about other companies being the victims by being unable to compete because of unfair competition, collusion, excessive mergers, etc. User/purchaser harm is only one narrow aspect of a much larger body of law.

It's actually more than that. For a typical website, you would be right. The problem with social media is that it is inherently social. If your friends aren't on the same site, you can't share things with them. People don't join a site that doesn't already have a lot of users, and therefore, there's an almost insurmountable barrier to entry when you end up with one or two entrenched players, in spite of it theoretically being possible to create another site.

And because Facebook is not federated, hides even public content behind a login wall, and makes sharing with non-users generally impractical, they are directly contributing to a situation where even if another company came along and created something that is better, no one would use it, because their friends and family would not be there, because they are all already on Facebook.

In much the same way that the EU basically forced Apple to open up Messages to support RCS for inter-platform communication, the only way Facebook/Instagram will ever realistically stop being a monopoly is if a government forces them to federate with other social media platforms so that you can share with your friends on other platforms. A strong antitrust judgment against Facebook would be a necessary first step towards that.

Besides, Google+ *was* better than Facebook in a lot of ways, IMO. It wasn't enough, though. I created an account, but nobody I knew was on, so I didn't ever post anything, and because people didn't ever post anything, nobody came to use it, and it ended up being a ghost town. The fact that a head-to-head competitor for Facebook emerged, backed by one of the largest companies on the planet, with a significantly better, more capable product, a more flexible sharing model, etc. and still could not successfully compete with Facebook should tell you that no, building a better product will never work.

The only way other sites "compete" is by being entirely orthogonal to Facebook, targeting largely non-overlapping demographics and largely non-overlapping sets of features. But that's not really competing. That's coexisting. I would argue that Facebook has no actual competition, except perhaps in the vague, wishy-washy "competing for eyeball time" fashion, in which case everything online and offline is a competitor.

I think your model is only one of several alternatives. I don't foresee a unitary intelligence as likely, but an executive function delegating different tasks to different experts depending on context. And it can't be limited to language, it needs to interact more directly with the physical world. But we're already taking steps in that direction.

Yes, it's difficult. Perhaps it will take awhile. But there's absolutely no reason to expect human intelligence to remain the top measure. (Even now there are lots of contexts where it isn't. Try to out-calculate a spreadsheet. What the spreadsheet can't do is design itself.)

Yeah, I'm having trouble wondering what's wrong with the universe if a judge thinks that Facebook hasn't basically obliterated all competition in social media.

YouTube is not really social media. YouTube shorts tries to be Tik Tok, and Facebook Reels tries to be Tik Tok, but they're fundamentally different things, because short-form video targets an entirely different category of people than social media and largely serves a different purpose — to entertain, not to inform.

Google/Alphabet's social media site was called Google+, and it died because everybody was on Facebook and Instagram, so nobody used it.

YouTube sharing is too public (and hard to use in any other way now that Google+ circles no longer exist), so it's not really a place to share pictures of your family and share stories with your friends. If it competes with anything in the pseudo-social space, it would be Twitter/X, which I would argue is a microblogging site, nota social media site. They have a fundamentally different kind of target audience.

Apple Messages isn't social media at all. It competes only with SMS. Same with WhatsApp. I can maybe understand a judge concluding that buying WhatsApp didn't meaningfully stifle competition, because no platform for basic point-to-point communication is ever going to prevent competition by apps that come on your phone (e.g. Messages).

But saying that Instagram didn't stifle competition is a cop out. Instagram (3 billion) and Facebook (3 billion) are the only two sites left standing that I would consider to be social media sites, with the sad exceptions of Truth Social (6.3 million), and Mastodon (1.8 million).

If you're in an industry where you have somewhere between three and six billion users and your next largest competitor has one fewer zeros in its user count, and all of the other competitors have three fewer zeros in their user count, you haven't just stifled competition. You've effectively eliminated it.

And Facebook/Instagram have incredible amounts of power when it comes to breaking the open web, hiding content behind a login wall that makes it basically impossible to share things with the public unless they are Facebook/Instagram users themselves, which makes it even harder for competitors to break into the space, because everyone has to be a FB/Insta user if they want to see the content that people create on those site. You can't just casually discover FB/Insta content. So that aspect also strongly leans towards Facebook/Instagram being a monopoly.

The only way you can realistically conclude that Facebook and Instagram aren't a monopoly is if you ignore all of the actual social use of social media and treat them as nothing more than a platform for influencers and bulls**t peddlers to make themselves seen by the whole world. And yes, for that narrow space, all of those platforms compete. But for social media itself — sharing of semi-private information with a close circle of friends and family — none of those other sites actually compete with Facebook and Instagram in any meaningful way, which makes this decision downright appallling.

But congratulations, Facebook, on amassing so much power that the government can't rein you in. I weep for the future of our world, because this really should have been open and shut, and Instagram should have been broken off years ago, the second Google+ proved that competing with that behemoth was infeasible.

But if that wasn't enough proof, the abject failure of Truth Social, where even Donald Trump's enormous influence wasn't enough to make a second traditional social media site become large enough to be viable, should be absolute inarguable proof that the Facebook/Instagram combination stifles competition. It does. Massively. Its very existence makes competition almost impossible, ensuring that the only even semi-social sites that can ever exist are those that focus on largely non-overlapping markets like microblogging.

And I really can't imagine how anyone could look at the evidence and conclude otherwise, because it is so incredibly obvious to me.

Good points, but not necessarily eternal truths. I suspect you could use magnetic fields to strengthen the cable. Of course, that would collapse if the power failed. But perhaps there are other alternatives that nobody has thought of.

Still, my favorite skyhook is the PinWheel, though it needs a hefty mass in a fairly low orbit (as well as long arms that reach into the stratosphere). But you need to lower as much mass as you raise (on the average) or the orbit decays.

Looks like you're implementing LISP.

What I wonder is whether it's any good. Admittedly, I don't wonder hard enough to listen to it, but then I generally (almost always) avoid podcasts.

There will be tools. But there will also be the more general intelligence. One can argue about the time-line, and that's quite reasonable, but denying it requires accepting spiritualism or some such.

For that matter, people are often used as tools. It's not an "either/or" choice.

The only way you could reasonably predict what jobs will be available would be to predict exactly how much more advanced AIs are going to get and how quicly. And any prediction is a "Wild Ass Guess".

FWIW, there's a company in China building humanoid robots for assembly line work. So far it's only sold less than a thousand, so it's probably still in the experimental stage, but if it's "nearly ready" then it will soon be ready.

Now most assembly line work is basically rote repetition, with only a limited number of special-case scenarios, to this is far from a general purpose robot...but it's enough to eliminate LOTS of jobs...if it's cheap enough. And if it is, one can expect incremental expansion into other roles.

It's not going to be an LLM. The LLM is just what it's going to use to talk to you. But "world models" are being built, and that is going to be the basis of real intelligence.

The thing is, it wouldn't help things for one player to quit.

OTOH, as someone else pointed out, the government isn't exactly trustworthy either. (I consider accepting funds from lobbyist groups to be accepting bribes, just like accepting funds from individuals.)

On the third hand, open source approaches can't limit the use to which something is put.

Perhaps the "corporate powers" are the least bad choice...but that sure isn't encouraging.

Sorry, but "death by GPS" is a label, not a reality. Someone decided to follow the instructions of the GPS. So this is not analogous to an actually self-driving car.

I would say that every nation exists as a mixed economy, unless the government has so collapsed that it's no longer worthy of the term.

It wouldn't hurt, but it would be a bit expensive (except the Morse code). Actually, I really think that shop classes should not have been cut. Admittedly repairing a steam locomotive is a bit extreme and a bit dangerous. Also horses are large and dangerous (and expensive) animals. And shoeing horses should be expanded to include running the forge that the horse shoe is created in. Perhaps not to digging the ore and making the charcoal, since in a lot of places the raw materials don't exist.

But these should be "options". They could replace PE and be merged with history and geography, or perhaps be "summer school". People really have no idea what the life of their ancestors was like, and "blacksmith" was a high status occupation.