Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

launch you to Mars one way without a helmet if you fuck with his IP

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

Surely an author would want to actually allow a user to read the book they purchased on whatever device they want? It's convenient to be able to download it as a PDF, and might make it an easier sale if the user doesn't have to own a kindle or install the janky Kindle app.

But I suppose there's still the lingering fear of losing potential sales because a reader can just copy and share that PDF with his friends. It might keep some authors awake at night. The DRM does present a (not insurmountable) barrier to copying and sharing.

I'm not sure I buy the conclusion that this will potentially increase DRM use, though... if you're already selling a book without DRM, it would already be trivial for a reader to convert it from an AZW to PDF or Epub, this just saves that extra step.

On the one hand, Meta made openllama right? So maybe these guys will do some similar things. On the other hand, maybe the world is safer if they focus on ads and we can just trade up on potential hellscapes.

And a leader who decorates the Capitol with gold Wing-Dings.

Helping out dyslexic glaucomic crosseyed midgets who are using CRT monitors due to poverty sets off all their DEI alarms. They'll send out ICE out of sheer panic.

More like Wing Dings, the dude rambles incoherently.

Computer screens are too advanced for MAGAs. They want to read their parchment while having a leeching at the Alchemy Medical Institute and Witch Burning Center.

Ahy Ahy

It's so bad, it's good.
The medium is the message.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
I always thought big mac patties were made of worm castings.

The best thing is, if you never go into the store, you'll never know! What a great scam. Bravo.

Whoever's idea it was to take the bars off capital "I" should be flogged. They are not serifs, they are bars, like a double-ended T. Floggem! Dig them back up and flog their bones if we have to. They generated centuries of confusion.