When you feed it a giant cesspool of invalidated data (The internet) you should not expect a single response to be accurate. none of these AI's are fed a carefully curated data set.

But companies are expecting to replace all their programmers with AI.... What could possibly go wrong?

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

For it to be price collusion, the algorithm would have to use, as an input, the prices of competing hotels. If they don't do that, the government will have a hard time proving their case.

I disagree. It just needs to be using an identical baseline price for all clients. While it probably would include competitive market data, that isn't actually required to induce a price-fixed outcome.

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.

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?

Seizing the assets of the wealthy might pay for UBI... for one year. Then what?

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.

We used to have a similar model, until they did away with the license nonsense and simply started funding public television from general taxes. The 5 people with no TV set complained for a while. But the savings were massive as there was no longer a need for an expensive enforcement agency.

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).

Plus you'll be stuck for 3 hours in a TSA queue.

Maybe. Still, it's nicer to listen to a dreamer than a naysayer, even if the latter is right. I miss the optimism mankind used to have.

Again: the idea is not to convince individual parents, but to change culture. Starting with the schools, perhaps. It won't be just your kid being without a cellphone then, will it? Sometimes it really does take a village...