Antitrust enforcement can't fix very easily.

Breakups that divide users into multiple pools will just result in immediate user consolidation.

Breakups by product will result in exactly the same amount of competition that we have now, because the various parts of Facebook don't really compete with each other meaningfully, and wouldn't compete meaningfully even if they were owned by different companies. They have mostly disjoint user bases, i.e. most people either use Insta or FB exclusively or at most auto-crosspost from one to the other, but still basically use only one. And users would just keep using the one that they use, and the only difference would be a slight reduction in communication, or people adopting a third-party posting tool that posts to both, neither of which would cause one to steal users from the other in either direction.

The *only* way to solve this is through mandating that all social networks with more than a certain number of users provide federation to other similar social networks using a public API, requiring published interoperability specs for all new features (along with a published interoperability test suite), requiring that the social networks publish a list of criteria for federation, mandating compliance with reasonableness standards that govern what those criteria can include, and mandating that the social networks enable federation for any social network that meets their published criteria, without any further discrimination.

Once you do that, the network effects cease to be important, and you have a functioning free market, where anyone can build a Facebook-like site with its own interface, where users on that new site can share things with Facebook users and vice versa, and so on.

If you want to deinstall the app, blowing up the owner's house is not he way to do it.

This was stupid, reckless, does nothing for actually improving AI safety, risks worsening that very safety, risks OpenAI letting their systems being used on more and more extreme products (because all publicity is good publicity), and in short does the exact opposite of anything that anyone could possibly have imagined going through the mind of of this dweeb.

However, it is what we've come to expect from the Nu Society that is emerging - violent extremism, senseless violence, thoughtless acts, utter stupidity.

Welcome to the "brave" new world where nobody has any brains but plenty of explosives. Any claim America might have to rationality is degraded every time something pathetic like this takes place, and the rest of the world is honestly in no better shape even if it hasn't degraded to open violence yet. I am really not happy.

Does anyone remember when the US State of Massachusetts went to switch to OpenOffice and the ODF file formats? The MS-MiBs were all over the place making sure MA senators got trips to One Microsoft Way for a bit of the 'flashy thing'. Then the MS-MiB sent out worldwide to MS-ISVs with checks and scripts in hand to flood the ISO in order to vote MS-OOMXL( MS-Office Open XML ) format as an international standard so the Massachusetts government could vote it as their open standards format for public documents.

The MS-MiB were sent out worldwide to shut down the One Laptop Per Child initiative so that poor children around the world wouldn't be forced to use a Linux based laptop which could operate for 8 hours on a charge, be charged with a hand crank and was readable in full sun besides having built-in mesh networking. The MS-MiB have been instrumental in other things too. Like when school districts across the US were getting notices of required district wide licensing audits costing many $10s of thousands of dollars or sign new license agreements with the MS-MiB folks. When a couple of districts rescinded their licenses and switched everything over to Linux and started to show other school districts how they too could do it. Did the MS-MiB get recalled back to One Microsoft Way.

Tucked neatly under the MS-Marketing department lives the MS-MiB offices and if they've been reduced over the recent years, surely France has given them reason to throw a few hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading the offices.

LoB

On paper, the barrier to entry is staggeringly high, which is why Facebook effectively has a monopoly on text-based social media and (via Instagram) photo-based social media, and you have to include radically different things like video sharing (short-form and long-form), private messaging, and microblogging to be able to claim that it has any competition at all.

But those things are really fundamentally different types of communication that appeal to fundamentally different audiences for fundamentally different reasons. And while they might be "competition" in that both take up your time, that's a bit like arguing that TV news competes with gym memberships. In any sane universe, they should be treated as entirely different markets. But Facebook has managed so far to convince judges and juries that they are all "social media" to avoid antitrust scrutiny, despite having killed the only viable competitor ever to exist (Google+).

The reality is that true competition in social networks — social networks fighting for the same eyes — is basically impossible unless you have government-mandated federation between social networks. What happens instead is that everyone of a particular age suddenly gets old enough to join social networks, and they join whatever is popular with young people at that point, because everyone they know is on that network. About once per generation, that social network starts being seen as "the social network for old people", and some new competition has a chance of taking the new folks. And they compete for a year or two until one becomes dominant, and then the market becomes static again.

So you get a brief moment of competition every decade or so. And that's it. The rest of the time, your choice of social network is dominated by network effects, where people choose a social network almost exclusively because everyone their age is on that network.

Can you imagine if someone said, "I'm going to create a competing telephone network that doesn't talk to the existing telephone network?" Everyone else would laugh in their faces. Yet that's exactly what social network competition is like.

So no, the barrier to entry is not and has never been low. That's why one of the wealthiest companies on the planet tried to compete head to head with Facebook and still couldn't pull it off. Anyone arguing otherwise is depending on a Frankensteinian hybrid market that treats competition as being between companies instead of between products. Facebook Reels competes with YouTube Shorts. Facebook Messenger competes with dozens of other companies. Facebook Groups competes with Discord. Facebook (as a friend-based text sharing social media platform) doesn't compete with anybody. Instagram (as a friend-based photo sharing social media platform) also doesn't compete with anybody meaningfully.

Put another way, the barrier to entry is low if you can come up with a totally different type of content to share that no other social network supports, and that takes long enough to support properly so that Facebook won't duplicate your feature and kill your momentum by week 6. Otherwise, network effects combine with monopoly market power to make the barrier to entry startlingly high. It is the "social" part that makes this true.

...doesn't this open up the ultimate in bait and switch excuses? Oh sorry, that car doesn't actually exist. The AI just made it up. We'll see if we can get our provider to fix that but for now can we show you THIS car that's only $4000 more expensive?

It can hallucinate all it wants and nobody will be able to tell the difference.

There is no left in America, they moved to the right.

The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.

If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.

Except none of that actually happened.

The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.

This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Don't you think you have the absolute best reason to not be revealed right there?

Can you imagine what criminals the world over would do for a few percent of that money?

Which it was.

Ever thought about moving the gaming PC? :-)

But seriously, there are cheap wireless KVM solutions for 1080p, and slightly less cheap 4K HDMI wireless extenders. I haven't seen any 4K + USB, but they probably exist. But I'd imagine anything wireless is going to be artifacty.

If you can run a single Ethernet cable in a crawlspace or attic, you can get a KVM extender for $153, and that presumably would be a clean, near-zero-latency HDMI and USB repeater (because it's probably just a bunch of level shifters).