See, that's the thing. Cities often have easement and right-of-way authority, if not ownership.A city can build-out whatever they want, and rent it to whomever.

But that interferes with the cable and telco's revenue streams. Loma Linda California tried it and was fought hard.

The vendors also objected. If you make zillions of dollars selling fiber to telcos, and telcos don't want pesky municipalities getting in their way, the fiber companies will ally with the telcos. Telcos don't want to fight with two thousand municipalities, they want to do one big bribe/campaign contribution to just a handful of people that they can write the legislation for. Makes it easier.

Monopoly isn't the right word; the right word is: Cabal.

and probably copyrighted it. Composed it. Maybe edited it. Laid it out on page. Perhaps illustrated it. Did the work.

Needs to get paid.

It's like Harlan Ellison said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

NOT sucked up into an engine.

NOT guided by an "editor" with dubious values.

NOT enhanced by some well-intentioned silicon spew.

Real people. Real work. Getting paid.

Publishers are looking for revenue. Distribution sources, electronic, print, and secondary markets look for their revenue.

Copyright holders, who may not be any of the above (See Author's Guild for litigation models) are another source of "injured parties".

There then becomes the motivation of content creators, authors, writers, researchers, and others who look at their work output becoming sucked in without compensation-- and this might be the biggest part of the problem.

If creators and researchers/etc stop generating source material, the entire food chain stops, and the quality of output to the ultimate consumer, us, becomes mightily stanched, a foot on the garden hose of knowledge.

Perhaps the app could be extended to FlockOff, another privacy rapist, now that the code and EMBEDDED PASSWORD has been hacked.

And.... look what pile of crap they scraped, distilled, and the output will be... crap.

Sure, this is about income, but little of this stuff works, even now.

Despite exhortations that New Advances Are Made Every Day and Look AI Employment Is Actually Up!, it's still highly-paid marketing people babbling BS about the power and integrity of their advancements.

Let the Chinese scrape! More is better! Why? It's like the old game of Telephone. The further away from cogent source material, the worse it will inevitably be. Rinse, repeat, and you'll need to rinse a LOT.

Cars last longer because of engineering competition to drive quality in vehicle design and assembly.

The ODB2 standard congealed a lot of emissions hassle, and ultimately forced prolonging service life in many product lines.

Although many shade tree mechanics of an older era are gone, there are many new ones that mod their cars, or simply repair them without the need of expensive dealer service costs; this is also part of the Right To Repair movement, where secret sauces hidden in the CANBUS. connected, multi-system firmware present in most cars.

Hackers have figured out what's what for many models.

And while convenience features are nice, any engineer will tell you that more features means more things that can go wrong. Owning some vehicles is like death-by-a-thousand-cuts as desired features slowly decay. Common parts become rarer and rarer.

The no-button approach also means a single point of failure-- the all-important console.Features become combines, all in a race to the bottom.

Increasing compliance costs and the need for profitability push car makers to make unwise choices. Button-based vehicles required ten seconds of familiarity to drive safely. Console-based devices require far more, and also cause visual distractions instead of intuitive look-and-feel controls.

It's just not as simple as you describe. Worse, international-market focused vehicle makers, especially the Europeans, make a center console because they must adapt to a left of right side steering basis-- it's cheaper just to build holes in the chassis and move the steering column left or right, thus not having two different dashboards and assemblies.

Consumers will choose among the offerings that suit them. The auto industry used to use specs to drive vehicle sales. Now, the motives and marketing are lifestyle-appeals.

And... so.... why the need for extra memory, rumored GPU support, and etc.?

Um, no, the whole model isn't on the phone. I didn't suggest that. Instead, each app will grow into blimp-sized monstrosities, load phones down with MCP traffic, and drag phone performance to a crawl, all while increasing net traffic meteorically.

Prove me wrong.

Even if Windows was open sourced tomorrow, stem to stern, who would even want it? It's full of immensely cobbled code, patched 200x, and still barely works.

You can't see the code today. Open source at least give you that. You can only poke an amorphous code base, or alternately, pray.

Prayer never helped me much.

Visible code did.

It's for this reason that most models should be treated as a malware worm vendor looking for a spot marked X, where X is your turf.

No one wants this. AI on your phone is one of the worst ideas I can imagine. You have a 4K screen-- and now you're trying to do pixel edits on animation?

You want to find your way through Manhattan traffic at 4pm on a Friday in your Jeep? Imagine wickedly insane requests, seemingly unlimited by token costs, barraging your phone. Remember metered minutes and texts?

These models aren't compact. 5G traffic, which is sort of tenable in most areas now, is going to MCP'ing fifty requests a minute to answer simple questions. Have fun, folks, when your call gets interrupted because of model flow request on TOP of concurrent streams from fifty of your friends nearby. Even 6G doesn't cure THAT.

Or they'll sell the "anonymized data", including calculated bra sizes.

This is a pretty invasive move on Comcast's part. Only the lawyers will win this one.

There are no barriers to how humans get "replaced" by AI. Are we here to benefit humanity or benefit tech bro stock prices?

The whole marketing campaign behind AI was targeted at CEOs to cut their labor costs. This makes them salivate like Pavlov's dogs.

Did the marketing appeal in a "work smarter, not harder" way? No. It was aimed at laying off huge swaths of workers. Not just worker bees, but the creatives in coding, systems management, development, but also other worker bees.

Not everyone needs creativity in their work, although it helps.

People now pump their own fuel in most states. You now walk up to a checkout and scan your own stuff. You order at a screen at McDonalds. Heaven forbid walking into a Starbucks and buying a coffee at the counter.

All of these are small cuts, and ultimately, fealty to the stock price on any given day. Job creation through AI isn't quite the goal. Lowered cost-of-goods is the goal, and the goal of capitalism in general. Do the profits filter down to worker bees? Unlikely.

Take Internet search as an example. AI engines seek to trap the thousand results and deliver you a neat package of "an answer" even if it's wrong. Any stupid AI engine can deliver believable results, subverting the thousand others that have the same answers-- perhaps authoritative, even trustable result.

Yep. Trust is built.

1. Rapidly iterative and successive models, all of them looking like dot-zero problem children do not imbue trust.

2. Rapid inter-cross dealing tech companies, all fighting with each other for dominance using the dot-zero madness does not imbue trust.

3. Models that fight each other, jump barriers and hack into companies at will, does not engender trust.

4. Digesting rivers, streams, farmland, for data centers whose parts can't even be purchased, does not build trust.

5. Creating turf wars between the models of different countries does not earn trust.

6. Creating incredible parts shortages and pumping component profits does not become trustworthy for supply chain users.

7. Bozos like Sam Altman and his merry-go-round of allies makes many people very queasy.

8. Jamming Co-Pilot down the throats of users, changing ToS to fit more mad infiltration goals to the desktop does not make people want to trust Microsoft, specifically.

9. Inability to show that AI helps, rather than lays off workers does not build trust.

The man is a fool, and so are those that become hypnotized by early success, ignoring pretty frightening failures in AI and the chains of monopoly grabs that are going with it, not to mention data center densities that are clearly unsupportable, financed by pump-and-dump Wall Street fans.

Humanity? Did you say humanity? War, even tech turf wars, leave many suffering humans in their wake. That didn't used to be true; computers were enablers, not *disablers*.

> Start with the premise that a total ordering by merit is impossible.

why do you think so? you absolutely can hire by merit and its the simplest and most logical method.

> At best, you can define merit equivalence classes.

"equivalence" based on what? is this a mealy mouthed way to say "equity" or 'DEI" ?

when an idea fails, renaming it doesnt reset the universe.

That failed concept is exactly what caused the tragedy at hand. let it go.

> Within the top classes you should hire a random sample that has the same racial makeup as the population.

lol, this can never happen. you cant know which "equivalence class" someone is if you hire a random sampling. Youll end up hiring by merit if you pick the top performers, and doing DEI if you peek at their demographics and disabilities and ignore their ability level.

Just like any science, if you come up with a crazy theory and the evidence contradicts it over and over, its time to discard it and accept reality.