Regardless, the trend is upward, and for good reason.

Make all of the snarky comments that you like, this is a frightening canary around the realities of de-generative AI and the new "economies" it is creating. I despise Big Tech as much as the next guy, but at least content creators and businesses saw SOME slice of the advertising-revenue pie. Now these troves of data are going to be used to train AI models and the downstream creators will never see a cent of return (and worse, their infrastructure will be hammered into oblivion by these ruthless crawlers).

The democratization of information is an incredibly valuable tool for a well-functioning society, but de-genAI is hardly that. It is a consolidation of information into a small cadre of for-profit (or soon to be for-profit) entities that will have a chilling effect on the ability of people to sustain themselves with bringing new or interesting ideas to the world.

It is easy to laugh at the downfall of the "Education Industry" and all of its shady financial motivations, but this is merely the first of many dominos to fall. How many are left before information on the web is either paywalled or accessed exclusively through an AI chatbot?

Nothing will eliminate that like the embrace of (de)generative AI!

Toothpaste I can understand, but lets hope our dependency on oil ends sooner than later. After all, we already know that oil itself is certainly not going to last forever.

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

My favorite quote around the Doomsday Clock has always been from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen:

This is why I use Telegram and why I've prodded my family to adopt it as well. There are obviously things about it that are somewhat alarming to me (closed-source and non-federated server software, a creator who is becoming more of a diva every day, an increasing promotion of crypto scammery, etc), but it is by far the most user-friendly messaging platform available that isn't owned by a tech megacorp.

If I have something secret to send, I can use PGP to encrypt the message and then send it over literally any channel without issue. What I (and more importantly my family) want in our day to day conversations is decent security, decent privacy, and convenience.
(This is not an advertisement or endorsement of Telegram, ymmv, etc)

This is the funniest contrarian take I've seen today. I could easily respond with "gotta discredit any reference to global warming somehow". Would you have rather they said "accelerates local sea level rise from some unnamed phenomenon"? Are you disagreeing with the measurable fact that the sea level has risen as a direct result of rising temperatures, or are you simply bothered by the term "global warming" because you view any reference to it as some plot to sell you something or get someone elected?

I can't imagine being naive enough to believe this.

The idea of a "distributed web" sounds great to me, but I fail to see why we need blockchains to accomplish this. Wouldn't self-hosting content utilizing traditional protocols be sufficient? There seems to be a chasm of middle-ground between "everything on the web is hosted by AWS" and "everything you access is part of a distributed ledger that is owned by no-one".

We have to hear about it twice!

Which is hilariously sad, considering that the "native app" is just using Electron, anyway.

Not that i would ever want to defend the actions of a corporation, but I can't imagine they are "spending" very much on this. And I say spending in quotes because there is a high likelihood that any money used here will be considered a charitable donation, which has much more beneficial tax implications than employee payroll.

I'm all for holding irresponsible companies accountable, but this probably amounts to a rounding error on their annual financial statements.

This is such a hysterically bad example that I'm honestly not sure a rebuttal would make sense to you. No one is telling Apple to "open up the source code" or "make CAD files for its phones readily available". What they ARE telling Apple to do is to stop arbitrarily forbidding people with those phones from installing whatever software they'd like on them. If you wanted to make a car analogy that MIGHT make sense, this is like a car manufacturer telling you (the owner) exactly where or how many miles you can drive the car and at what times of the day. The problem here is that the company is dictating how you USE the device, not whether or not competitors have access to trade secrets.

Seriously, the inane "arguments" posted to this site seem to make less and less sense every passing year.

I laughed out loud when I realized that "a ahead" was the algorithm modifying "a Forward". There are a few other equally humorous examples, as well.