If you want the "super-hero stuff" to be "played out", you're going to be waiting a long time. We've been fascinated with super-powered heroes for thousands of years. The movies cross genres from space action-adventure to gross-out comedy to spy thriller, and those genres are going to stick around.
Maybe you should just ignore the fact that the main character is wearing a funny suit, stop using your hatred of super heroes to feel superior to everyone else, and enjoy the show.
Just because something is open source does not mean it's good.
I didn't say it was. My point was more that the danger of the risk of monoculture was mitigated by the monoculture being open source. Someone can always innovate off of the open source project. Without open source, you have vendor lock-in and monopolies.
The monoculture even with open source is still a massive problem as the standards stop driving development of software, and rather the development of software starts driving the standards.
To some extend, development always drives standards. Someone develops a new thing, then it's standardized, then others can develop to the standard. That's not the danger that monoculture presents.
This is exactly the shit we had with IE6. Had IE6 been open source the internet wouldn't have been any less of the incompatible non-standard shitstorm that it was either.
That's not really true at all. If IE6 were open sourced than people could have either chosen to standardize based on that implementation, or at least implemented an IE6-compatible rendering mode. Or someone could have made a fork of IE6 with more standards-compliant rendering. There would have been options.
Also, MS wouldn't have had the motivation to create IE the way they did if it were open source. They were intentionally perpetuating vendor-lock-in, and that was the real problem.
I don't see a huge problem in mostly using the same engine if it's open source and being actively developed well. To some extent, you know... the point is to render HTML consistently. I understand the benefit of avoiding a monoculture, but it's better than web developers having to include a bunch of hacks in their sites to get their sites to render properly on each browser. Yeah, it'd be nice if there were different implementations with different approaches to keep things diverse, but if I were a developer I wouldn't want to spend my time reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good open-source wheel available.
And I think part of the reason browsers are a bit stagnant and boring is, we just need to to render HTML. There's really not much room at the moment for interesting innovation. Just render the HTML securely, protect privacy, and block ads and annoyances. Frankly, they should probably be stripping things out. Static web pages shouldn't need to use as much resources as they do.
Also, the way it's used is different. People tend to be anonymous, and even have multiple identities for posting different kinds of content, so it's hard to know what even constitutes a "user". It's more discussion based (long-form discussion rather than quick posts), with a lot of independent communities, so I'd imagine it's hard to make much of an impact with a quick post engineered by a social media team.
Are we now just calling any website that has user accounts and topic discussion a "social network" in hopes of investment money?
I think they're defining "social network" as a site where the bulk of the content is from the contributions of its users, and not the people running the site. I agree that it doesn't quite fit with what I think of when I think of a "social network", but the term is hard to define and it's not clear where to draw the line.
Yeah, small businesses can't afford to support and maintain their own software, but an organization the size of the US government can. They could, at least theoretically, hire a team of programmers to develop and support the software they need. They can fix bugs and develop new features.
And it's true that having software vendor support is overrated. For an awful lot of the problems you'll run into, when you contact support they'll tell you, "Oh, right, there's a bug. The thing you want to do can't be done and the data you've lost is gone forever. Sorry." Having support doesn't mean that everything will work or everything will be fixed. It just means you'll have a specific group to be mad at when things don't work.
I've also been arguing for years that someone needs to come up with a sensible system for managing alerts/notifications. We have all kinds of little notifications that pop up and grab our attention, and there really aren't sufficient ways to say, "Only interrupt what I'm doing with a notification if these sets of circumstances are met. If any of these other circumstances are met, then compile the notifications into a report that I can review when I want to. Everything else, ignore it and don't ever tell me about it."
The problem is, the tech industry isn't going to allow there to be systems that let end-users use technology how and when they want to, and to otherwise ignore it. The tech industry is making too much money forcing end-users to operate in the terms that advertisers set.
Honestly, I've come to think that's a bit of a cop-out. If the government can't use FOSS, then I think they should fund the software they need, which should then also be open source.
That may sound excessive, but it's an investment. It accomplishes a bunch of stuff. First, over the long term, it does away with licensing costs. It also allows them to access the source code and verify its security, and then make modifications as needed. Also very importantly, it frees them from proprietary interests. They're not beholden to do things the way their vendor wants and serving their vendor's interests.
Also, whatever improvements they make to the FOSS are likely to be needed somewhere else. Improving public software serves the public interest.
The reality is, buying proprietary software may be "efficient" when looking at the short-term immediate cost, but it's much harder to say what will be efficient and cheap when viewed over the next several decades. I suspect that investing in public software now will pay off several times over in the next 50 years, and that's the sort of timeline the government should be considering.
I think you're misunderstanding something about this story, but I'm not sure what. This seems to be what happened:
Apple has privacy protection built into their products to protect their customers. There are limits to the amount of control an App has over a device, and what data can be collected. They do things like, just as an example, prevent Facebook from snooping on every site you visit on your phone's browser just because Facebook's app is installed.
However, Apple doesn't these rules to hamstring large business customers from having control over their own devices. For example, maybe some company wants to use iPads for industrial purposes in their warehouses to track inventory. For iOS to be a good platform for that, the company wants to be able to develop their own app that can take greater control of the device than Apple normally allows. Ok, fine, Apple has a developer program for large businesses to cater to that kind of thing.
Apple lets big businesses have greater control over their own devices, but as part of the agreement to allow that, Apple specifies that they're only allowed to use this greater level of access on their own devices, and not use it to distribute apps to consumers. Otherwise, developers could just use this access willy-nilly to get past all of Apple's security and privacy protection. Seems reasonable enough, right?
Now along comes Facebook, and they do the exact thing Apple says not to do, and for the exact reason Apple says not to do it. They use their Enterprise program to sidestep Apple's privacy protections so that they can spy on Apple users. In response, Apple revokes their ability to distribute apps that way.
Now if I'm being honest, I'd prefer that Apple allowed us all to use apps from outside of the App store. I don't really like the walled garden, and I'd prefer that Apple not rely on walled gardens for security. However, given that there is a walled garden and Apple does rely on it to secure their devices, it only makes sense that they'd enforce it.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: Facebook entered into an agreement with Apple in order to receive a greater level of access than developers normally have. Facebook then violated both the letter and spirit of the agreement, so Apple responded by revoking that greater level of access. I don't see any valid interpretation for how Apple is in the wrong here.
Right. So you select a VPN provider that you believe you can trust. Still, that doesn't change the fact that you're putting a lot of trust in that company, and if the trust is misplaced, they could violate your privacy as badly as your ISP. Or even worse.
I tend to trust my VPN provider more than I trust my ISPs, especially the mobile ones.
I'm not trying to argue necessarily, but I don't really see any reason why I should trust a random VPN provider over a random ISP. I wouldn't trust either to have my best interests at heart. If anything, VPNs have more reason to snoop because they have more reason to believe that the traffic going through them is sensitive.
There is also value in routing your traffic to a different legal jurisdiction, because it makes it much harder for law enforcement to bypass due process.
True, but there's also danger in routing your traffic to a different legal jurisdiction, for a couple of reasons:
1) Though arguably it's harder for the government to bypass due process, it's also harder for the government to do anything if the company is doing something abusive/illegal. For example, if you use a VPN that routes your traffic to China and the Chinese endpoint is spying on you, what is the US government going to do about it?
2) One of the things Snowden revealed is that the NSA spies more heavily on traffic that enters/exits US jurisdiction. Basically they somewhat recognize that they're not allowed to spy on communications between US citizens on US soil without due process. By sending the traffic out of the country, you're excluding your traffic from that (admittedly minor) protection.
Do you have examples? Are the projects still around? I'm surprised if code that terrible was merged.
I don't know of any cases where obfuscated malicious code was found in a live project, but it's a valid concern. It's certainly possible to obfuscate the true purpose of code, and there are even contests to come up with cleverly obfuscated code.
Open source software can be "trusted" to a fair extent. At least then, experts can look at the code and see what it's doing.
Of course there are still risks. Open source software can still have bugs. Malicious code can be obfuscated. Compiled binaries might be different from the source. Hosted services based on FOSS can still be used by the host for malicious purposes. And I don't think it can count as "open source" in situations like Android phones, where you have to run the OEM's version that has unknown alterations, and you can't just wipe it and install your own version.
Still, any real hope for trusting our hardware and software would be for us to have control of it and know what it's doing.
One of my worries about VPN apps (those used for privacy) is that, although they protect your privacy against your ISP, they hand over control to the VPN provider. They can say they'll keep your information private and they won't keep logs, but you're placing a lot of trust in that provider. If they have malicious intentions, or even if their security is bad and there's a method of compromising people's privacy that they're unaware of, then you're making it very easy for your privacy to be violated.
In fact, it can be worse than whatever spying your ISP can do. With a VPN app, they'd be able to monitor your traffic anywhere you go, all tied to a specific identity, tied back to whatever credit card you've used to pay for it.
I think you're misreading the emphasis of what I'm saying. It doesn't stress me out in an obvious way like I'm walking around all day worrying about it. I talked about the possibility that people aren't consciously aware of the stress impacting them, and then said I "realized" that it's stressing me out.
The idea that I'm suggesting is, things like this might add to your stress level at a relatively low level, but it can accumulate without you knowing that's what's going on. It's likely happening to you, too, but you lack the self-awareness to see it.
I don't think it's just the cost of storage or the cost of finding a particular thing, but also the psychology of seeing a bunch of junk, not knowing what it is, and not knowing if there's some problem lurking in that mess.
Like, ok, sure, it might not be too bad to find a particular email you're actively looking for. But how confident are you that you have a grasp of what information exists in your mailbox? How sure are you that you didn't miss an important email at some point, or forgot to respond to an email chain you were on?
Maybe you're extremely organized and you're fine. Or maybe you think you're fine, but the psychological stress is impacting you, but you're not consciously aware of it.
I'm pretty organized, but I've realized that it still stresses me out. I don't even remember all of the accounts I've signed up for over the past few decades. A while ago, I spent a few days trying to clear some of those out and shut them down. Still, there could be some old Dropbox account out there with a bunch of personal information that I signed up for with one of my old alternate addresses, and I might have just forgotten about it. Currently I have 4 different email accounts and 4 different online storage accounts, each for a different reason, but I think it adds to my stress level that I can't keep track of where all of my information is.
I don't think anyone was banking on Microsoft to be acting purely out of good will. At best, it's marketing that hopes to produce good will from us.
But I don't care much. My question would be, is it good? Or maybe instead I can ask, given this new offering, is this a better deal than what BitBucket or Gitlab are offering?
I don't think these things need real/strong AI. Then we might have to feel bad for them. A real sentient being whose purpose is to sit around in my cell phone in case I want to ask it to play me some music? It reminds me of Rick's "Pass the butter" robot.
Honestly I think we'll run into some big problems before we get to real AI. For example, the weak AIs could probably be a lot more helpful even without AI if they snooped on you, tracked your movements, and watched your reactions. To some extent, that's how real assistants learn how to service their bosses. Even a real/strong AI wouldn't be able to learn your preferences without measuring a lot of information about you. So do you want that?
And if you're willing to entertain the idea, what kind of safeguards do you want to protect your privacy? To what degree are you willing to let advertising sneak into that interaction.
Just to give an example, let's say you set the AI to remind you to pick up milk. It's going to work better if you can say, "Keep track of my location all day long, and when I'm close to a grocery store, remind me to get some milk." Are you ok with Apple and Amazon knowing your location all day long? And what are you going to do when Alexa steers you toward a Whole Foods, and mentions that a particular brand of milk is on sale?
Ok, but your laptop can run Windows, and I'm guessing it was sold with Windows, and that's why the sticker was on it. What you did with it after that is your business.
It'd be more comparable if you bought a laptop with a Windows sticker on it, but didn't have Windows installed and wasn't even capable of running Windows.
It's also just a nonsense fad created by news organizations so they can have a meaningless fluff story that old boring people can get excited about.
Nobody talked about "super moons" until a couple of years ago, when there was (at least according to the news) some alignment of factors that would cause the moon to appear larger than it had in... like... thousands of years. Ok, cool, that's kind of interesting. A lot of people got excited, and reporters just love talking about it.
Suddenly they started talking about the "super moon" every few months. Ok, so it's not an uncommon occurrence, then? It's just a full moon when the moon is near its apogee? That's pretty meaningless. So now they have to invent some other reason why the moon is in some rare alignment. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* a lunar eclipse!" Ok, I guess that's a little more interesting. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* Jupiter is in retrograde!" Is that interesting? I don't know. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* a lunar eclipse *and* a blood moon!" Wait, so a 'blood moon' is when there's an eclipse...? So isn't every super-moon during a lunar eclipse also a blood moon?
Next they'll invent a term like "super-ultra moon" for when there's a super-moon without an eclipse. "It's amazing how bright and white it is when there's no eclipse! It's ultra!" And then they'll start inventing terms for a new moon at apogee, or a waning moon halfway between apogee and perigee, or a waxing moon three-quarters of the way to apogee. That way the weatherman can get all excited every night because, "Oh my god, we now have a semi-ultra micro-waxing extra-gravy moon! That only happens every goddamn month!"
They'll be more likely to fail, all else being equal. Unfortunately, we don't live in a world where things are fair and the best company making the best products win out in the end. Entrenched players will win out, and they'll force bad products on us.
I don't think people would even pay $5/month. I could see spending $2/month, but it wouldn't just have to be ad-free and tracking-free. They'd have to let me control my account and feed. Like just do a chronological feed of what my friends have posted. Let me turn off all of the alerts that I don't want to see.
There's still a bit of a problem: Decisions are being made based on this stuff.
The data is contaminated, and then we don't know where it goes or who's using which information to make decisions, but someone is using it to make some decisions or else no one would be paying for it. So what happens when companies market their products, or politicians make policy decisions, based on that contaminated information?
And don't think they won't. They're all chasing the opinions of a few demographic groups, and they're not above using bad information.
Yeah, I get it. I'm suggesting that it was just bad marketing.
And yes, I know a lot of people are going to be like, "well marketing is stupid, so who cares?" But on a human psychological level, it just wasn't going to work. Even without the issues of the domain land-grabs and squatting, it would just be too much planning on the business side, and too much to keep track of on the consumer side.
Like you're Sony, and you make www.playstation.sony.com. Then the Playstation 2 comes out. I suppose technically you should move all the Playstation 1 information to www.ps1.playstation.sony.com and then make www.ps2.playstation.com... maybe...? Or do you do www.playstation2.sony.com? Is the PSP supposed to go into www.psp.playstation.sony.com or www.psp.sony.com or www.portable.playstation.sony.com?
Basically you need to be an expert in library science to figure out the best way of categorizing those things. Nobody is going to want to bother. They just want to stick ".com" on the end of the thing they're looking for. So it's "playstation.com".
Slashdot Mirror
If you want the "super-hero stuff" to be "played out", you're going to be waiting a long time. We've been fascinated with super-powered heroes for thousands of years. The movies cross genres from space action-adventure to gross-out comedy to spy thriller, and those genres are going to stick around.
Maybe you should just ignore the fact that the main character is wearing a funny suit, stop using your hatred of super heroes to feel superior to everyone else, and enjoy the show.
Just because something is open source does not mean it's good.
I didn't say it was. My point was more that the danger of the risk of monoculture was mitigated by the monoculture being open source. Someone can always innovate off of the open source project. Without open source, you have vendor lock-in and monopolies.
The monoculture even with open source is still a massive problem as the standards stop driving development of software, and rather the development of software starts driving the standards.
To some extend, development always drives standards. Someone develops a new thing, then it's standardized, then others can develop to the standard. That's not the danger that monoculture presents.
This is exactly the shit we had with IE6. Had IE6 been open source the internet wouldn't have been any less of the incompatible non-standard shitstorm that it was either.
That's not really true at all. If IE6 were open sourced than people could have either chosen to standardize based on that implementation, or at least implemented an IE6-compatible rendering mode. Or someone could have made a fork of IE6 with more standards-compliant rendering. There would have been options.
Also, MS wouldn't have had the motivation to create IE the way they did if it were open source. They were intentionally perpetuating vendor-lock-in, and that was the real problem.
I don't see a huge problem in mostly using the same engine if it's open source and being actively developed well. To some extent, you know... the point is to render HTML consistently. I understand the benefit of avoiding a monoculture, but it's better than web developers having to include a bunch of hacks in their sites to get their sites to render properly on each browser. Yeah, it'd be nice if there were different implementations with different approaches to keep things diverse, but if I were a developer I wouldn't want to spend my time reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good open-source wheel available.
And I think part of the reason browsers are a bit stagnant and boring is, we just need to to render HTML. There's really not much room at the moment for interesting innovation. Just render the HTML securely, protect privacy, and block ads and annoyances. Frankly, they should probably be stripping things out. Static web pages shouldn't need to use as much resources as they do.
Also, the way it's used is different. People tend to be anonymous, and even have multiple identities for posting different kinds of content, so it's hard to know what even constitutes a "user". It's more discussion based (long-form discussion rather than quick posts), with a lot of independent communities, so I'd imagine it's hard to make much of an impact with a quick post engineered by a social media team.
Are we now just calling any website that has user accounts and topic discussion a "social network" in hopes of investment money?
I think they're defining "social network" as a site where the bulk of the content is from the contributions of its users, and not the people running the site. I agree that it doesn't quite fit with what I think of when I think of a "social network", but the term is hard to define and it's not clear where to draw the line.
Yeah, small businesses can't afford to support and maintain their own software, but an organization the size of the US government can. They could, at least theoretically, hire a team of programmers to develop and support the software they need. They can fix bugs and develop new features.
And it's true that having software vendor support is overrated. For an awful lot of the problems you'll run into, when you contact support they'll tell you, "Oh, right, there's a bug. The thing you want to do can't be done and the data you've lost is gone forever. Sorry." Having support doesn't mean that everything will work or everything will be fixed. It just means you'll have a specific group to be mad at when things don't work.
I've also been arguing for years that someone needs to come up with a sensible system for managing alerts/notifications. We have all kinds of little notifications that pop up and grab our attention, and there really aren't sufficient ways to say, "Only interrupt what I'm doing with a notification if these sets of circumstances are met. If any of these other circumstances are met, then compile the notifications into a report that I can review when I want to. Everything else, ignore it and don't ever tell me about it."
The problem is, the tech industry isn't going to allow there to be systems that let end-users use technology how and when they want to, and to otherwise ignore it. The tech industry is making too much money forcing end-users to operate in the terms that advertisers set.
Honestly, I've come to think that's a bit of a cop-out. If the government can't use FOSS, then I think they should fund the software they need, which should then also be open source.
That may sound excessive, but it's an investment. It accomplishes a bunch of stuff. First, over the long term, it does away with licensing costs. It also allows them to access the source code and verify its security, and then make modifications as needed. Also very importantly, it frees them from proprietary interests. They're not beholden to do things the way their vendor wants and serving their vendor's interests.
Also, whatever improvements they make to the FOSS are likely to be needed somewhere else. Improving public software serves the public interest.
The reality is, buying proprietary software may be "efficient" when looking at the short-term immediate cost, but it's much harder to say what will be efficient and cheap when viewed over the next several decades. I suspect that investing in public software now will pay off several times over in the next 50 years, and that's the sort of timeline the government should be considering.
I think you're misunderstanding something about this story, but I'm not sure what. This seems to be what happened:
Apple has privacy protection built into their products to protect their customers. There are limits to the amount of control an App has over a device, and what data can be collected. They do things like, just as an example, prevent Facebook from snooping on every site you visit on your phone's browser just because Facebook's app is installed.
However, Apple doesn't these rules to hamstring large business customers from having control over their own devices. For example, maybe some company wants to use iPads for industrial purposes in their warehouses to track inventory. For iOS to be a good platform for that, the company wants to be able to develop their own app that can take greater control of the device than Apple normally allows. Ok, fine, Apple has a developer program for large businesses to cater to that kind of thing.
Apple lets big businesses have greater control over their own devices, but as part of the agreement to allow that, Apple specifies that they're only allowed to use this greater level of access on their own devices, and not use it to distribute apps to consumers. Otherwise, developers could just use this access willy-nilly to get past all of Apple's security and privacy protection. Seems reasonable enough, right?
Now along comes Facebook, and they do the exact thing Apple says not to do, and for the exact reason Apple says not to do it. They use their Enterprise program to sidestep Apple's privacy protections so that they can spy on Apple users. In response, Apple revokes their ability to distribute apps that way.
Now if I'm being honest, I'd prefer that Apple allowed us all to use apps from outside of the App store. I don't really like the walled garden, and I'd prefer that Apple not rely on walled gardens for security. However, given that there is a walled garden and Apple does rely on it to secure their devices, it only makes sense that they'd enforce it.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: Facebook entered into an agreement with Apple in order to receive a greater level of access than developers normally have. Facebook then violated both the letter and spirit of the agreement, so Apple responded by revoking that greater level of access. I don't see any valid interpretation for how Apple is in the wrong here.
Right. So you select a VPN provider that you believe you can trust. Still, that doesn't change the fact that you're putting a lot of trust in that company, and if the trust is misplaced, they could violate your privacy as badly as your ISP. Or even worse.
I tend to trust my VPN provider more than I trust my ISPs, especially the mobile ones.
I'm not trying to argue necessarily, but I don't really see any reason why I should trust a random VPN provider over a random ISP. I wouldn't trust either to have my best interests at heart. If anything, VPNs have more reason to snoop because they have more reason to believe that the traffic going through them is sensitive.
There is also value in routing your traffic to a different legal jurisdiction, because it makes it much harder for law enforcement to bypass due process.
True, but there's also danger in routing your traffic to a different legal jurisdiction, for a couple of reasons:
1) Though arguably it's harder for the government to bypass due process, it's also harder for the government to do anything if the company is doing something abusive/illegal. For example, if you use a VPN that routes your traffic to China and the Chinese endpoint is spying on you, what is the US government going to do about it?
2) One of the things Snowden revealed is that the NSA spies more heavily on traffic that enters/exits US jurisdiction. Basically they somewhat recognize that they're not allowed to spy on communications between US citizens on US soil without due process. By sending the traffic out of the country, you're excluding your traffic from that (admittedly minor) protection.
Do you have examples? Are the projects still around? I'm surprised if code that terrible was merged.
I don't know of any cases where obfuscated malicious code was found in a live project, but it's a valid concern. It's certainly possible to obfuscate the true purpose of code, and there are even contests to come up with cleverly obfuscated code.
Open source software can be "trusted" to a fair extent. At least then, experts can look at the code and see what it's doing.
Of course there are still risks. Open source software can still have bugs. Malicious code can be obfuscated. Compiled binaries might be different from the source. Hosted services based on FOSS can still be used by the host for malicious purposes. And I don't think it can count as "open source" in situations like Android phones, where you have to run the OEM's version that has unknown alterations, and you can't just wipe it and install your own version.
Still, any real hope for trusting our hardware and software would be for us to have control of it and know what it's doing.
One of my worries about VPN apps (those used for privacy) is that, although they protect your privacy against your ISP, they hand over control to the VPN provider. They can say they'll keep your information private and they won't keep logs, but you're placing a lot of trust in that provider. If they have malicious intentions, or even if their security is bad and there's a method of compromising people's privacy that they're unaware of, then you're making it very easy for your privacy to be violated.
In fact, it can be worse than whatever spying your ISP can do. With a VPN app, they'd be able to monitor your traffic anywhere you go, all tied to a specific identity, tied back to whatever credit card you've used to pay for it.
I think you're misreading the emphasis of what I'm saying. It doesn't stress me out in an obvious way like I'm walking around all day worrying about it. I talked about the possibility that people aren't consciously aware of the stress impacting them, and then said I "realized" that it's stressing me out.
The idea that I'm suggesting is, things like this might add to your stress level at a relatively low level, but it can accumulate without you knowing that's what's going on. It's likely happening to you, too, but you lack the self-awareness to see it.
I don't think it's just the cost of storage or the cost of finding a particular thing, but also the psychology of seeing a bunch of junk, not knowing what it is, and not knowing if there's some problem lurking in that mess.
Like, ok, sure, it might not be too bad to find a particular email you're actively looking for. But how confident are you that you have a grasp of what information exists in your mailbox? How sure are you that you didn't miss an important email at some point, or forgot to respond to an email chain you were on?
Maybe you're extremely organized and you're fine. Or maybe you think you're fine, but the psychological stress is impacting you, but you're not consciously aware of it.
I'm pretty organized, but I've realized that it still stresses me out. I don't even remember all of the accounts I've signed up for over the past few decades. A while ago, I spent a few days trying to clear some of those out and shut them down. Still, there could be some old Dropbox account out there with a bunch of personal information that I signed up for with one of my old alternate addresses, and I might have just forgotten about it. Currently I have 4 different email accounts and 4 different online storage accounts, each for a different reason, but I think it adds to my stress level that I can't keep track of where all of my information is.
I don't think anyone was banking on Microsoft to be acting purely out of good will. At best, it's marketing that hopes to produce good will from us.
But I don't care much. My question would be, is it good? Or maybe instead I can ask, given this new offering, is this a better deal than what BitBucket or Gitlab are offering?
I don't think these things need real/strong AI. Then we might have to feel bad for them. A real sentient being whose purpose is to sit around in my cell phone in case I want to ask it to play me some music? It reminds me of Rick's "Pass the butter" robot.
Honestly I think we'll run into some big problems before we get to real AI. For example, the weak AIs could probably be a lot more helpful even without AI if they snooped on you, tracked your movements, and watched your reactions. To some extent, that's how real assistants learn how to service their bosses. Even a real/strong AI wouldn't be able to learn your preferences without measuring a lot of information about you. So do you want that?
And if you're willing to entertain the idea, what kind of safeguards do you want to protect your privacy? To what degree are you willing to let advertising sneak into that interaction.
Just to give an example, let's say you set the AI to remind you to pick up milk. It's going to work better if you can say, "Keep track of my location all day long, and when I'm close to a grocery store, remind me to get some milk." Are you ok with Apple and Amazon knowing your location all day long? And what are you going to do when Alexa steers you toward a Whole Foods, and mentions that a particular brand of milk is on sale?
Ok, but your laptop can run Windows, and I'm guessing it was sold with Windows, and that's why the sticker was on it. What you did with it after that is your business.
It'd be more comparable if you bought a laptop with a Windows sticker on it, but didn't have Windows installed and wasn't even capable of running Windows.
It's also just a nonsense fad created by news organizations so they can have a meaningless fluff story that old boring people can get excited about.
Nobody talked about "super moons" until a couple of years ago, when there was (at least according to the news) some alignment of factors that would cause the moon to appear larger than it had in... like... thousands of years. Ok, cool, that's kind of interesting. A lot of people got excited, and reporters just love talking about it.
Suddenly they started talking about the "super moon" every few months. Ok, so it's not an uncommon occurrence, then? It's just a full moon when the moon is near its apogee? That's pretty meaningless. So now they have to invent some other reason why the moon is in some rare alignment. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* a lunar eclipse!" Ok, I guess that's a little more interesting. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* Jupiter is in retrograde!" Is that interesting? I don't know. "Oh, it's a super-moon *and* a lunar eclipse *and* a blood moon!" Wait, so a 'blood moon' is when there's an eclipse...? So isn't every super-moon during a lunar eclipse also a blood moon?
Next they'll invent a term like "super-ultra moon" for when there's a super-moon without an eclipse. "It's amazing how bright and white it is when there's no eclipse! It's ultra!" And then they'll start inventing terms for a new moon at apogee, or a waning moon halfway between apogee and perigee, or a waxing moon three-quarters of the way to apogee. That way the weatherman can get all excited every night because, "Oh my god, we now have a semi-ultra micro-waxing extra-gravy moon! That only happens every goddamn month!"
They'll be more likely to fail, all else being equal. Unfortunately, we don't live in a world where things are fair and the best company making the best products win out in the end. Entrenched players will win out, and they'll force bad products on us.
I don't think people would even pay $5/month. I could see spending $2/month, but it wouldn't just have to be ad-free and tracking-free. They'd have to let me control my account and feed. Like just do a chronological feed of what my friends have posted. Let me turn off all of the alerts that I don't want to see.
There's still a bit of a problem: Decisions are being made based on this stuff.
The data is contaminated, and then we don't know where it goes or who's using which information to make decisions, but someone is using it to make some decisions or else no one would be paying for it. So what happens when companies market their products, or politicians make policy decisions, based on that contaminated information?
And don't think they won't. They're all chasing the opinions of a few demographic groups, and they're not above using bad information.
Yes, and successful capitalism is dependent on regulation and social programs to prevent disaster.
Maybe the answer isn't to run amok with an extremist ideology.
Yeah, I get it. I'm suggesting that it was just bad marketing.
And yes, I know a lot of people are going to be like, "well marketing is stupid, so who cares?" But on a human psychological level, it just wasn't going to work. Even without the issues of the domain land-grabs and squatting, it would just be too much planning on the business side, and too much to keep track of on the consumer side.
Like you're Sony, and you make www.playstation.sony.com. Then the Playstation 2 comes out. I suppose technically you should move all the Playstation 1 information to www.ps1.playstation.sony.com and then make www.ps2.playstation.com... maybe...? Or do you do www.playstation2.sony.com? Is the PSP supposed to go into www.psp.playstation.sony.com or www.psp.sony.com or www.portable.playstation.sony.com?
Basically you need to be an expert in library science to figure out the best way of categorizing those things. Nobody is going to want to bother. They just want to stick ".com" on the end of the thing they're looking for. So it's "playstation.com".