Yes, absolutely. They are digging their grave with their transition to being an AI company and it will absolutely catch up with them eventually.

This is not being ignored my Microsoft

My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.

It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.

Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.

Because I thought you were obviously wrong about the 7000 years thing, here’s a history of trademarks by some guy named Olivier Pierre:

Since ancient times, merchants have been using signs or marks in trade to distinguish their products. Registrations came much later, in the 18th century with the establishment of Intellectual Property Offices.

[…]

The use of trademarks dates back thousands of years, however we can’t date their origins with precision. Some of the earliest forms of identification of marks date from Prehistory. For instance, the Lascaux cave paintings in France show bulls drawings with marks on them. Experts believe that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock, long before literate societies. That was about 15.000 years ago.

The Egyptian masonry from some 6,000 years ago shows distinguishable quarry marks and stonecutters signs, to identify the source of the stone and the laborer who carried out the work to claim their wages. There were creative entrepreneurs who marketed their goods beyond their localities and sometimes over long distances. Wine amphorae marked with seals were found inside the Tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun who reigned between 1336 a.c. to 1327 a.c. over ancient Egypt.

I’ve gotten so used to think of trademarks as registered trademarks, but it makes sense that it has existed much longer in the literal sense. The earliest known law however dates back little more than 4000 years, and there’s nothing about trademarks there, so I think it’s fair to say trademark law is a lot more modern. :)

Sorry for being entirely off-topic.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.

Not saying it’s a good platform. It’s still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.

Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.

It’s too bad Cohn didn’t get to talk more about Mastodon.

If you have a reading mode in your browser it works well on that site. :)

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

I like the idea of keeping track of my hikes using GPS to be able to remember exactly where I’ve been, but I don’t trust the kind of data gathered by a smart watch with any company out there, and I don’t want to drain my phone by keeping the GPS on constantly. If this has good battery life it sounds interesting to me.

I’m generally sceptical of introducing another screen into my life though. Something about smart watches just seems inherently intrusive even if the software itself isn’t spyware.

Isn’t a bit of the challenge with the software to write something that supports the very modest hardware?

This is probably a much more efficient “mention of the fediverse” than if the journalist had started trying to explain that there is this federated network of independent social media sites bla bla bla.

The people reading this are looking for something they can understand. I expect naming Mastodon and leaving it to them to check it out will convert more people than if they started trying to explain what it is.

I’m a bit weirded out by all the attention given to w-social.eu by mainstream media, though. First of all it doesn’t exist yet, second we have no reason to believe it will actually be decent, third we have good reason to believe it won’t be.

The neat thing about algorithmic social media is that content relating to suicide and self-harm inspires a lot of interaction among teenagers, causing it to be shoved in their faces whether they search for it or not.

Suicidal teenagers are not searching for suicide material on Instagram; Instagram is feeding suicide material to regular teenagers for ad views.

They have been on Mastodon for many years already. As for why it takes so long to leave Twitter I guess it’s the same reason as everyone else - giving up on reaching the people there seems like a big loss to some.

Yeah, I think it’s reasonably run and invite-only now, so the ban should probably be lifted. @Skavau@piefed.social , something to consider? :)

Yeah, they are looking for “early twitter”, without reflecting too much on why “early twitter” that they loved turned into what it is today. I think many are forgetting that it took a turn for the worse long before Musk bought it.

The kids would be the ones answering as well, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

I know a lot of people here come from Reddit, but I’m sure I’m not the only one here who grew up using old school phpBB forums to talk to other kids about random stuff online after school. My favorite forum was not in English and probably had fewer than 100 active members, and its by far the best experience I’ve had online. I didn’t bother much with other public social media before Mastodon.

I think at least some of us are dreaming of recreating that type of safe and fun online space, where it’s possible to create more close-knit (but nevertheless anonymous) communities. Reddit isn’t it, and I agree that it’s not good for children (or anyone) to be on there.

Whether the Fediverse could provide it remains an open question. It certainly comes with huge moderation challenges.

I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.

I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.

I can imagine he has access to crazy surveillance of them and their mothers.

I don’t fully understand this shit out of a lack of really caring, but wouldn’t it be fully possible for an “AI agent” to create a crypto wallet on its own, scam some people to get money into it, and then just lose access and have the money pretty much just lost?

And if that happens, where does the money go? Into crypto “stock” in whichever coin it invests in?

What a stupid future we’re building.

He does some good things and some bad things. Don’t fall for simplistic thinking where everything and everyone is either good or evil.

When fighting to tax the rich, Macron is not an ally. When fighting to regulate American big tech he can be an ally, and it would be stupid not to use him as such.

The article touches upon race here and there:

Dan is white. Nicole is Black in a city that is 94 percent white.

In these cases, we found, people charged with growing vegetables in residential communities were more likely to be people of color (usually either Black or a recent immigrant), but not always. In Orlando, Florida, Jason and Jennifer Helvenston, a white couple, plowed up their front yard to grow vegetables. “A budget thing.” The city fined them $500 a day until it was replaced with “approved ground covers.” White defendants usually found it possible to shift vague lawn laws in their favor or overturn fines, but this was rarely the case for non-white homeowners.

And for the white folks out there who are looking for yet another reason to be self-hating:

communities with vegetable bans had 30.4 percent fewer Black, 28.5 percent fewer Asians, 7.8 percent fewer Hispanics, and 12.6 percent more white people than the population of their state. Those communities were also richer, with a 73.5 percent higher median income. This demographic profile supports what geographers call an “ecology of prestige” in which residents of higher-income communities attach greater importance to turf grass.