It's really quite easy to regulate many small competing entities. There are plenty of people ready to fill the role of IRS agent, and even the cost is relatively trivial.
What's practically impossible is regulating a few anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity that writes your nation's laws.
On the contrary, some Taco Bell locations are using an LLM for the entire order conversation. It's still a human that takes your card/cash, but they only state the price to be charged, and ask about hot sauce packets. I was so unsettled by the experience that I ended up not noticing the extra drink they handed me until I made it all the way home.
The problem is that your response is precisely what the corporate decision-makers rely on to insulate themselves from criticism.
That doesn't mean that you are wrong: there is no point protesting to a cashier. My point is that there is no realistic or effective way for us to actually communicate to the corporate decision makers that rule our world. This becomes even more true as corporations consolidate power, which is precisely the "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow has been writing about.
Flock's entire business model is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. What Flock does for their core business is called "stalking", which is a crime.
The issue here is not that the law is inadequate to resolve this problem. The issue is that the current administration has chosen to collude with private corporations that flagrantly violate the law, thereby replacing our entire judiciary system with a protection racket.
Please don't be generous. Fascists depend on our patience to insulate them from consequences.
Yes, but the problem is deeper than flock or even privacy as a concept. The problem is that we routinely fail to recognize organization crime. Basically, you're allowed to just spread and obfuscate accountability and get away with basically anything.
If I stalk someone, I go to jail. If 100 people get together and invent Super Stalking and they stalk everyone all the time, nobody goes to jail. It's completely counter-intuitive but this is how we structured society and justice.
I'm not sure why we've decided that if one dude named Mark stalks one girl then he's a creep, but if he stalks a million girls he's a hero and role model.
It is true that the dems have not been good on the topic of mass surveillance. Obama leveraged and expanded what Bush had built, the Obama DoJ defended mass surveillance in court, and Biden didn't do anything to change this direction. The dems found this stuff to be too useful and appealing to resist and helped build the machine that now supports Trump's fascism.
But it is also correct to say that Trump is a fascist and that Biden wasn't one.
It's literally in the name: Autism Spectrum Disorder.
You experience autistic traits, but not intensely enough to be a disorder? Congratulations, you can leave the word "disorder" out when you describe yourself.
Everyone masks, but some people mask so often and so intensely that it's like performing a second life; all while hoping your audience doesn't notice. Also, it physically hurts to do, because the interactions you are performing overstimulate your brain.
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I'm assuming you are an adult. Would you like to make social room for someone to be themselves around you instead of perform the role of "functional adult"? If you don't want to make that accommodation, is it something that you are willing to do anyway?
Making "social room" is incredibly broad. I am fine with someone wearing what they want, speaking in a manner they desire, or stepping away if they are stressed. But I won't accept anything.
It all depends on how large the accommodation is. What if they say my talking overstimulates them and I must write everything down. Also the stress from masking is too much so we can only work together 30 minutes a day. In that case no, I would need to work with someone else. Not because I dislike them, but because we are not getting a project done that way.
> What if they say my talking overstimulates them and I must write everything down.
The goal is to resolve the problem, not to bow to every person's whim. How many accommodations are they making for you that you are unaware of?
You can't be responsible to manage a person's disorder. You can, however, actively try to help. The most important distinction here is how you frame your participation.
One of the best ways to help is to explicitly say that you want to help and compromise, but have clear boundaries you are unwilling to cross. The default assumption, that you are unwilling to help simply because you find it inconvenient to do so, is usually accurate. It takes effort to disprove that assumption, but that proof can relieve a lot of stress.
What you have done in the comment I responded to, has had quite the opposite effect. I understand it wasn't likely your intention, but your communication implied that you are generally unwilling to make an accommodation until you personally believe it is necessary. That implication is an insurmountable boundary that every ADHD/ASD person is intimately familiar with. You are the only one in a position to move that boundary.
More interestingly, users care about 20% of each of the other applications they are trying to use. Not only is it frustrating for them to be bombarded with the 80% of your app they don't care about, it's frustrating when they can't easily replace that 80% with the other apps they prefer.
The entire premise of an "application" is, in my opinion, a huge mistake. Each application, by virtue of being just that, is designed to be a silo of functionality and usability. An application monopolizes the functionality for the use case it was designed to apply to. Not only does an application hold its functionality hostage, it insulates itself from the functionality of other applications. This creates a brittle system with incredible overhead.
There's a reason many of us prefer to use a terminal emulator and shell utilities: they are designed with the opposite goal, to collaborate with each other as much as possible. That's often worth dealing with the ~40 years of cruft that the shell comes with, but accessibility could definitely be improved.
> when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.
You are conflating the expression of an opinion with the opinion itself.
Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for. I don't find it hypocritical to draw attention to that irony. I do, however, find it hypocritical to fire someone for expressing dissent about the opinions of a man who literally became famous for directly asking random people in public to enter into arguments with him.
> Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for.
He never advocated murdering people over political disagreements. He disagreed with banning guns, but even the people who advocate banning guns don’t usually openly advocate banning bolt action hunting rifles.
The sentiment here is to cheer and laugh at a premeditated murder. If you want to rationalize it, whatever. It’s no use trying to have a discussion with someone who cheers and laughs at a man getting murdered for having discussions.
You're right that he didn't cheer on political assassination.
He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males. A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.
And to be very, very clear: ambivalence at his departure from earth is not equal to ambivalence of the manner.
I was happy Rush Limbaugh died of skin cancer. I was not happy Charlie Kirk died of murder.
> He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males.
False.
> A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.
Lying about what other people say and mischaracterizing those statements as an incitement to violence is itself an incitement to violence. Stop lying and stop inciting violence!
That's a provocative statement, especially taken out of context like that, but it doesn't necessarily imply the devaluation of anyone's life, and the broader context of everything Charlie Kirk said and the way he treated people, including people who identified themselves to him as transgendered, makes it obvious he didn't feel that way. But then again, that's exactly the reason you stripped that quote out of context and posted it to an online argument in which you are much more explicitly devaluing the lives of people you disagree with politically.
But he said it. So you're either wrong and he meant it, or you're defending the words of a disingenuous sack of... Well, let's say "lies". That bad faith provocateur act has no role in decent society.
His speech was legal and despicable. He was not a good person. He may have believed himself to be a Christian, I don't know his heart, but he was not Christ-like.
That's the same tradeoff we make with all civil rights.
Lots of people criticized Donald Trump's proposal of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on", and rightfully so in my opinion. Do you think the irony would be thick if some of those people were murdered by Muslim terrorists?
The entire Republican platform (especially since ~2016) has switched focus to something less like propaganda, and more like engagement for engagement's sake. Conservative talking heads do tend to frame everything from a particular perspective (that's the propaganda part), but rather than try to convince everyone to agree with them, they do the opposite: try to get as many people as possible to disagree with them, so they can get themselves and their audience into eternal "arguments". These "arguments" are never intended to be logically defensible. Instead, they are intended to fail as spectacularly as possible. Naturally, most other media outlets love this, because they get to profit from their own participation. The only value left in this dynamic is engagement.
By leveraging the alleged "two sides" of American politics, both politicians and media corporations have managed to create an infinite feedback loop of engagement with their media; and at the same time have managed to direct that feedback into political support for their preferred policies. Knowing this, it's entirely unsurprising that many of the highest positions in government are now held by household TV personalities, like Dr. OZ and Donald Trump.
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So what can we do about it? If engagement is the new currency, can we simply boycott this entire thing by disengaging? I doubt it will be possible to get enough people to actually participate, particularly those who are currently the most engaged. Disengagement only creates an implicit victory for whoever is speaking loudest.
Honest argument is incredibly important. There is no value in diversity of thought until differing positions meet each other and collaborate. Media corporations have found huge success by replacing argument with bickering. I think the first step in undoing that damage is to help people understand the difference between the two: argument is goal-oriented, whereas bickering is goal-avoidant. Knowing that difference, I think we should find ways to practice argument with each other, and redirect our engagement into collaborative progress.
Plasma isn't bad and better than Windows in most respects, but it's kind of the opposite of Omarchy in that it has a trillion toggles and its defaults don't work for many, so a good deal of tweaking is required to make it "cozy".
I'm curious which defaults you find so unusable. I'm rather fiddly and particular, but I haven't done much more to my KDE setup than disable mouse acceleration.
We devs are really good at answering two out of three questions:
1. How? This is the tutorial. It might be really helpful, for specifically what is being taught.
2. What? This is the reference documentation. It's often the most usable and complete resource.
3. Why? This is the context. It can only be learned by getting familiar with the environment. This journey is where we devs grow our metaphorical (and sometimes literal) neckbeards.
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We could stand to pay a lot more attention to question #3. The contexts we have surrounded ourselves with are messy, conflicted, incompatible, and surprising. Some particularly savvy devs have made incredibly powerful tools to help clean up this mess, yet somehow those tools are some of the least noob-friendly software we have! How did we get here? Is there any way out?
I think the most uninviting part of our environment is also the most familiar: the shell. There are a lot of pokey bits that we really don't need anymore: escape sequences, suspend, environment variables, etc. What would happen if we took a serious look at starting from scratch? Could we do better than a REPL?
It's pretty incredible that after all these years, no one has actually made a real competitive alternative to the shell, and I have a theory for how we got here. The GUI model was created by corporations for proprietary software. We call them "applications", because they are supposed to cater to a specific predetermined use case, which is precisely what makes them inferior to shell utilities. This development model isn't limited to GUI either: apps have taken over the entire development scene.
I think if we really started fresh, we could revolutionize modern software to be more compatible, flexible, and malleable than any application could ever be. That's what a shell is already, which is why we devs never want to leave it behind.
What's practically impossible is regulating a few anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity that writes your nation's laws.
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