BraveSirZaphod

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don’t usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

You’re never going to get an honest answer to this question, but props for asking it anyway.

Maybe you can run the servers and pay the engineers with good vibes or praxis?

The funny thing about Lemmygrad people is that you could tell me that this comment was an intentional caricature and it’d seem just as likely as it being genuine.

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I’ve ever read in my life.

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

Ok, you mean I could be getting paid to not panic about Threads? If you have a referral link, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Implying that anyone who disagrees with you must be a paid shill is not the rhetorical dunk you apparently think it is.

I quite liked it, personally.

I imagine saying that is going to be treated as an admission of heresy here though.

Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, will become public domain in literally 13 days.

Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn’t necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn’t going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.

You have to scan a QR code from the website with your phone, which I’m assuming then facilitates a transfer of the keys.

That’s essentially what’s been posited by this rando on StackExchange.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/119552/how-does-end-to-end-encryption-work-with-whatsapp-web

Sure. My point is that, as far as I believe anyone is currently aware, there is no evidence that any law enforcement agency has ever accessed the content of encrypted WhatsApp messages. That does not mean that it has never happened either, but anyone positively claiming so is doing it without actual evidence, which is something we should probably avoid doing.

That your messages are encrypted at all
That your encryption keys are kept on-device, and not plainly available to a centralized party
That the encryption the application is using is securely implemented

This is true, but something that should be noted is that, to my knowledge, no law enforcement agency has ever received the supposedly encrypted content of WhatsApp messages. Facebook Messenger messages are not E2E encrypted by default, and there have been several stories about Facebook being served a warrant for message content and providing it. This has, as I understand, not occurred for WhatsApp messages. It is possible, of course, that they do have some kind of access and only provide it to very high-level intelligence agencies, but there’s no direct evidence of that.

I would personally say that it’s more likely than not that WhatsApp message content is legitimately private, but I’d also agree that you should use something like Signal if you’re genuinely concerned about this.

There is a practical difference in the time required and sheer scale of output in the AI context that makes a very material difference on the actual societal impact, so it’s not unreasonable to consider treating it differently.

Set up a lemonade stand on a random street corner and you’ll probably be left alone unless you have a particularly Karen-dominated municipal government. Try to set up a thousand lemonade stands in every American city, and you’re probably going to start to attract some negative attention. The scale of an activity is a relevant factor in how society views it.

OP’s responsible approach to privacy is not something that needs questioning.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is objectively not normal.

You can believe that it should be normal, but that’s a very different claim.

Not really, no. Freedom of speech is very strongly ingrained in our Constitution. The only legal restrictions on it are essentially direct threats or incitement of violence.

“Go kill this Jew” - Absolutely illegal.

“Go kill the Jews” - Illegal

“The Jews should be killed” - Borderline based on circumstances

“The Jews deserve to die” - Borderline, but probably protected by the Constitution

“The Jews deserved the Holocaust” - Almost certainly protected by the Constitution

Honestly, I would love to see a Wikipedia-style social media platform take off, but I really don’t know if the finances could work out. Wikipedia already struggles, and it’s obscenely useful. I don’t think nationalization is really feasible for social media - at least in an American context - because it would be subject to the government’s legal limitations on regulating free speech, which are extremely minimal. A federally run platform would not be able to remove literal unironic Nazism, which is probably going to be a bit of a turn-off to normal people.

Genuine question: given that running a platform like that costs money, and that money must come from somewhere, what would you actually do if you were in charge of running it? You either take money from advertisers, or you charge users directly, and I’d hazard to guess that if you’d nuke your account upon seeing ads, you probably wouldn’t pay actual money to use it.

So what do you do?

The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.

Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.