Guys, it's been over for a while now. And I mean decades... This is just one of the next steps in the path that's been laid out in front of us since the general population reached critical mass on the Internet and the ruling class (politicians, the media, corporations...) went all in on exploiting them for money and power. If we don't radically change the underpinnings of how the entire system works, we're in for much worse than this.
None, I'd bet. Can't you see this is just about tightening their grasp on our liberties, swaying our opinions, and selling our data? Organised religion could be going for that (minus the data, at least not in the current sense) in the past with a certain degree of success, but I don't see how they are even a tad bit as powerful as they once were. It doesn't seem sensible to associate these seemingly coordinated measures around the world to organised religion instead of corporations and the political elite. That's just a tone deaf take.
We're going to see more and more crackdown on internet access, in the name of making it "safe", or "safe for kids", particularly. All they want is pushing for censorship and control, though, on top of collecting and selling even more data. We'd be wise to make an effort to migrate to censorship resistant overlay networks like Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) or i2p before it's too late.
If I need to buy a phone made by Google to get away from Google, I'm just not doing it. /e/ doesn't support my current smartphone, either, and postmarketOS is not functional. At this rate, I think we're better off going back to dumbphones.
I think we aren't far from GrapheneOS being rendered unusable. We desperately need to make Linux phones viable daily drivers. Desperately. It's the only way we'll have access to critical funcionality while being independent from mega corporations like Google and whatever they decide to do with AOSP and their Pixel phones. Right now everything regarding our privacy is in their filthy hands.
Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.
Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.
You got this exactly right. I've been trying to sound the horn on this issue for years now, since GPT-3 got released and exploded into the mainstream and you could read and hear "you don't need to {x} anymore with AI" all over the place.
How ironic. "AI" feeds off structured knowledge, artistic creations and otherwise any human production to generate its output. As a consequence of its widespread adoption, people start to lean even more towards consuming rather than producing, a tendency which was already increasing before the advent of LLMs and modern machine-learning. This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what? The whole process folds onto itself. Are we entering the dark ages of cultural (in the widest sense of the word) production? Not that I don't think that we're already there, in any case, but for other, somewhat related causes...
>Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0].
Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web, my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too, including gemini, which I really liked.
Nice site. I miss the pre social media, pre-hypercommercial, pre mass surveillance Internet of old. It was mostly the product of genuine, sincere self-expression. Now it feels and even works like an infomercial, a scam, everywhere you look, filled to the brim with grifters and corporations trying to take ahold of your attention (and money). It's disgusting and inefficient at almost anything you attempt to do on it because of that terrible fact. It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world, and its enforcers: normies. For many, many years now, it's been the exact opposite: it's turned into the epitome of what it helped us escape from, and it permeates every moment of our waking lives, directly or indirectly.
The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
Well, offering less and less features for more money each time could be the main culprit, I reckon. The bot issue is also huge, of course. I'd like to see data on the male-to-female ratio in terms of users, too...
They're probably bluffing to an extent, but just picture the dystopian scenario we're all heading towards: you're watching anything that's not {MegaCorporation or Government}-Approved Content™ on your TV and all of a sudden the screen goes dark and displays an ominous message, "This device has been permanently disabled due to non-approved usage. It will be retrieved by authorized personnel in the following days. Failing to comply will carry a serious fine. Thank you." Then you say "McDonald's! I'm lovin' it!" out loud so you can unlock your phone and proceed to complain on X before you're swatted by the police for doing so.
Most books are junk entertainment, and not what they're, in fact, falsely purported to be. We live in the most insincere period in history thanks to the malign coupling of late stage capitalism and pervasive interconnectedness (smartphones and social media). Everything is simulacra, just an insincere monetization process. Sensationalism is our new God.
This bothered me a lot in the past. I want to be in full control of any information that is on the Internet concerning myself. Some of the people I know will add an appeasing comment before taking a picture: "don't worry, I won't upload it anywhere!", but most people will just post it willy-nilly all the same.
By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.
>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous. What the author is describing there would better fit what we tend to do during weekends, where "sobremesa" (coffee and drinks after we're done with the main dishes) can admittedly get a bit out of hand, but absolutely not on working days.
Adopting javascript universally, and consequentially making it a de facto standard, was a terrible mistake. I think the only way out of this nightmarish privacy-less state of things (in this regard) might be something like the EU putting out an extremely severe law banning all these bad practices. Banning all practices that undermine privacy is the only morally valid option; it's not only about 3rd-party cookies. It'd be an incontrovertible measure for everyone but bad actors, just like USB-C or user-removable batteries (February 2027).
E-ink technology is a godsend. Until refresh rate and image quality improve, though, it's great for many things other than a general-purpose monitor. For instance, I just ordered the Mudita Kompakt: I love how it's low-power and extremely minimal by default, but you can sideload apps if you so desire. With a regular smartphone, I have to traverse the opposite path, which is vastly more cumbersome and inefficient: root the phone, install GrapheneOS, take care of all the wasteful and unneeded "features" or functionalities, install and set up a minimalist launcher, install tools to get around bloat and other nuisances, etc. And there's no guarantee you'll end up with a satisfying result. I very much prefer starting from the ground up than trying to regain control over my phone and remove all the corporate and retarded shit. I'd even love the Kompakt more if it didn't come with a camera--I have dedicated cameras I use for pictures and video.
Note the very first expression employed to answer the question in the title: "No.". If that ain't an exceedingly confident and ignorant stance on a subject we lack a huge amount of context on for us to give such a direct answer, I don't know what is.