Stopped clocks and all, they’re still endorsing an absolute shithead over one issue that he hasn’t even actually delivered on, but who has good reason to insist on authoritarian surveillance measures.

If you care about privacy, betting on companies that suck up to Authoritarians is a bad idea.

Oh FFS, and here I was recently considering switching to ProtonMail… fuck the fuck off.

Dear CEOs: if you’re eager to suck dick, I’m sure you can find someone better than authoritarian shitheads. Have some fucking standards.

He’s like Billy Mitchell with more money.

Careful there, or you’ll have two nut jobs suing you

The jar

It seems to have an iOS app, but it’s also evidently still in development.

Oh you’re absolutely right, I just felt like spelling out the subtext of “Musk isn’t in it for the right wing mentality, just for the power” that I thought you were hinting at but left unsaid. I wasn’t trying to contradict you at all, but rather to expand on your setup.

The issue is that the difference is clear to us, but not to everyone else. Even at the periphery of the tech world, I’ve met people generally aware what source code is, but not of the specific concept of “Open Source” and why it makes a difference. We should avoid falling into the bubble trap where we assume that what’s familiar to us is familiar to everyone else as well.

Damn cats are lucky I love them.

The shit cats get away with by being cute…

When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of “the other”, yes, you’re gonna be negative.

I don’t believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn’t quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn’t actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they’ll make him richer. He’s motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.

I suspect he just doesn’t want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we’ve already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn’t off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don’t think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.

Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it’s harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view…

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

(Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn’t make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I’m just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)

I’m not the smart person you replied to and I don’t know for sure, but given many modern circuits have become very fine and compact, I’m not optimistic about your chances to repair it. It would depend on the nature and extent of the damage, of course, but if you’re an amateur, I think you’re better off replacing (though you might get away with replacing just a part instead of the whole device).

Also a good point. Personally, I’m not willing to extend the charity of Hanlon’s Razor to corporations well known to be malicious. In this event, I’d rather be wrong than off-guard, if that makes sense?

The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result.

I think this is more of a case where the mandate to always increase profits compelled them to take calculated financial risks and hope to be the vanguard of a new boom. Well, maybe the calculations were more estimates, but I assumed they figured out they could afford the loss if it flopped, but would make major gains by securing a foothold in a new digital space if it succeeded.

Consider how occasionally niche technologies once mocked later turn out to be hits. I remember once reading somewhere that QR codes were a fad, had died out and were basically useless, for instance, and I bought it because I myself saw decreasing use of them. At the time, I think QR code scanners weren’t built into smartphone camera apps, and smartphones weren’t as ubiquitous either, so unless you downloaded dedicated (and in retrospect sketchy) apps for it, they remained useless.

Now, I see QR codes everywhere. My company has them on meeting rooms to check their occupation and book them right from your phone without needing to remember or manually enter the room number. Our printers have QR codes for email templates to report errors to IT that include technical details for the printer. Restaurants have QR codes for digital ordering, invoices for automatically scanning the payment details from your banking app, the list goes on.

Obviously, the financial scale is far different, but that’s the example that came to mind just now seeing a QR code in my train for digital schedules including current delay. I’m sure there are better examples I could think of, but it’s eight in the morning and my long-term memory won’t come online for another hour or so.

My point is that it’s sometimes hard or impossible to predict whether something will succeed, but the nature of corporate economics in the tech sphere compells taking risks on new innovations because the potential payoff is immense. And if they can afford to take it - they’re not exactly short on money and not particularly worried about their users running away over it - I don’t know if they can afford not to. Who knows what new tech people might surprisingly latch on to?

I do think you’re right, but I don’t think it’s the only reason for doing things we think are stupid. The tech sphere in particular has a lot of survivorship bias, but while small companies might disintegrate over a failure, a giant corporation can take the hit and keep trying for the next gold rush.

To see if the backlash is really that bad, to see if there are specific issues people object to, to see if there are certain demographics more strongly opposed, to desensitise people for when they try it next time (“ugh, again?” instead of the full outrage), to give people the illusion of control (look, online complaints work!)…

There are a lot of possible reasons, but I doubt it’s an entirely ignorant decision coming from a company known to be good at manipulating it’s users.

The value of distributed redundancy