I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover…

The intent is to allow companies time to implement the change. But if you’ll pardon my cynicism, in practice, what ends up happening is companies just use it as a tactic to delay the implementation and continue recording the revenue.

At the very least they should forfeit the revenue that they earn during the period for this. I’m not sure exactly how the fines work and whether they take this into account, but I doubt Apple is seriously going to use the 12-month period to actually come clean and change their ways. I think they’ll just use it as more time to come up with some new bullshit form of non-compliance.

Excellent news:

At the heart of Monday’s findings are three elements of Apple’s practices, including fees charged to app developers for every purchase made within seven days of linking out to the commercial app.

source

This is, in my opinion, the most egregious non-compliant practice from Apple. They have no reason whatsoever to entitle themselves to purchases made outside their repository just because the software runs on their hardware. It’s also the most asinine set of rules that they established to pretend that they were complying with the DMA.

It’s a bit disappointing that it will take so long before the fines can be enforced, but I really hope that they get the maximum penalty over this because it’s really the most shockingly brazen breach of the DMA’s terms. In fact, I hope that they get imposed the maximum penalty multiple times - the same article I linked mentions that there are two other DMA investigations being launched into Apple, though I don’t know what grounds those other investigations are looking into.

And I really hope Apple gets the message loud and clear: they’re gonna start making less money. And this is a good thing. They don’t deserve it, and they were never entitled to it in the first place. This is what happens when you invent new revenue streams that are criminally worthless.

Such a sad world we live in. When the internet was hitting the mainstream, virtually everything was standardized. There were RFCs for probably every standard the internet operated on. Email, HTTP, DNS, TCP/UDP/IP, etc.

Today, we live in a world where we can’t even decide on a fucking chat protocol without making it a proprietary piece of garbage. The internet has been consolidated into giant companies that see interoperability as a weakness that enable their competitors and prevent them from oppressing and exploiting their users.

A small group of gatekeepers that kill anything nice for their own short-term gains: it is sad but true that it feels like any technology that’s commercially successful will end this way.

It can’t possibly be that. We have to abolish trees - that’s the real answer!

This is quite cool. I always find it interesting to see how optimization algorithms play games and to see how their habits can change how we would approach the game.

I notice that the AI does some unnatural moves. Humans would usually try to find the safest area on the screen and leave generous amounts of space in their dodges, whereas the AI here seems happy to make minimal motions and cut dodges as closely as possible.

I also wonder if the AI has any concept of time or ability to predict the future. If not, I imagine it could get cornered easily if it dodges into an area where all of its escape routes are about to get closed off.

Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:

Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.

This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google’s culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they’ll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.

The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they’ll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that’s needed to build something real like this.

That’s what heathens like yourselves deserve for living lives full of sin. True servants of God like myself have been rewarded with the almighty TempleOS

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Great, then I’ll finally have some time to play them…

Two simple words: digital sovereignty.

Hopefully this serves as another case in the push for the EU[0] using native alternatives instead.

[0]: Not just the EU of course. Any non-American company should see dependency on Microsoft as a liability. I hope all countries around the world see this as a warning of things that could happen to them.

why is it a bad idea that studenst get some tools, free of charge, that they are free to use

I can’t find it right now, but there was a quote from a long time ago by Bill Gates where he basically said that it was fine if people were using Microsoft’s products for free because it would get them “addicted”. They would rather have people use Microsoft products even for free if it would prevent them from using alternatives.

That’s why it’s harmful. It’s free for students in the short term, but it prevents them from learning how to use an alternative product that will most certainly be free for them to use forever. Students waste those years when they have a chance to learn something useful, and instead get hooked on proprietary tools that will most certainly fuck them over at some point in the future.

The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they’re just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it’s pretty hilarious watching them flail.

You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It’s actually kinda poetic because now he’ll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.

An AI has a much better chance of actually providing some sort of vision for the company. Unlike its current CEO.

I assume you’re trying to imply in your comment that people are not going to use it if it’s not easy.

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes, having nice things can be a little hard. If people want to use the easiest thing under the sun, then they’ll just have to accept the downsides that come with it. Sometimes, that means private companies will use private photos of people’s underage children in AI training models that can generate deepfake pornography. What can you do? Convenience comes at a cost sometimes.

I’m not saying I agree with this of course, but that’s just how things are in the world where all rules must follow the dollar.

Well of course, that’s true of any and all publicly accessible data. At least with self-hosting, your private channels still don’t get mined against your wishes

Xournal - a great way to draw on pdfs

Oh goody. I’ve been wanting to use this since my slashdot days… today is my first chance!

Your post advocates a

[x] technical
[ ] legislative
[ ] market-based
[ ] vigilante

approach to fighting (ML-generated) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why
it won't work. [One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea,
and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad
federal law was passed.]

[ ] Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
[ ] Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
[ ] No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
[ ] It is defenseless against brute force attacks
[ ] It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
[ ] Users of email will not put up with it
[x] Microsoft will not put up with it
[ ] The police will not put up with it
[x] Requires too much cooperation from spammers
[x] Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
[ ] Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
[ ] Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
[ ] Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

[ ] Laws expressly prohibiting it
[x] Lack of centrally controlling authority for email^W ML algorithms
[ ] Open relays in foreign countries
[ ] Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
[x] Asshats
[ ] Jurisdictional problems
[ ] Unpopularity of weird new taxes
[ ] Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
[ ] Huge existing software investment in SMTP
[ ] Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
[ ] Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
[ ] Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
[x] Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
[x] Extreme profitability of spam
[ ] Joe jobs and/or identity theft
[ ] Technically illiterate politicians
[ ] Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
[x] Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
[ ] Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
[x] Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

[x] Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
[ ] Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
[ ] SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
[ ] Blacklists suck
[ ] Whitelists suck
[ ] We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
[ ] Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
[ ] Sending email should be free
[x] Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
[ ] Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
[x] Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
[ ] Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
[ ] I don't want the government reading my email
[ ] Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

[x] Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
[ ] This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
[ ] Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!