> They want to get established as the de facto standard and get a whole bunch of people on their platform so by the time they need to "get profitable" they have a captive audience, a leg-up on other labs. It's a tale as old as time, that's why ubers used to be cheaper than cost.
Some of that is seeking to kill competitors before they can get established. That's normal and has been around for generations, if not since trading was invented.
But most of what we've seen during the "enshitification age" has been to burn money until you achieve a critical mass of users. However, this only really applies to social platforms where the point of it is communicating with people you know. That's the lock-in. You convinced Grandma to join Bookface and now you feel bad leaving if she doesn't leave at the same time, and more importantly, who wants to join Google Square if nobody else uses it?
That's not going to work for AI platforms.
What I do see potentially working is one method that email platforms use to lock in users: having tons of data you can't export/migrate. If you spent lots of time training your AI by feeding it your data, that's going to make it harder to leave.
So far none of them have capitalized on this (probably due to various technical reasons) but I expect it to start eventually.
The lock-in of email platforms is the address. With IMAP you can extract the messages right away and migrate. Yet, you would still have to check the old mailbox for stray emails that you must tell to reach you on the new address. And continue doing so for years or risk missing some critical email.
Coincidentally, bringing your own address that can be migrates away is somewhere between impossible and expensive.
Disregarding the grandfathered free accounts, own domain is $7.20/user/month on gmail, €5/month on Proton. On microsoft that's business tier feature and AFAIK not supported at all on Yahoo.
There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers
No there isn't! That's not hypocritical! Words mean things!
Country X1 is claiming that country X2 is allegedly doing bad thing Z. If it turns out that it is the country X2 that is actually doing Z, you would call it hypocritical, wouldn't you?
Like Russia talking about the importance of international law and sovereignty of Iran. Like Israel speaking how much against Holocaust/genocide they are.
Snd words do mean things and they don't discriminate. So all the "it's only bad when others do it, for us there is an exception" defence is invalid. It is indeed hypocritical.
> Isn't that an obligation when you own a trademark? That you sue people, or else you may lose the trademark?
It's not quite as cut and dry as you suggest. Besides, in which way was a trademark being violated? Last I knew merely talking about and referencing a celebrity by name was not a trademark violation.
Is it trademark, or IP. If someone made a list of Mickey Mouse jokes, Disney's law department will send them a letter too. Chuck Norris is a person/name but also a persona.
> As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around.
I really wish this was true. It should be true. It used to be true. But I don't think it is now.
> With enough users, they will have to respond.
Well, yeah. But even if we had millions of people lined up (which we don't) it still wouldn't be enough to force a positive response.
Frankly there's too much money wrapped up in this now. Because of that, open computing will always be under attack. I hate coming off as so defeatist, but what we need is a culture change, and a new device which is (from the perspective of the 99%) worse and more expensive than Android isn't going to get us that.
> One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
It sounds like you're implying that's what happened here, but I don't see any of that in the article. Was additional info shared elsewhere?
Edit: oh, I see links to the article author's social media saying this. Nevermind my question, and I agree.
looking at the statement, I find it weird that Benj Edwards is trying very hard to remove the blame from Kyle Orland, Even if he is not directly responsible.
Not weird. Kyle will take a massive career hit, as a result of this.
I’d say that some of the onus is on Kyle, anyway, as he should vet anything he slaps his name on (I do), but it sounds like he really didn’t have anything to do with it.
Despite the aspersions against the company for their sick time policy (which might actually be valid), the other corporate pressure might be to force their employees to incorporate AI tools into their work. That’s become quite common, these days.
He is taking responsibility because it is by his omission his mistake. That is what grown ups do. He probably feels an immense sense of guilt, even if it was an honest mistake.
> The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".
It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.
What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
Eh, you're trying to boil the ocean. This functionality built into the browser would cover 99.9% of the use cases. Applications can be monitored separately, and I'm at a loss for why my OS needs to know about my age.
None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.
It's an interesting legal question, but I would imagine for a federated service, the burden of proof should be on the individual's home server for age verification. That's where the user account is, after all.
Matrix is basically labeled "adults only" everywhere, so restricting certain servers/rooms due to possible innocent eyes is likely out of scope.
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