By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.

Whenever I see a story of “some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can’t do anything anymore” I think “this can never happen to me”. Which means there’s a whole category of problems you’re suddenly never going to see. It also means you’re less naive. So just don’t vendor-lock yourself in. Don’t put a log-in for an account which you don’t control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.

On top of that, you’ll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I’m just saying, if you don’t even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you’ll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.

I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it’s probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn’t vendor-lock yourself in.

Translation help from Fascist English to US English:

• “activist” = a non-politician whose free speech we don’t like
• “allow all voices to be heard” / “free speech” = extremist/unconstitutional/propaganda speech which serves the interests of the current fascist regime must be allowed, while every other speech will be labelled as being activist/communist/un-American/…
• “defend […] all Americans” = at least the part of Americans which we tolerate or haven’t jailed yet (subject to change)

AI has some use but it always needs human oversight and the final decision must also be made by a human professional. If you use AI to speed up tasks and you know whether the output of the AI is valid or not, and you have the final decision, then you can safely use it. But if you let AI decide on and execute important tasks basically autonomously, then you have a recipe for disaster. Fully autonomous and mistake-free AI is a naive pipe dream which I don’t see on the horizon at all.

Generally yes but it’s not nearly always so clear cut that one is 100% the offender and the other one 0%. Which is why attention to details, context, sophistication, listening to both sides before coming to a conclusion, etc. Is so important. But guess what kind of things get lost when taking part in such a one-sided blame game on the semi-anonymous internet.

Apps like this but also social media more generally allow for one-sided public naming and shaming of Individuals who probably don’t even know about it. It’s problematic because it can be deeply unfair.

I get that there is also value in women protecting themselves against predators but more than likely most content within the app/service is probably one-sided public blaming and gossiping.

And as we all know from right-wing propaganda, being the first to make a bold claim public and generate headlines with it is very powerful and spreads the message far and wide, whether true or false, and many will just believe it’s true without further investigation.

While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it’s not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there’s potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don’t know and you can’t know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it’s just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they’ll always claim that they don’t manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user’s end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have happened before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.

The only “wins” for this current US regime are negative records: most cruel, most degenerate, most stupid, most racist, and so on. And the “grand prize” for these wins will be war (civil or conventional) plus a spot in history among the worst people ever to destabilize and rule a country.

Maybe it works as an excuse when you claim you just wanted to train your own AI model with all those pirated books and videos. But who am I kidding. The reality is that copyright violation, as well as quite a few other things, is only really a crime if you’re poor. This current “endgame capitalism” era we’re in is becoming extra-legal quite fast. Maybe we should start making interactive law books where you can view whether a particular law actually applies to your person or your company, or not. Just to keep up with the times.