You might want to read the whole article. It provides a lot of supporting evidence including names of inmates and how much money they’re making per hour. No, they’re not getting all of it. 10% of their pay is taken for “housing” them at the jail,which is BS, but whatever, that’s small potatoes compared to having nothing at all.

From the end of the article:

Scott never thought much of herself, she said, and after being sentenced to 11 years in prison, she felt she would forever be labeled a “criminal.” But then she enrolled in college, got involved in MIT’s Educational Justice Institute, and in the spring of last year, landed a fellowship making $25 an hour as a project manager for the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, where she helped develop a guide to remote work.

Being part of professional networks that valued her contributions has helped her redefine her place in the world, Scott said, and “see a better version of myself.”

In all, Scott has managed to save nearly $30,000. She applied for supervised community confinement and was able to rent an apartment after her father persuaded the landlord to drop the “no felonies” clause by showing him her résumé and bank statements.

Scott could be released soon. She has a place to live and another possible job on the horizon.

So this particular inmate, who is still incarcerated, is making $25 an hour and has been able to save $30,000 and potentially has an apartment lined up. There’s other examples and evidence in the article, but I suggest you read the whole thing.

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers’ wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they’re released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date résumés, a nest egg — and the hope that they’re less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

I went into this article skeptical. Allowing them to be paid fairly shouldn’t be a big deal but it absolutely is. Getting inmates a nest-egg to go back to the world with is huge, because most inmates walk out with almost nothing, which often leads to chronic homelessness and ending up back in jail. This is huge. I’m glad to see it at least somewhere.

I’m not seeing you specify the late 80’s as your reference timeframe anywhere here.

OP really is mixing metaphors is the bigger issue. Microsoft didn’t build their OS on Open Source, they only embraced it later, after getting in trouble for Embrace Extend Extinguish. Google built their OS on open source tech. Then more recently Microsoft followed the same path forged by Google.

Just an example, in 2020, Microsoft acquired npm, the Node Package Manager.

Exactly.

Wozniak did the real work, he was an actual computer engineer and programmer.

Jobs was literally the fucking marketing guy who made his entire career about how marketing guys ruin companies.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/defunct-datasets/the_pile_books3

This dataset is Shawn Presser’s work and is part of EleutherAi/The Pile dataset.

This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1). seems to be similar to OpenAI’s mysterious “books2” dataset referenced in their papers. Unfortunately OpenAI will not give details, so we know very little about any differences. People suspect it’s “all of libgen”, but it’s purely conjecture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220522050247/https://huggingface.co/datasets/the_pile_books3

I emphasize “well known” because it was literally in the description when it was initially uploaded to the internet. It was always right out in the front that this was all the ebooks from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Shawn Presser/books3 never lied about where it came from. As you can see with the archive.org link, that description about it’s sourcing was on the page in May 2022.

Bibliotik is a well known private tracker for ebooks and even peddles tools for removing DRM from ebooks. So, arguably, not only are the books pirated, but at some point, a DMCA criminal violation occurred when the DRM was stripped from them. So OpenAIs willingness to use it without question to get their company started should be evidence they’re not concerned about where the data came from or getting it in more legal ways.

What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet. The ideologies of the tech nerds now are directly descended from earlier, more decentralized ideologies.

Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.

In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that’s not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.

What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as “bad laws to route around.” That’s why you have Musk buying Twitter and forcing his opinion’s down everyone’s throat (routing around traditional media). That’s why you have Jack Dorsey dumping his money into Nostr, because he thinks the worst sin on the internet is censorship (routing around attempts to rein in disinformation/misinformation).

It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn’t care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.

Anyway, it’s a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.

Like Steve Wozniak is your standard real tech nerd from the 70’s who was the actual engineer behind Apple products, while Steve Jobs was literally the marketing guy yet only the marketing guy got remembered.

Zuckerberg was so hyped, he renamed his entire fucking company Meta.

Funny, this is what these app stores were marketed as protecting against originally.

They even invented a fucking marketing term for how you traditionally install applications. Fuck “sideloading” its fucking “frontloading.” Needing a fucking app store should be “sideloading,” not the other way around.

Anyway, “sideloading” is (according to Google/Apple/Microsoft) “more dangerous” because the files could have come from anywhere, ooh spooky. Yeah, that’s why we’ve had file hash matching for like 20 years or more for file downloads. Every reputable site publishes a current hash, so if the package isn’t legit, the hashes won’t match, and you can just delete it.

It’s sad that Nintendo has so much money that these devs keep caving, when they legally have a right to develop an emulator as long as they’re not distributing them with title keys and such.

I think a major reason they went so hard on this issue is the rumors that Switch 2 will have largely similar hardware and backward compatibility, including use of the same type of cartridges. As such emulating Switch 2 could easily just be a simple continuation of the work on the original Switch and it’s going to be a bad deal when their brand new system can be emulated on day one of release.

Personal opinion, it’s the natural result of them keeping their systems so low-end for so long, emulation of them is just easier than emulation of a PS5 or an Xbox. (do you even have to emulate xbox? aren’t they technically UWP windows apps?)

Twitter was never profitable, so it just kept adding ads until that wasn’t sustainable.

Okay, so Bluesky started the same way, with no plan to monetize from the get-go, waiting to monetize later. So far, they’ve not been profitable yet, either. They keep taking money but until seemingly just now have not articulated a plan on how to pay any of it back. That’s exactly like Twitter, honestly.

I think the bigger issue is who they took money from and the kind of investment returns they expect. Because if this model doesn’t pan out enough for their greedy little hearts, they’ll demand ads and worse, too.

Donation model works for Wikipedia and they’ve got a fuckin warchest of god damned money.

As of 2023, it has employed over 700 staff and contractors, with net assets of $255 million and an endowment which has surpassed $100 million.

If fuckin Bomis Gooner Jimmy Wales can figure it out, so can we.

Just playing devil’s advocate: Nobody forced them to take loans from Venture Capital firms. They could be developing just as slowly as Mastodon, but instead they took the influx of cash so they could “move fast and break things.”

It’s solidly their choice to have taken on so much investment money without a plan to pay it back yet. Leaning on growth and then figuring out how to actually monetize it down the road, which is literally not a different path than any previous social media. These are choices they made.

They could have easily found different sources of funding, worked with smaller staff, smaller funding, and slower progress.

They’re literally following the path of every previous social media ecosystem. Get investor cash, enshittify to pay back, profit.

Preach it, that money is far more well spent on supporting a community.

Here’s a TESCREAL adherent’s manifesto, by world’s biggest asshole Marc Andreesen:

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

And here’s a good response to that psychotic manifesto:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in

the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with

And the hype around crypto also is driven by people who have certain ideologies which are, let’s just say, bad for regular folks.

You’re gonna have a hard time convincing me anyone who sees crypto as a “stable job” and not “a fucking con” isn’t sucked into this psycho TESCREAL bullshit and that they won’t start being a fucking pox on our nation like Musk,who is also a TESCREAL freak.

Jay Graber was personally chosen by Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey is all in on TESCREAL, too.

You’re telling me she’s completely uninfluenced by the psycho freaks surrounding her and their unhinged ideologies? I just don’t god damned buy it. Those views are almost endemic in Silicon Valley at this point.

You forgot “it’s not my job to contribute to a community project” and “if they do enshittify it, I’ll just move to the next Big Thing, making more billionaires who screw us over in the process.”

but I don’t see evidence of the same mistakes as you appear to be suggesting.

Oh so minting another new US billionaire who is deep into cryptocurrency already (that’s literally how Jay Graber got her start in the industry) just so they can turn around and use that money to start influencing US politics just like Musk is a good idea?

You really think just making a new billionaire is a great idea? But I mean you’re not far off, that’s a user mistake, not a company mistake.

Lmao and all these idiots will gladly pay it because it’s a slick corporate product, and they’ll turn CryptoQueen Jay Graber into another fucking billionaire leech on our fucking system.

Great job everyone, meanwhile Mastodon still exists and you won’t be contributing to building another billionaire crytpo freak to control our country’s politics by using it. Also, all Mastodon features will continue to be free to everyone.

Jay Graber literally got her start in tech working on Zcash, a privacy-focused crypto-currency. She was happy to make a deal with Blockchain Capital, a Venture Capital firm made up entirely of cryptobros and ‘effective altruism’ freaks.

But I mean, this is America, where we say “Fuck community projects!” the corporations I hate and bitch about all the time pamper me like a baby and I must have that pampering!

“Corporations rob us of our dignity and independence.”

What the other user here is documenting Discord doing with the cancel button that doesn’t look like a cancel button are called “Dark Patterns.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

The point of a Dark Pattern is to make options unclear and how to do things just ever so slightly confusing. Why? Because unlike you and me, this will trip up a significant number of users. They wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t working.

Further, the US FTC considers Dark Patterns such a big deal that in 2021 they committed to ramping up enforcement of removing Dark Patterns that make it difficult to cancel subscriptions.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-ramp-enforcement-against-illegal-dark-patterns-trick-or-trap-consumers-subscriptions

It’s also important to note that Discord is being sued through a California law:

https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-business-and-professions-code/division-7-general-business-regulations/part-3-representations-to-the-public/chapter-1-advertising/article-9-automatic-purchase-renewals/section-17602-unlawful-acts-by-business-making-automatic-renewal-or-continuous-service-offer-to-consumer#%3A~%3Atext=2024+Legislative+Session.-%2CSection+17602+-+Unlawful+acts+by+business+making+automatic+renewal+or%2Cthe+automatic+renewal+offer+terms

When you read through this, the Dark Patterns that Discord uses definitely fall under this law. One hopes that the FTC will do some follow-up with Discord as well.

But I mean, go ahead, keep denying that psychological tricks are being used to make it difficult for some people to cancel. Not everyone’s brain works the same ways, and things that are easy to see for you aren’t easy to see for everyone. When it comes to consumer protections, we protect everyone, we don’t just say “You must be dumb, sucks to be you! I guess that means it’s okay to exploit you!” I mean, I personally am not cool with tricking the mentally handicapped for a quick buck.