Thank you! Nicely put. The problem isn’t people like your aunt, its massive shareholder-controlled investemet machines that own thousands or even millions of homes. Your aunt probably knows eafh renter by name - there can exist a personal relationship. There’s two things limiting your aunt becoming a money-hungry antisocial ghoul:

1. raising the rent is a relatively large amount of work for relatively small of a reward. If she raises rent she has to write these 4-5 renters a letter explaining why she has to increase it. Those renters might disagree, have objections, ask for reasons and proofs (like the central heating bill or maintanance costs etc). If she raises the rent by lets say 2% it’s 2% of not that much money (with her single digit number if houses).
2. she is raising the rent on people she knows. She is taking money away from people she even may like - have a personal relationship with.

So increasing rent is a lot of hassle and her renters might like her less after that - which might be a factor.

Now lets think of the hugr real estate company. They have thousands of renters and maybe hundreds of employees. They have lawyers employed. If they raise rent by 2% they have to send thousands of letters. But these letters are sent by people whose job it is to do so. Tyey can calculate in advance that from their renters X% will just accept the nrew rent, Y% will require some manouvering, Z% might move out and so on. They can estimate the cost of raising rent pretty well based on experience and compare to the profits they make. And with thousands of apartmants 2% is a lot of profit. The employees have no relationship to the thousands of renters. Renters are just numbers anyway. Everything is much more efficient. Also: Shareholders. They demand profits and dont’t care how. They care even less aboht the renters. They demand more profit and will just say “make it happen”. If thr ceo doesn’t raise profits - with whatever means necessary - the shareholders will replace the ceo.

The soltion IMHO would be some progressive tax That makes it basically unprofitable to have more than 10 apartments. And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments in order to circumvent this. If there exists (and can reasonable exist) a personal relationship between landlord and renter everything is alright in my opinion. People usually are not animals to eaxh other if they know eaxh other personal.

I have an old iPod that I got from eBay. I’m running Rockbox on it which allows me to put music on it with almost any format. Ive used it for about 4 or more years now and it’s working fine.

I can connect it easily to other old “dumb” tech. It just works.

Edit: it’s an old iPod classic of the last generation. There’s a bunch of mods/upgrades you can get online like HDD replacements with microsd-cards. You can increase the capacity that way. The battery even lasts longer then. Or you can get a bigger battery with a bigger metal case to fit.

The Pianist

AI in general is a shitty term. It’s mostly PR. The Term “Intelligence” is very fuzzy and difficult to define - especially for people who are not in the field of machine learning.

Maybe you can dip your toes into using lineage os or graphene os?

Everybody has to support the new new underdog Intel.

Why do they have the data in the first place?

Your communications on telegram are not encrypted by default. You can have e2e encrypted 1on1-conversations, but group chats are blown for them to do everything.

They had a hilarious argumentation where they claimed that the key to unlock your chats is stored on a different server than your chats are and therefore they cannot access it. A company that argues like they (“trust us”) isn’t trustworthy.

Signal has been audited over and over again by internationally respected cryptographers. They cannot decrypt your chats by design. No need for “trust us bro”.

True.

I’m very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

But there’s two things at play that should be differentiated.

1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
2. She’s obviously a unique figure. She’s not replaceable or generic in the position she’s at. Her “position” cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She’s not “some CEO” taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don’t even know his name FFS. So he’s making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

I don’t want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There’s a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She’s much more independent than any CEO. She doesn’t have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

I’m still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.

Ahh the event in 1054… Yeah that event was a banger!

Yes

… for now.

We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.

I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.

Can Brazil rent out that judge to Europe for a Sec?

yeah that’s just ridiculous. omg

It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?

Amen

I quit netflix recently after almost 10 years of continuous subscription. When they raised the price again it was a good Occasion although not the reason. I think so was done with it for a while now.

I guess I’ll start reading books again - or watch a few films instead of stretched out series.

I’m using none of these. But what i use almost all the time : possibly = evtl (eventuell) maybe = vllt (vielleicht) kindest regards = LG (Liebe Grüße) e.g. /for example = zB (z.B.: / zum Beispiel) (i omit the dots and colons)

Apparently Microsoft didn’t get the memo :-)

“machines mimicking living things” does not mean exclusively AI. Many scientific fields are trying to mimic living things.

AI is a very hazy concept imho as it’s difficult to even define when a system is intelligent - or when a human is.