So they are -that - desperate now.

The AI stuff might genuinely factor into it, I largely don’t use it myself but from what I understand from some colleagues it’s churning out decent react and co, while other languages can have mixed results.

I presume it’s a mix of things, there are near daily changes making services worse for consumers in one way or another, which fuels the relevancy of Doctorows writing on the one hand and the desire of people to be agreed with on the other.

Yup, the baseband modem does what it’s firmware tells it to, and that’s entirely independent from the phone’s software. And open baseband modems to my knowledge don’t exist.

Yup, the fediverse has a lot of things still to solve and figure out before it goes anywhere. I have little faith that present moderation would scale well if there was a massive growth in the userbase. And then there’s the other issue. There’s a discussion on the peertube github for two years now on how to keep instances from dying.

I mean the data from those has been used for AI training for ages so it’s hardly surprising it got good at it.

Clownflare staying true to its name.

I am sorry but much as I enjoy lemmy, activitypub is absolutely not a threat to anything. Mastodon and co had stagnant to declining user numbers ever since the last twitter exodus. And as things are, that just isn’t going to change and no amount of telling each other so in the mastodon and lemmy echo-chambers is going to change that.

Worse, the open platforms could absolutely not handle massive growth. Moderation would be a nightmare. How many people are going to volunteer to look over the additional thousands of thousands of posts with gore, csam etc. And you would need a lot of them.

Who’s going to pay for the legal advice that inevitably will be needed for the various situations that’d crop up if the network ever got enough users to be an actual threat? Donations? How well is that going to scale? How many volunteer hosters and admins would still be willing to do it in the face of all that?

ActivityPub is a niche, and if you enjoy it, you should hope it stays that way, because it certainly wouldn’t survive mainstream.

There’s been recent pushes in that regard, investment in AI shit has been enormous but the financial payoff for anyone besides hardware manufacturers remains nonexistent. So investors and corporations have recently redoubled their efforts into trying to get everyone to use it in the hopes that this somehow will make them profitable.

Most likely, yes. Probably some sort of automation that ran wild.

Some deal with the israeli government if I had to guess.

The “unfair advantage” bit has been incredibly funny to me ever since I sat in a call to prepare a joint research proposal and the representative of a certain large euro automotive supplier told us that their company would only participate in any project if they got at least a certain amount of government funding.

I am guessing the ultra-Elon fanboys managed to convince themselves that it’s a 4D chess move or something. That dude had an insane cult following, there’s some where I am not sure there’s anything Musk could do short of murdering a loved one in front of them that’d make them change their mind.

Which would be particularly wild given that nexus mods is run by a British company.

I suspect they didn’t want to make it sound alarmist or something, but yes the real percentage is likely going to be higher, including a good chunk of “technically finished but remaining unused and forever idle on some box until it’s quietly shut down 5-10 years later.”

I could see some exception for windows 11 IoT being made, but I honestly don’t know.

Genuinely kind of surprised they only met now, one would have thought that in over 30 years they would have run into each other at some point at some conference or other.

Conversely, I have seen this opinion expressed a few times. I can’t judge the accuracy but there seem to be more than a few people sharing it.

Oh absolutely, the moneyfurnace wikimedia foundation needs to find ways to justify its own existence after all (^:

Your custom FOSS rom won’t prevent the very much proprietary modem of your phone from communicating with the celltower.