Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@qoto.org

Ben Thompson gives a detailed breakdown of the sentiment I shared yesterday that Google lost the Epic case by pretending to be open.

Apple is up front that they are a closed platform. Consumers and developers know this when they choose iOS.

Google markets Android as an open platform to consumers and developers but then uses OEM contracts and constantly changing rules to effectively make Google Play and its in-app billing as the only effective choices.

So they lost.

https://stratechery.com/2023/google-loses-antitrust-case-to-epic-the-differences-between-apple-and-google-revisited-the-tying-question/

"What if (#ChatGPT) learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December ... and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/is-chatgpt-becoming-lazier-because-its-december-people-run-tests-to-find-out/

If you think Elise Stefanik - or any other major figure in today’s Republican Party - is leading an honest fight against antisemitism, if you actually think that’s the Right’s political project, I must assume you are either incredibly uninformed and naive or simply full of shit.

It’s striking that they’re so open about this being viewpoint discrimination.

They’re not calling for speech to be repressed to stop Islamophobia or anti-black racism or any other form of bigotry. Just #antisemitism, defined as overheated rhetoric against Israel.
#censorship #fascism

@nazgul I think this gets the root cause analysis wrong on the cotton gin -> slavery thing. The cotton gin itself did not cause people to do anything; it enabled what they wanted to do anyway. The *cause* of the increased slavery was... slavers.

It's important to differentiate, because in a less fucked up world, we could have had the happy "and then everyone worked less" story in reality. Any time-saving invention can result in either "less work" or "more production". The only reason we didn't get "less work" is because we never do that: our society is fundamentally set up to prefer scaling production up whenever possible, instead of just producing the same things with less work, and it's also fundamentally set up to require everyone to work full-time.

*That* is what we need to fix. Making humans do things that could be automated, just for the sake of having them employed, isn't a solution. It's just turning the fine adjustment knobs on the "exactly how shit are things" panel.

(To be clear, this is not to imply that AI is good at everything people are currently slapping it on.)

#ChristmasCarol #nobillionaires #unionize

Great piece on the Cybertruck’s design

… which distills every malign trend in US trucks: Massive weight, jacked-up height designed to lethally throw accident victims beneath it, noise baffling so perfect you can’t hear the outside world

Cars are rolling buckets of externalities: They greatly improve the life of their riders, while making the lives of everyone *outside* them worse

The Cybertruck is a tone poem to this impulse: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/12/02/how-to-build-a-car-that-kills-people-cybertruck-edition