Thanks for the clarification, I'm old and sometimes my memory is more fuzzy on those details. But yeah, it's always been a license, and back then it felt more like ownership because of the honor system.
SnotFlickerman
joined 2 years ago
"Piracy is a service problem." Truer words have never been spoken.
Let's be real though, technically software has always lived and died on licensing instead of ownership.
I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced), and making backup copies of software that you owned (like copying a CD for backup purposes) was a hard fought right when the DMCA was being implemented. But even the backup only helped so much because especially in the last 20 years tech has grown at lightning speed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. A CD backup of Office 2003 isn't really helpful in 2026 anyway.
I'm not arguing this is how it should be. I'm just clarifying that technically this is how it has always been. We've never had full rights to do whatever we want with the software we buy. It's why Free (as in speech, not as in beer) Open Source Software is so important, and why open hardware is so important by extension.
The same companies that rose to dominance using an environment with weak regulation and enforcement while also maintaining that hacker attitude of "routing around bad legislation" have now been using their dominance to make an environment of tight regulation and enforcement, now that they're at the top. They have spent endless amounts of lobbying money to get this environment to benefit them where you're locked in via hardware and software to the companies rules on how you use your hardware and software... because the software was never really ours, and now they're leveraging that to make our hardware not ours either.
The only way out is through. FOSS.
How will they protect that content being trained for AI models on third party piracy sites where dumps of Patreon subscriber content get published without a paywall. On those sites, there's no protection.
Like that's the unfortunate part about a lot of this is a lot of people pay for Patreon access and then just pirate the content out. I'm not against piracy, but I do see the nature of the piracy sites being wide open with no controls or protections from AI scraping that even with Patreon doing this, many are likely to still have their art scraped.
2024-2025: AI companies pour money and support into DJT leaving many of us perplexed given Silicon Valley’s history of being left-leaning.
Curtis Yarvin has been writing about his ideas since at least 2009, when I first heard of him and his "Dark Enlightement." He's the "philsophical" underpinning of Silicon Valley's actual values and it was clear long, long before 2024.
He has the ear of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and more.
From Wikipedia:
Yarvin's ideas were influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin's project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Journalist Jason Wilson noted that Yarvin had "a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump's coming administration". Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, has spoken in approval of Yarvin. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Vice-president JD Vance also praised Yarvin in 2021, and said, drawing from his 2012 "Retire All Government Employees" talk, that "what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
Also a leak of info about Thiel's secretive "Dialog" group included:
Elon Musk ($1.3 trillion)
Eric Schmidt ($40.1 billion)
Henry Kravis ($12.2 billion)
Marcos Galperin ($6.8 billion)
Mike Cannon-Brookes ($7.7 billion)
Scott Cook ($4.4 billion)
Barry Sternlicht ($3.1 billion)
Nicolas Berggruen ($2.9 billion)
John Arnold ($2.8 billion)
Joe Lonsdale ($2.8 billion)
Reid Hoffman ($2.7 billion)
Eric Schmidt from Google, Reid Hoffman of Netflix. The idea that Yarvin's ideas don't come up or aren't obliquely pushed at these events seems deeply unlikely.
To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he's always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.
See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider's law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.
I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.
Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000's. I recall an article about Napster where he said "Napster's original goal was to sell music to people" which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.
So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.
This is an article by the guy who coined the term enshittification, so uhhh, pretty sure he knows what he means.
After reading the article:
Enshittification: The process by which a company starts by giving away everything seemingly for free, doing everything they can for both users and business customers. Then, after they have achieved enough network effect to keep people tied to their product, they begin to degrade the experience for users to make more money. Eventually, the same process happens to their business customers as well, as they have an effective monopoly over the space.
Technocarcinization: The tendency of technology companies to become both more surveillant and controlling of their devices (which they truly treat as theirs, not as ours) over time. Essentially tech companies all slowly become 1984 Nanny States in corporate digital form. Yes, enshittification is part of this process, but they are different things.
True, but I still think there would be plenty for HR to be mediating in terms of employee-to-employee relationships. However, it's a big ask for HR to stop being a "cover your ass" department that is otherwise dedicated to making sure things like sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments don't impact the company itself despite existing in the company all the same. Because that too is a large function of HR.
If only there was a whole department at schools that was made for exactly this... I heard they used to have one way back in the olden days. What would it be called? God the art of naming things is so difficult!
(Seriously, this is what happens when you defund the arts programs in education, you end up with teachers who are not trained in art doing their best... and their best is really really bad)
Like how Ford just had to hire back all their old greybeard engineers after the AI was not actually up to snuff (shocker).
Isn't this enough proof that these chucklefucks are a drain on company resources and time and the FIRST thing to replace AI with is the bosses so workers can organize collectively while the AI helps them stay organized without the AI being in control.
I mean, I guess that would make too much sense.
Genuinely though, if the first thing they do with AI is outsource their own decision making, isn't it just rock solid evidence that these people are useless at their fucking jobs to begin with? They aren't even making the decisions anymore, the AI is. Let's cut out the middleman, which is all a boss is now if AI is running the show. I mean, it's what they did with all the junior developers, because they had forced the juniors into using AI and then asked themselves "why not cut out the middleman." And they hadn't even considered that maybe the cost of AI would outpace the cost of an employee. How the fuck are these short term thinking idiots in fucking charge anyway? A lot of bosses are just fucking charlatans.
EDIT: Clarified first sentence.
Zitron is a pinnacle of you can be smart and foul mouthed. Part of the reason he succeeds at this is he actually knows where to properly put cusses in sentences and doesn't overuse them (like me, for instance).
There was evidence part of the reason people gravitated to Trump was that his foul and odious way of speaking seemed more "honest" because of the vulgarity. As someone who worked in local television news for 10 years, I can say that I think that's true because it was always so clear that our newscasters were putting on a show and often had very few feelings whatsoever about what they were reporting on, or worse, genuinely were dismissive and cold to people in real tragedy. People have responded to that over time by realizing that all that faux-professionalism just really comes off as covering your ass and/or just using buzzwords to sound like you know how anything works at all when you don't. It doesn't come off as sincere, knowledgeable or, most importantly passionate.
When we heard Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani speak, we can hear the passion they have in the way they speak. When we hear Centrist Dems like Chuck Schumer speak, we automatically hear the work of strategy to get people on their side, not that they really believe or care about what they're doing. I don't hear passion in Schumer's voice for anything but Israel. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, you can hear that passion that they have for citizens and protecting and lifting them up.
Trump is passionate about himself and his followers are passionate about him, too, I guess. It's that their is spurred by delusion and unaddressed mental health issues.
Anyway, people need to speak more plainly and with more passion, Zitron is a prime example of doing it well. Other than Doctorow and maybe WIRED, I don't know of any other really hard hitting evidence-based journalism on this stuff, and Doctorow is a little bit too up his own ass on coining fucking words. (In my humble opinion, Doctorow comes off as way too extremely online to connect his ideas with regular people, he's just too much of a fucking nerd who can't stop being a nerd long enough to jive with average people)