Tag: technology

I don’t know who Tim Pool is, but he is warning his 584k subscribers about the demise of Patreon:

If you still use Patreon you should consider warning your subscribers about potential disruption

Due to the legal defeat they recently faced some lawyers are speculating that Patreon will collapse under the weight of legal costs

You Could LOSE Your entire income stream

I just think it’s funny they still don’t understand how many people want to burn them down to the ground and dance on the glowing cinders.

The way the whole situation has evolved is rather interesting. For generations, companies have understood very clearly that they had to maintain positive relationships with their customers in order to stay in business. Hence the outmoded corporate doctrine that “the customer is always right”.

However, the combination of practical monopolies and the venture-to-IPO model has tended to sever the historical link between the consumer and the corporation, to the point that many technology companies no longer depend upon their consumers for their operating income. To the contrary, they have transformed consumers into users that are nothing more than raw material for their real customers. This is why they simply don’t possess a culture of giving a damn about their users, let alone harboring any regard for a single user they don’t like for one reason or another.

Their problem is their failure to understand that although the technology corporations are not financially dependent upon consumers, they nevertheless possess the same legal responsibilities toward their consumers that they did before, so their survival still relies upon maintaining the good will of the very users they now regard as irrelevant. And, as I noted in Corporate Cancer, because they remain caught between the Scylla of class action litigation – now complete with jury trials – and the Charybdis of mass individual arbitration, there is no way to legally finesse their way out of the situation.

Even worse, every attempt to legally thread the needle by their legal Odysseuses only renders them more vulnerable to being held responsible for the deceptive practices that are necessarily involved, such as Patreon’s false, misleading, and unenforceable “waivers” on class action and trial-by-jury.

The only way out is to accept the fact that their continued survival requires the goodwill of their users, but this necessitates a fundamental change in corporate culture that may not be possible for more than a few converged technology corporations.

We really don’t need to communicate any better with the animals than we do:

A rock star, a vegan financier and a pioneer of the internet are backing a project to find ways for humans to communicate with animals using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Interspecies I/O forum on Friday announced the Coller Prize for Interspecies Conversation, a $1 million research award, according to a statement. The effort kicks off this weekend with a video conference on subjects running from the language of bonobo apes to the music of elephants.

Can you imagine how incredibly irritating it would be to actually understand what your dog was saying all the time? It would be like taking a long trip in a car with a little kid who keeps asking “are we there yet?” Except your dog would be alternating “I’m hungry, is it time for dinner yet?” with “hey, hey, hey, there’s a BIRD out there!” all day every day.

It didn’t take long for the consequences of Linus’s surrender to the SJWs to take effect:

Subject [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology
From Dan Williams <>
Date Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:02:51 -0700
share

Recent events have prompted a Linux position statement on inclusive
terminology. Given that Linux maintains a coding-style and its own
idiomatic set of terminology here is a proposal to answer the call to
replace non-inclusive terminology.

Cc: Jonathan Corbet
Cc: Kees Cook
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams
—
 Documentation/process/coding-style.rst          |   12 ++++
 Documentation/process/inclusive-terminology.rst |   64 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 Documentation/process/index.rst                 |    1
 3 files changed, 77 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/process/inclusive-terminology.rst

diff –git a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
index 2657a55c6f12..4b15ab671089 100644
— a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
@@ -319,6 +319,18 @@ If you are afraid to mix up your local variable names, you have another problem, which is called the function-growth-hormone-imbalance syndrome. See chapter 6 (Functions).

+For symbol names, avoid introducing new usage of the words ‘slave’ and
+’blacklist’. Recommended replacements for ‘slave’ are: ‘secondary’,
+’subordinate’, ‘replica’, ‘responder’, ‘follower’, ‘proxy’, or
+’performer’.  Recommended replacements for blacklist are: ‘blocklist’ or
+’denylist’.
+
+Exceptions for introducing new usage is to maintain a userspace ABI, or
+when updating code for an existing (as of 2020) hardware or protocol
+specification that mandates those terms. For new specifications consider
+translating specification usage of the terminology to the kernel coding
+standard where possible. See :ref:`process/inclusive-terminology.rst
+` for details.

And let’s not bother with the whole “well, the changes haven’t been fully adopted and enforced YET” defense. We all know how this is going to end.

Not content with eradicating thought crime from the social media platforms, the media is now teaming up with the technology companies to eradicate it from personal accounts in the Cloud:

The Washington Post’s Silicon Valley Correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin complained that after the coronavirus documentary Plandemic was censored on social media, some YouTube clips were telling users how to access “banned footage” from the documentary via Google Drive. She then notes that after The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary.

This is why you need to get off the Cloud, get off the social media platforms, and support the independent alternatives. Even if you are certain that you are not a crimethinker today, you cannot be certain that you will not be deemed a crimethinker tomorrow.

The President threatens to shut down Twitter:

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
– Donald J. Trump

The great weakness of the conservative Right is their inability to accept the necessity of action. Every single social media giant merits being shut down for their crimes and their ongoing war against the Constitution.

As I wrote in Corporate Cancer, China is going to dominate the consumer technology high ground – namely, the apps and interfaces, because they a) protect their home markets from competition and b) don’t hate more than 50 percent of their users. The signs of this coming domination are already visible.

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.

“Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,” said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.

But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it’s one that’s gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube’s official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem.

Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.

The fact that we’re already seeing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook beginning to kneel before Beijing means that it won’t be long before other converged companies like Paypal and Patreon are completely compliant, assuming, of course, that they even survive the initial shock of competition from the East.

It’s even possible that rogue independent platforms like SG, BitChute, and UATV may have a brighter future than the Silicon Valley giants.

Ron Unz learns the hard way which of the two Internet giants actually matters with regards to site traffic:

I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, which seemed to underscore our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e}, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.

This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results….

Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} reduction in regular traffic.

I use DuckDuckGo myself, but one of the problems with it and the other alternative search engines is that they still seem to be tied into the Google system in various ways, so they don’t take proper advantage of Google’s self-hamstringing of their own technology.

Turnabout is fair play. And Big Tech is long overdue for taming:

‘The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google,’ Trump said in his tweet. ‘The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events.’

Trump’s tweet came after it emerged that federal and state regulators in the U.S. are preparing to file antitrust lawsuits alleging Google has abused its dominance of online search and advertising to stifle competition and and boost its profits.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google should all be shut down for their complete lawlessness. Facebook and Google, in particular, need to be broken up as a result of their illegal duopoly in the online advertising market.

For SJWs and their historical antecedents, it is always Year Zero and we have always been at war with Eastasia:

Last month, MIT Technology Review went after the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – a service that preserves historical versions of webpages and allows users to access archives of these pages when they’re deleted.

MIT Technology Review complained that these archives were allowing coronavirus “misinformation” to evade moderators and fact-checkers and that these archived coronavirus articles had “better performance than most mainstream media news stories.”

Now, just a few weeks later, the Wayback Machine has started to add warning labels to some of its archives, while also forcing users to log in to view some of the archived content on the site.

The warning labels are bright yellow, appear at the top of some archived pages, and tell users when a post was removed for violating a site’s content policy.

Every institution and organization that is not dedicated to rooting out and keeping out the parasites will eventually be converged by them. No rational appeals to functionality, competence, merit, or profit will ever suffice to stop them.

As Arkhaven has embraced Webtoons – and if the backers want it, we are even considering our own custom site and app, which would be considerably simpler than SG2, UATV2, or Infogalactic – Marvel is retreating from web-based comics.

Thank you for being a loyal Marvel fan. As a fan of Marvel digital comics, we wanted to let you know that the Marvel Digital Comics Shop at comicstore.marvel.com will be closing on June 2, 2020.

After June 2nd, you will still be able to purchase Marvel digital comics and read your existing Marvel digital comics library via the Marvel Comics app and the comiXology store.

To purchase Marvel digital comics after June 2nd:

Download the Marvel Comics app on the App Store or Google Play Store, and/or Visit comixology.com.

To read your existing Marvel digital comics library after June 2nd:

View your past purchases in “My Books” when you log into your account on the Marvel Comics app, and/or

Sync your current Marvel Digital Comics Shop account with a comiXology account to continue to read your books on a web browser

I can only read digital comics on a web browser, how can I continue to do that?

Marvel won’t support a web reading experience after June 2, 2020.

Translation: Apps or Amazon. Comixology is Amazon’s platform and it is a suboptimal page-based approach. Vertical panels are the future since they display much better on smartphones. All of our comics are now being created and constructed with that in mind, even if they’re not designed specifically as panels for vertical digital display.