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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2023

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  • While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.

    Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.














  • In a letter written to X’s head of global government affairs Nick Pickles on April 17, the CBC said their label was “factually incorrect” because the government doesn’t have involvement in CBC’s editorial decisions.

    Many public broadcasters are set up so that their governance is done at ‘arms-length’ from the sitting government. The problem is that the mechanisms used to achieve this (usually a government-appointed board of directors, a parliamentary committee, etc.) often intervene in coverage on behalf of an annoyed government, including threats to litigate against the entity, termination threats against the director or other personnel, tabling of targeted legislation designed to make the entity’s life worse, etc. These governance bodies are kind of like car brakes made of balsa wood: rock solid when not in use, then a pile of sawdust during the organization’s time of need.

    For that reason I’m happy with X’s label, even though I value public broadcasting, because history has shown executive government tends to issue marching orders to media (no matter their ‘independence’) whenever it feels that getting its way is particularly vital. The motive for the label may be ideological given Musk’s record, but it has some utility to the reader in that it reminds them of a broader, awkward truth about government funding.

    (I think the general media’s shunning of X has a certain coordination about it, and that it’s really about sector-felt resentment rather than engagement metrics. The metrics stuff is just noise, and likely explains the refusal to disclose the engagement figures mentioned in the article. Musk to them is a foreign occupier, and they are the underground resistance, withholding their content/advertising dollars, determined to undermine his efforts to reforge Twitter to X and ensure they get ‘their’ platform back.)


  • If OP takes the Soulpill, I offer some tips:

    • Don’t despair if search results carry a [private] prefix. Some of these people just got frustrated once upon a time and decided to whitelist peers rather than blacklist. Often they just want a polite PM asking for access. It pays to be inquisitive, so check their User Info for information.
    • Chat rooms don’t need to be occupied to obtain or download search results. In fact it’s usually better to ignore them.
    • 99 per cent of users would rather you share 3 albums than 500 system files.



  • The existence of the paid offering doesn’t invalidate use of the free offering, regardless of whether people are permitting ads on the latter. Any given Youtube page is just a collection of web elements and a call to a video server: these things get loaded or blocked at my sole discretion. My hardware, my web browser, my internet bandwidth, my opsec, my time.

    If I put household items out on the nature strip, I have no expectation that passers-by will have a cup of tea with me first, then take every item as an indivisible lot. So my proposal to Google is: take those items off the nature strip, put them back inside the house and lock the door. Until they do that, no issue exists, despite the company’s efforts to fabricate one.