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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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    1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

    2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

    3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers







  • This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it’s not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

    The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

    The US is a flawed democracy. That’s still better than an authoritarian regime.



  • The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.

    Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.

    They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.

    Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.

    But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.

    This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.


  • For people who consider this a sign of social status

    Ok well,

    1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won’t be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

    2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS’s provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

    In short, apple isn’t an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.


  • In addition to the other great points in this thread, Apple has a cost barrier that other operating systems don’t.

    In an economic climate where everything is getting more expensive, a consumer isn’t going to fork out $800+ on a MacBook or an iPhone without first actively wanting to be part of the ecosystem, especially if the hardware they have gets the job done.

    The reason Apple isn’t growing as fast as it’s competitors right now is exactly that. Apple is expensive to get into. No amount of enshitification on other OS’s is going to change that.



  • You think this is confined to gab? You seem to be looking at this example and taking it for the only example capable of existing.

    Your argument that there’s not anyone out there at all that can ever be offended or misled by something like this is both presumptuous and quite naive.

    What happens when LLMs become widespread enough that they’re used in schools? We already have a problem, for instance, with young boys deciding to model themselves and their world view after figureheads like Andrew Tate.

    In any case, if the only thing you have to contribute to this discussion boils down to “nuh uh won’t happen” then you’ve missed the point and I don’t even know why I’m engaging you.