Social media was always kind of garbage, and the modern algorithmically sorted stuff is worse.

I’d rather just text my friends

Did you independently reinvent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System or did you know about the history?

Conservatism is just “in-groups to protect, out-groups to hurt.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing. They’re bad people.

I don’t want to share my location nor have anyone else’s shared with me.

Friends and partners can text “I’ll be there in 5”

My friend shares her location with her mother. Her mother then nags her with like “Are you seeing someone new? You’re spending a lot of time in north brooklyn now.” Like, who needs that, or even the temptation of that?

A tech solution is not going to fix a social/mental problem like fear of cheating.

If I was going to make something like this, it would have to incorporate trust chains. I don’t care if some maga-hat says this lady is horrible. I care if my good friend Alex says she’s horrible. One person’s “this person won’t shut up about communism” is a big red flag (no pun intended) but for someone else that’s the dream.

When you sign up, you’d need to be referred to someone or be a root node. Anyone connected to you can be weighted differently. If some section of the tree is misbehaving, prune it.

But that’s a lot of work

Yes. Good. Tell Clarence Thomas not to be afraid. Just go outside. You don’t need security. Just go for a nice long walk. Nothing to be afraid of.

Google probably wants to keep you on google.com, where they have ads. By doing the AI stuff, you never click through to someone else’s page. They get 100% of the interactions and can sell all the clicks.

It’s monopoly stuff. They should be stopped, with whatever box of liberty is needed.

This guy sucks. Some of his friends should take him aside and set him straight. Like at night, with alibis

Is this getting news coverage?

Anyone who says republicans are fiscally responsible should be laughed out of the room

I mean that seems like it would be pretty effective.

Right wing people are either stupid or dishonest. The stupid ones don’t understand the saying and never thought to look it up, and the dishonest ones don’t care.

Do they vet the people? Could someone hypothetically sign up for the app, case the rich person’s situation, and then do crimes? Sounds like a good way to find rich assholes.

Code reviews are important. Unfortunately, no-test-text guy convinced his whole team that he was right, and I wasn’t able to block it. I’d scheduled a meeting to try to get the wider org to adopt a more sensible standard, but then there was a mass layoff 🤷

The other guy with the bad messages is at a tiny startup where they’ve laid off almost everyone, and the other 2 guys don’t want to make waves. The CEO is big on “just ship it” (and also “why are there bugs in production? this is unacceptable!!”)

What if there’s no competing companies, but a monopoly (as is the dream of capitalists) or a cartel (a lesser dream)?

Let’s not forget that these companies aren’t really running on profits from customers. They’re running on venture capital bro driven development. Uber lost money for 15 years.

Sometimes people are my old job post AI stuff and I just tell them “stop using the lie machine”

Automobile companies should be held accountable for destroying and lobbying against other modes of transit, so not really the best metaphor. Also destroying the environment is pretty bad.

Also there’s no cosmic law that says tech companies had to make LLMs and put them everywhere. They’re not even consistently useful.

These big companies have blood on their hands and it seems like no one is willing to do anything about it.

That’s a quote from Eco’s essay on ur-fascism, for the unfamiliar

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

I’ve thought about this problem and don’t have a generally applicable answer.

On the one hand, I don’t want someone to steal my bike or have their bike stolen.

On the other, the police are the worst and will probably make the situation worse.

So I lean towards “don’t call the cops”, but it feels like there should be something to do other than taking on the full risk of intervening yourself.