Maybe eventually, it has to do with market share and if the service is a “core platform”. Signal doesn’t have enough market share to warrant it yet, even iMessage wasn’t forced to since it’s not that popular in EU. The law was mainly targeted at WhatsApp as that’s THE messenger in the EU.
I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn’t as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren’t focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life …
Apple at this point knows it doesn’t have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they’re gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don’t have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.
They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.
They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don’t turn to androids for those incremental updates.
All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn’t a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don’t because they put some value on the “ecosystem”. From a company’s perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.
If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.
This is why “high quality” consumerist and capitalist “art” and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one’s paying to get it made.
Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire
It’s sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn’t matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn’t got overthrown in revolutions.
Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?
Let’s say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of “a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil”, does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?
For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I’d say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.
You can disagree with Maduro and his autocratic actions without supporting sanctions that mostly harm the civilian population.
the primary motivation behind this decision was. Obviously it wasn’t building public housing
That doesn’t mean the intent behind the CCP policy isn’t good, well intentioned, or positive
Can you see how I’m confused, do you think the primary intent is for public housing, or for some political drama?
It could be some political drama, we’ll never know what goes on in the HK city council, but if you read the article you’ll see this site wasn’t selected so much as it’s lease was up and the city would be taking back control of it and they needed to do something with it. Yeah some high official could’ve been waiting for the course to come back into city hands so they could build public housing over it and snub a rival, but I think it’s far more likely that the property fell into the cities hands and they decided to turn it into affordable housing because that’s what the city needs, no sinister or alterior motive is needed.
the CCP can’t possibly do something in the interests of the people, their must be something dastardly behind this.
Your just as bad as the tankies who think u.s. aid is just a CIA front, or the Republicans who think welfare is just Democrats keeping black people poor and dependent.
The u.s government and CCP aren’t just full of villains trying to oppress people, both have the capacity for empathy and compassion and do exercise it often.
degeneration might be the ONLY way to prevent Faceboom
So we should just start posting furry porn to try and scare them off?
Some drugs (alcohol, opiates, meth) do fuck up your brain with long term consistent use associated with addiction, but most people don’t fall into that unless they have some sort of severe external stress or genetic predisposition. You can see this with alcohol which despite its acceptance by society is one of the most harmful drugs out there, but most people who consume it do so in relative moderation.
Drug prohibition fucks ups society way more than drugs can fuck up your brain. It creates a police state that targets the poor and minorities. It gives money to cartels and gangs that cause violence. It doesn’t even stop drug use, those who want it can still get it, it just makes drugs less safe as theirs no quality control leading to adulterants and an incentive to make overly concentrated substances like fentanyl, which probably wouldn’t exist without prohibition.
then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support
How do they do this without running a foul of regulators? People are already mad at meta and want to break them up for having instagram and Facebook, if they add the last big social media platform every politician right and left will be lining up to take them down. There’s a reason they never bought twitter despite being able to 10x over. Combine that with new EU interoperability laws and there’s no way meta could get away with that.
The platform never really took off. It was a niche messaging platform before Facebook and Google and went back to being one after they left. I have yet to see any evidence that Google or Facebook helped or hurt xmpp, just speculation and anger that it didn’t take off.
To all the people wondering about metas intentions in this it’s not the big bad corporation taking down the upstart competition. All the people saying it’s EEE can’t show any sign metas doing this or even wants to because the strategy doesn’t work, any time a company does it it either doesn’t take off or they get brought up on anti-trust laws. Show me a standard that was destroyed by EEE and I’ll show you a standard that never took off in the first place. All the usual examples given, email, java, html, remain open standards to this day.
The truth is the fediverse isn’t competition to meta, it’s a fraction of the size and is populated by users who would never use meta services in the first place. They can pretend it’s a competitor though. If twitter does actually collapse and people switch to threads meta will face anti-trust suits for owning the three largest social media platforms. If they add activity pub support though they can point to the fediverse and say it’s competition, even if it’s only 1 % of the platform. They also have to deal with EU interoperability laws that might start getting enforced.
TL;DR this is about compliance for meta, not conquest.
Western nations give into terrorist demands going back to the French revolution. Some of those demands were for the freedom of speech that is being trampled on here or other rights and protections we hold dear. For recent examples look at the troubles or even that guy who shot shinzo abe and got the moonies out of Japan.
The focus shouldn’t just be on the means for political change, though the means can be criticized, but the political change itself. Banning book burnings in this case is an afront to free speech and should not be implemented.
It does, it just favors the dominant ethno-religous complex. Much of the western proffesional dress code has basis in christian ideals of modesty. These cultural signifiers don’t occur to us though as they’re so normalized. If you came to work dressed like Angela from the office you wouldn’t be cited because the dress code was written with that attire in mind and people view it as normal. You’ll be cited if you violate those ideas of modesty, eg. Showing midriff, or having different views on modesty, eg. A head scarf.
If you want to say it’s completely neutral you’ll have to exorcise all christian biases and assumptions from western culture, which they dont seem to be doing here.
they’re a particularly beefed-up auto complete
Saying this is like saying your a particularly beefed-up bacteria. In both cases they operate on the same basic objective, survive and reproduce for you and the bacteria, guess the next word for llm and auto-complete, but the former is vastly more complex in the way it achieves those goals.
Those are mostly for sprinters and short distance runners as they are higher impact and use running cleats with less cushion then softer distance running shoes. They’re also more likely to fall in events like hurdles and it’s better to land on that then on concrete. Most of the shock that could be absorbed by those tracks could also be absorbed by good running shoes. Most events above a mile take place on the streets.
You can if the company is a non-profit like open AI. Basically when you take on investments for a company you declare what the goal/purpose of a company is, either to make money (for profit) or for some other nebulous cause (non-profit) eg. Ending hunger or saving humanity from AI. If an investor thinks you aren’t following that goal and are pursuing some other goal then they can sue the company.
Sadly most companies are for profit so they can only be sued if they’re trying to do something that doesn’t optimally make money. So a fossil fuel company can’t be sued for legally dumping poison into the air if it’s the most cost efficient method, but they can be sued if they do a less cost efficient solution that would make air quality better because improving people’s health isnt there goal, making money is.