To me, the real story is that a merger has led to less competition in the gaming industry. Imagine if two major car manufacturers merged and then products started to get cancelled.

To me, these look like ESL errors not AI errors. Content farms.

Why is Consumer Reports considered a rag?

Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.

Thank you for the response. Alas, the monetization question is key to enshittification. I’m left unassuaged.

Let’s take a concrete example. There are a bunch of neo-nazis inciting real violence on Blue Sky. People will die. Does anyone have the power to do anything about them? Or can the neo-nazis " mix and match services and switch quickly" to escape any consequences? It’s a dilemma either way. On one fork, BS has no control, which means bad actors run free. On the other fork, BS does have control, which suggests they’re not as enshittification resistant as it may seem.

I know and am happy with how Activity Pub (Lemmy/Mastodon) deals with both forks, as imperfect as the system is. What about Blue Sky?

It’s more robust against enshittification than your average Mastodon server

I’m very skeptical of that. What makes Mastodon so robust against enshittification is that it’s hard for a single or small set of players to have so much control that they can act as gatekeeper to extract money from the user base.

Blue Sky is a for-profit corporation. How do they plan to make money? Who controls access to the network? These are genuine questions.

That assessment sounds right. I think we just need to stay vigilant as consumers. We have defeasible reason to trust Apple right now. But we’ve seen, especially recently, what happens when we let corporations take advantage of that hard earned trust for short term gain.

I think that decision makes sense.

What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is “tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides”. That’s a convincing concern, and you’ve changed my mind on this. I don’t see any evidence that they’re doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.

I agree with that. I think there are cheaper laptops, where you can spend less to get less. Not everyone needs a metal body and all day battery life.

I didn’t claim that Apple is doing anything to be “generous”. That seems like it’s moving the goal posts. Say, are other PC manufacturers doing things out of generosity? Which ones?

Even the M2 and M3 Macs are a good value if you want the things they’re good at. For just a few hundred more, no other machine has the thermal management or battery life. Very few have the same build quality or displays. If you’re using it for real professional work, even just hours of typing and reading, paying a few extra hundred over the course of years for these features is hardly a “scam”.

You didn’t elaborate on your “spyware” claim. Was that a lie? And now you claim it’s “known” that Apple limits hardware and software. Can you elaborate?

That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.

On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?

(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)

I don’t mean to pick on you, but I also don’t think “AI bad” articles are just based on fear of the unknown. Some of them are, but there are also reasonable concerns with all this, and I believe we will need strong and attentive regulation as we continue.

By analogy, people who opposed car culture in the 50s and 60s were seen as fear mongers who just opposed “progress”, but they turned out to be right. Cars don’t scale, they’re an environmental disaster, the most expensive and dangerous form of transportation possible, and we’ve completely redesigned our society so that now it’s extremely hard to reverse. We should have been more cautious.

The problems raised by these researchers may be an easy fix (disallow these specific tokens), or it may be surprisingly difficult to fix, or indicative of a bigger problem, and therefore worth worrying about. I’m concerned that society is a bit blasé about the risks.

I don’t know what makes you so confident that inferences from the current state of AI are foolish. The black box problem is extremely tricky. This is a harder problem than the protein folding problem, which people thought we’d make quick progress on given all the other progress we made on “harder” problems, like the structure of the atom. This “simple” problem turned out to be one of the hardest in science. Progress looks fast now, but it’s not trivial. Some things may surprisingly remain an enduring mystery. We don’t know yet either way.