That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.
That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
More importantly we shouldn't deny the rest of humanity benefits on the basis that the majority of the benefit accrues to the powerful. We should strive to change the distribution pattern, not remove the benefit.
The problem with billionaires is that they are able to hoard so much money by exploiting others. We would be much better off if billionaires weren't given so much advantage by Capitalism as those resources would be much more useful if distributed.
The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).
Right, giving up is actually how these things end up becoming principles/laws. Power centralizes because people become complacent and ignorant on matters of power, so there ends up being a power vacuum, to which others seize the opportunity. But absolute power centralization almost never occurs, due to the delegation that is necessary to wield that power in practice, and so these two forces end up balancing each other. As such, the equilibrium point (or point of maximum entropy) ends up being some type of oligarchy. But anyone can take steps to address this and adjust this equilibrium point, but it takes active work.
I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware
This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will do them no matter what, we should make it safe for them to the extent we can. False positives, causing people to ignore actual positives, creates a market for these things.
Many years ago, even a "Hello World" binary that wasn't compiled by MSVC but by a GNU toolchain was detected as "suspicious" or "potentially unwanted", and in some cases automatically deleted. MS clearly has a different definition of "malware" than many people, and while it may overlap with a majority opinion (e.g. viruses and worms), where its opinion differs is used to push an agenda.
Software is the one thing I won't pirate since the risk of installing malware is extremely high. For media files, unless you are incredibly unlucky and someone is exploiting a bug in the media player, you are entirely safe. But for software you have no way of knowing how the software has been tampered with, and often there actually is malware in it.
Same. I used to pirate software but even way back I kept it limited to very popular software and established downloads (where if they were malware they were almost certain to be in a signature database by that point). And I absolutely never pirated an OS. I thought anyone doing that was out of their freaking mind because any malware there had ultimate access to block its own detection and do whatever else it pleased.
Now I don't do it at all. It's not worth the risk when I have the money to pay for the proprietary software that I like and when the ecosystem of open source software is very good.
Until recently the exception for me was music software/VSTs. I definitely did get a few infections over the years doing so, but after finding some safe sources it went pretty well. To some extent, I still see advise it, actually, just with purchasing first but never using the key, just because DRM in the music software world is so aggressively bad. iLok is a cancer on that industry.
I mean this is by design? It makes pirates more likely to get malware, and thus normal people more likely to pay for MS products rather than pirate? You may think its immoral but the incentives line up.
I don't think it's some conspiracy to make anyone more likely to get malware. Instead it's that for their business model of mostly being used on business PCs where the same dozen tools are installed all over the world they can be overzelous in protection and it is what most customers want. Really, they should leave the "piracy is malware" thing in defender, it should just be off by default if your PC isn't connected to a domain or setup as "work PC".
It's entirely possible to ship malware in source form... Just look at the numerous supply chain attacks. Nix is a cute project but entirely irrelevant here.
Burning an identity? Instead of hacking the server that serves the binary, you have to hack the developer's machine and commit a malicious source change.
I wouldn't consider either of them to burn an identity.
It's been very hard to watch how many people who, a few years ago, believed everything the media said about say the pandemic, now claim you can't trust them at all. Time makes "conspiracy theorists" out of all of us -- it can be hard to see just how much the media lies and distorts, until they start talking about something you care about.
If you NOW believe that the media is corrupt and full of lies, but also believe that 6 years ago they were 100% truthful, you're being intellectually stunted. If you believed all the media lies during Covid, but NOW you see that the media is lying about the Middle East, you should have the intellectual honesty to at least earnestly consider if you were duped back then. Because that's much more likely than the entire media going from truthful to deceitful in that same period.
Oh don't be so obtuse. We're not going to get into a big long debate about the particulars -- it's been done a million times, you can search the details if you actually care. But you're only asking in an attempt to deflect the topic away from the reality staring you right in your face, if you had the courage to admit it.
This is a good point. As much as there is too much breathless enthusiasm for AI, there is also a lot of emotionally manipulative and hyperbolic language used by skeptics. We're warned not to anthropomorphize, and then hear about AI's compulsive lying, or "hallucinations", in the next.
Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.
Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.
That is true i'm sure. But in this particular case, there is no search or AI directly involved. It's the ads that get inserted to Youtube videos, and what they pay to creators.
Creator-led channels are competing with AI-generated video channels that pump out many videos every day. The ad spend hasn't increased but now it's shared with people who have automated their channel's content production and who are likely getting the majority of what's available.
That's to be expected. Google needs that money to fund the AI development that will enable them to replace creators with their own slop, allowing them to pocket 100 % instead of sharing anything at all.
Exactly, it is already a pattern that Google will start paying good money for ads and then progressively reduce the pay to its publishers. It is a bait and switch strategy, but they'll certainly say that it is just an algorithm improvement....
Totally an organic and transparent marketplace that joins together publishers and consumers huh?
It has been down since the COVID boom for obvious reasons, and then it has gone even more.. Google needing the billions to put into the AI burner is just and unfortunate coincidence..
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.