As I said, few years ago.

Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?

Companies can bleed ridiculous amounts of money if it means that they can push competition out of the market. Couple less profitable, or even negative, quarters are fine, if they’re expecting good enough return for that investment. So, they’re still firmly on track with maximum profit hunting, sometimes it just takes some money to make even more money.

accomplish nothing else

Come on now, give credit where credit is due. There was also a shit ton of wealth transferred to Trump and his gang via insider trading, messing around with markets in general and a ton of other shady business. Russia (and likely Putin directly) and China also benefited from the chaos created. And also global instability increased by quite a lot, but one could argue that was only a side effect and not a direct goal.

That’s been going on for a while already. Stellantis was founded only a few years ago and they already have a ton of different brands in their pockets. Obviously PSA and FCA already had a ton of those brands before merging, but similar merges have been happening for decades, for example GM has been gathering different brands since 1920s.

Not surprising at all. Every worker everywhere does this if they have some sort of ‘tokens’ they need to consume. Helpdesk ticket count is one pretty common with IT-folks and it’s easy enough to boost if you just write one from every single small thing you’ve done for the day.

None of these obviously are beneficial for the actual work getting done, but as the game is ‘make KPI numbers look good’ then that’s exactly what gets done.

There are various mesh-network projects around and it’s better than nothing, but their issues tend to be pretty low bandwidth and physically limited area. Wifi-mesh in a somewhat densely populated area is technically possible, but technology says that you need to be pretty close (100m give or take) to the next node. On rural areas people have built pretty long range wireless jumps without ISPs but hardware requirements for those are a bit different and you’re relying heavily on the node next to you in upstream direction.

Then there’s things like LoRa Networking, but their bandwidth is very small and it’s really only suitable for SMS-style messaging with pretty low traffic, but it can reach up to 10km between nodes. AX.25 over amateur radio has range up to hundreds of kilometers, but it’s also pretty slow (~1kbps).

So, in practise, the best would be to use something like NNTP and distributed servers across the mesh network where you’re less dependent on long range high speed communications. Modern web experience or instant messaging just isn’t really feasible over any mesh network with current consumer-grade hardware.

I don’t know about running the whole internet over peer-to-peer network, but my home server is pretty much the ‘main’ computer and while phones an laptops obviously have data locally it’s also synced to the server so losing one mobile device isn’t really a big deal (besides money to get a new one). Immich for photos, nextcloud for other data, radicale for contacts and calendar and self hosted imap-server for emails.

Obviously the devices are still very much personal, but it’s easy enough to wipe and start over if needed. For remote wipe I still need to rely with google on phone and with laptop there’s currently no way to remote wipe it but it’s running with encrypted drive anyway so it’s only the monetary value of the thing in case it’s lost.

That is a problem, I agree. But I still feel like it would be beneficial if there was some standard on HTTP or other protocols which could limit user access based on PG-rating instead of everyone developing their own approach. It could also be something like robots.txt, but for PG-rating, where client would do the verification.

And, as I already mentioned, that should be strictly local only setting and only for parental/guardian controlling what minors can and can’t do with their devices.

There is a very good argument for OS level age ‘tracking’ as a means of creating a cohesive environment for software and websites to operate without having to implement individual age verification. The biggest actual issue here is how the OS determines what the user’s age is.

I agree with you on this. I wouldn’t mind if there was a mechanism on browsers which would send ‘child/teen/adult’ (or whatever they’d be called) data to websites in request headers since they already report a ton of stuff to the server anyways. It would be trivial for adult sites to check one header and limit access based on that. But the setting needs to be local only, so that parents could easily set restricted accounts for their kids. The point where user age must be validated via any 3rd party it’s no longer about parental controls and the whole thing becomes a surveillance tool.

Also the limits should be agreed somehow on at least somewhat global basis so that it’s only used for porn/gore/horror and other stuff like that. Things like sexual education, religious topics (likely both pro- and against-), medical stuff and things like that should be left out of the filtering. But as with practically every ‘think of the children’-thing proposed for the internet it’s got nothing to do with children nor used only for that.

Well, you’re not wrong, but that would still be a catastrophe modern world hasn’t yet seen. Those millions would become refugees and absolutely overwhelm European immigration system even with mass casualties due to riots, loss of water/food/medicine and who knows what else. Current oil prices would seem pretty cheap and global economy would take a massive hit causing homelesness, bankrupts, humongous loss of crops (due to fuel and fertilizer prices) and all kinds of havoc.

Global west would suffer badly, China would become even stronger, Russia would benefit from that as well causing even more problems around Europe. Global trade with USA would practically collapse and pull USA down as well. In the global scale it doesn’t even matter that much if there’s a nuclear explosion somewhere too as results will be pretty nuclear anyways.

It seems like something so important that we’d have ironed it out, but the Constitution never explicitly laid out the terms, and it’s never been specifically answered by the Supreme Court.

I guess lots of the world have similar situations with different laws. Generally, when those are written no one really asked what if president/minister/whoever is bat shit crazy demented old guy and should the law have guardrails for that.

You can’t make a Lego drone. It’s not rigid enough.

You actually can make one mostly out of lego. Obviously not a really good one, but it can be done.

So creating an onlyfans account using Grok is profitable?

Finland has similar thing, but it is not capped. There’s a ton of 100 000+€ fines given around here. Obviously with Musk it would be a bit different, since the fine is based on actual income, not some imaginary monopoly money on the stock market.

the joke was that in the USA you can be multi millionaire+ wealthy and pay 0% tax

That is the actual joke here, agreed. If, and that’s a pretty damn big if, there was any sense on USA government they could just take our progressive steps and leave everything above 35% away from it and still have a crapload of budget to actually make their country great again.

But spending 100 million bucks per hour to demolish schools half way across the world is cool too I guess.

You don’t need to be Elon-wealthy to get those percentages. Over 500 000€/year salary gives you nice 50% tax bracket. You absolutely are not poor if your taxes are that high, but you don’t need to be CEO of Google either.

This does not apply to “installing software”.

So it doesn’t apply when I click the big button which says ‘Install’ on F-Droid app on my phone?

And it does come with risk,

Just like installing software from the ‘secure’ Google Play store.

Installing software is installing software, no matter where you get that software from. That’s it. You can try to twist that with nuances on terminology or invent new ones, the end result is that an piece of software is installed on the system and nothing more. It doesn’t matter if the software came from play store, f-droid, steam, windows store, shady google drive link or the pirate bay. It doesn’t matter if you’re a power user or never seen a smartphone before in your life.

Sure, there might differences in potential security, compatibility, licensing and whatever, but it is still a piece of software being installed.

“installing apps from outside the Google Play Store”

To me that implies it’s somehow different than just installing software. You could say ‘install from play store’ or ‘install from f-droid’ if you need to specify which app repository you should use, as that what it is. Sideloading might be an appropriate term if you need to upload apk to your device via USB-cable from your PC, which the term originally meant.

to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify

[Citation needed]

From the article:

This “advanced flow” is for power users and enthusiasts who “want to take educated risks to install software from unverified developers.” Google says it was “designed carefully to prevent those in the midst of a scam attempt from being coerced by high pressure tactics to install malicious software.”

Sure, the term itself comes from 1990s, but lately specially Google tries to twist that to mean something only ‘power users’ do and it comes with a ‘educated risk’.

Do you consider installing games to you PC from Steam sideloading too? What about downloading Firefox installer? It is installing software on your computer, no matter if that computer happens to be in a cellphone form factor, and always has been. Sideloading is a made up term to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify even bigger walls on the ecosystem garden and control how people use their own devices.