So what?

As if the US government or US compabies don’t play the same “underhanded” tactics to harm competition.

Selling at a loss to earn market share is a perfectly valid strategy for US corpos. Why is China supposedly doing the exact same thing suddenly not as nice?

So… a “Make sure all votes are for the only true candidate” army?

And… They didn’t communicate this with you beforehand?

When the company’s immune to accountability […] backlash changes nothing.

Not really. Backlash is important because it shows there’s an alternative. And not to the company - the company won’t change. But its users, customers and consumers just might.

It creates publicity, which triggers people to talk and think about the issue.

Which is a good thing as well as a driver of change.

Boycotts are also effective. The only problem is, huge companies have their fingers in multiple jars (industries, brands, etc.) and their main customers are other companies.

This gives them a great dose of stability. But if people were to suddenly boycott all of say Nestle’s brands, stores wouldn’t order new Nestle stock.

There’s also no need for extreme backlash in some cases. Just look at Walmart or Microsoft.

Microsoft is bleeding users at a record rate. Sure, the year of the Linux desktop is still not here, but Linux market share has been rising dramatically lately. Why?

Because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot.

Walmart is a similar story.

There’s something about huge consumer-facing companies that makes them extremely vulnerable to losing focus and falling out with consumers.

If some more Boeings fell out of the sky and not just one or two a few years ago, airlines would be looking to clear thenselves of all Boeing stock. This wouldn’t even need backlash.

Backlash is a source of bad PR. And bad PR causes customer loss. That’s profit loss. That’s a bad credit score. Hell, even the government might take a look and find some issues they’d like to check out!

As you can see, this can all spiral out of proportion.

And backlash is the first step in this story.

The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer

I wouldn’t agree. Sure, Taylor Swift would own her likeness. But so would her doppleganger.

This could be done on a nonsensical basis such as first-dibs or whose ever is the most well-known, but the only logical option is that both are protected.

So if our Taylor doppleganger goes around just looking and existing with an appearance closely matching Taylor’s, she’s protected under her own likeness.

If she goes on to claim of being Taylor Swift and swindles people, that’s a seperate issue dealt with impersonation statutes.

Even cosplaying as they did with Dolly Parton would be protected under free speech/expression.

Since these protections already exist, a right to likeness only really stops the deepfakes, which is exactly the point.

It also used to be that if one part of such a contract was found to be illegal, the entire thing would be thrown out, not any more.

Not necessarily.

A contract is supposed to be a mutually-beneficial arrangement. I sell you a car for its market value. I work for you for a market price on my time for the position and my expertise.

If there’s a small mistake both sides are willing to amend - there probably won’t even be a suit.

Even if there is a suit, most places’ laws prefer nudging toe contract to the side “less off” in such cases.

Only when there are unreasonable demands by one side, or the contract is so one-sided it can’t be amended is when it gets thrown out completely.

Which is supposed to be almost never.

Therefore, I don’t think the rules themselves changed as much as the goalposts and the reasonableness window have. Quality of life and purchase power is decreasing steadily basically since Reagan.

Contemporary EULAs are taken as acceptable and a fact of life when even 10 years ago T&Cs were laughed at which were much less unreasonable in comparison.

Other types of contracts follow the same general direction, with employment ones being among the absolute worst.

If you just give binary blobs and no sources

The main point is that you give the source to the blobs, so it’s not a black box anymore - new maintainers knowing what the blob does (and how) saves a HUGE amount of time prodding the black box (blob) to infer its behaviour.

And it doesn’t pose a security risk - if anything, more eyes on the code is better. Security through obscurity has been proven a myth since open code has more eyes on it. Security researches have smarter things to do than prod some binary blob when there’s so much code that’s either open source in the first place or at least only they got access to closed code.

What obscurity does is limit the eyes on the code, but the share of bad actors hoping to strike gold to researches looking at it outdoes any benefit.

Will your technically-challenged great-Aunt switch to post-support build when her phone hits EoL

She won’t. But you as her niece/nephew might. And the local repair tech might when she comes to ask. Abd she’s not an idiot, just the technology isn’t mature enough in the societal sense: people don’t think of bringing their phone to a repair shop like they do their cars, which is a fixable issue - even without much advocacy groups time will fix this issue.

hackers [will] be able to remote control her banking app and take away your inheritance before the community can even patch it

You might be mixing apples and orabnes here: why and how is the community expected to “fix” a banking app?

A banking app is a closed blob just like phobes nowadays. It’s a parasitic relationship: blobbed phones are used to justify blobbed apps and vice versa. It’s like saying “well, the foubdation of the building is bad, but to fix it we’d need to also deal with the crumbling walls” - so instead of fixing, it often is better to do a fresh start. But you’re suggesting we should continue making buildings with bad walls and foubdations because we have the wall materials lying around, so why not use them?

Then there could also be licensed code

This is a recipe for disaster. I hope you’re trolling.

The Internet wouldn’t work if DNS were centralized, and the only thing DNS is used for is translating key pairs (basically). Now a single point of failure would have to do code vetting?

It’s the totalitarian dream! Oh, and absolutely out of touch with reality.

“Israelism” = Zionism.

I never even thought I’d say this, but if he really said “Israelism”, he may be one of the few right-wing people who aren’t committing the gravest form of antisemitism: conflating all Jews and the Jewish faith as a whole with the sins of Israel the state, its leaders and its supporters.

Whoever has a brain, a gun and less than $1 million in the bank. Hell, even some uber-rich folks might join the cause.

And besides, if anyone has a gun problem, it’s America. Might as well make that bug into a feature. Y’know, wrong clock right twice or whatever.

If the rulers end up getting shot and school shootings give way to senate, town hall and courtroom shootings, maybe a positive change would come. If nothing else, guns would get controlled which would mean less school shootings judging by the Brian Thompson case.

And just to say - I’m not preaching political violence. What I am saying is that a bunch of dead adults is teeny tiny bit less terrible than a bunch of dead kids.

Bigger is always better. For hardware.

On the other hand, less is always more for software.

Might as well bump it to 64 GB and an LLM chip since in 5 years’ time people might like Copilot & Friends spying a bit less on them.

What do you mean it’s not a review?

If a congressional comitee and a few invitees (such as POTUS) reviewing golf clubs together in a courtroom isn’t a judicial review, I don’t know what is.

Politics is the science and art of organizing, constituting and managing

If politics is the art and science of anything, that something is spreading corruption and attaining personal gain at thr cost of general society.

Well, of course anything he does has to be strong as he can’t seem weak in front of his somehow-still-existing sheep heard.

I mean, if someone is responsible enough to brethalyze themselves, they should also be responsible enough to not drive. Hooking the brethalyzer up to the car to disable it seems like a terrible idea.

Deoending on the way it’s implemented, a bad one could brick a car for hours if someone drunk tries it, but there are perfectly sober people who could drive. Or y’know, this shit with someone coming on and remotely disabling things all willy-nilly.

Wait, are you telling me…

…that a device meant to disable a vehicle…

…was used to disable a vehicle?

Whould’ve thought?

No, there are.

The “teachings of Jesus” seem just fine: stuff like love thy neighbour no matter what (aka don’t hate minorities), let the one without sins throw rocks first (aka don’t judge), throwing a tantrum at money changers (aka communist).

If only Christians looked up to the one and only character they literally believe is God in human form and try following his actions.

But alas, those Christians are “Christians”, and most know more abot the teachings of Thomas Aquinas than Jesus Christ.

Why lax the timelines? Companies have an army of employees. They can deal with the consequences, unlike individuals.

Someone comes home dead from work. Someone’s close family passed away. Someone went to vacation and didn’t get the (snail) mail in time.

A lot of things make the 10-ish day window of “raise issue now” impossible to honour.

However, not for companies.

If people are overworked - hire more.

If someone’s family member died - there’s everyone else in the section to take care of stuff until they return.

If the only person responsible for dealing with this stuff is out on vacation, it’s a managerial issue. One that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

While the reasons companies raise sound PR-friendly, they’re really not justifications - only mere excuses.

A company is a system, and if it fails a 10-day deadline of dealing with their financial obligations (after months of failing to provide a core customer service on top), it’s a failing system. The only one whose fault it is is the company itself and its (clearly sub-par) management.

Individuals can have the excuse of “life happened”. Companies cannot, as they’re not living beings. Especially since sooner or later, everyone is replaceable in their eyes, and because most can always hire more people without a single meaningful change in any KPI.

About the deadlines: yes, they should be extended. Claimants usually don’t care much abd start the process after months of backlogged claims anyway. Even for a single claimee it’s beneficial - a slower buth more robust system has higher odds of honouring a request.

However, companies have absolutely no ground to request an extension because they’re big. If anything, it should be shortened.

What OP explained isn’t arbitration. When you don’t pay off your bills, they go through a shortened court process in which you haven’t got any representation.

The claimant merely submits their records of the claimee owing them. Then the case is either upheld and the claimee gets 10 days to fight the case or pay before their accounts get impounded, or the case gets thrown out.

The claimee doesn’t have any say in the entire process - they can only raise issues after they get the stern letter to pay.

Since there’s no representation for one side, it’s not arbitration.

An AI can easily start nuclear war, as can a human.

The only thing preventing a nuclear disaster are all the institutional measures limiting its accessiblity.

If you gave a single human (or a single AI) access to a magic no-strings-attached ‘Send a Nuke’ button, either the human/AI is the second coming of Jesus Christ, or a nuke will befall some unlucky portion of the population sooner or later. Bonus points if people can talk to the AI or if access to the button is hereditary.