And then the restaurant down the street that doesn’t give two shits takes the soup and uses it to make their own stock and serve it to you without the warning. And when the other three restaurants and the soup kitchen see THAT restaurant taking it, they ignore the sign that says “contains piss” because surely, if that first guy was using it it can’t be that bad, and even it it is, well, they can’t get us ALL if we ALL do it, right?

This is actually a post about artificial sweeteners.

Yes. If you’re giving soup to someone who isn’t homeless, you are allowed to pee in it. It’s in UN Charter.

The real threats are much less sci-fi and more good old fashioned resource theft and exploitative slavery.

I agree, and I desperately want a Linux phone, but the really problem with Linux phones gaining traction is that is the developers are DEVELOPERS.

“I make $200,000 a year… how much should a good smartphone cost… how about $700? It’s a bargain!”

I get that making hardware is expensive, but asking people to jump into something with a learning curve and real sacrifices at a premium price is just guaranteeing it stays niche - especially when asking an audience that by and large has to have an Android as a backup for some apps anyway.

And this is coming from someone with no fewer than 16 machines running various Linux distros in his house. You can’t ask someone to spend that much on a secondary phone to play with until they get comfortable enough with it to switch completely. You just can’t. It’s barely working for the Linux OS, and that’s free.

You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying “This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership.”

Unless it’s protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.

Even if they ARE an “honorable” company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.

Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a “kill the golden goose to get the eggs” move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.

Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it’s a GAMBLE. It’s a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it’s not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.

Pro-tip: If the company hasn’t already been around for over 100 years, NEVER buy a lifetime pass for ANYTHING.

Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?

Yeah… they’ve been stripping important control features out of the kernel for decades.

This is just the LATEST reason your phone isn’t yours.

Anyone remember how much nicer the world felt before we all realized nobody in charge of anything with any real power has any idea what the fuck they’re doing?

Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It’s not great that they’re paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they’re also not contributing to Anthropic’s code base. If they were? They’d absolutely be complicit.

The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.

Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.

It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.

I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.

Major watch dog

They were evil but constrained and minor. Their current power is the direct result of the anti-immigrant flames social media like Facebook have been fanning with their algorithms for years.

If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.

Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.

It would help if reality weren’t also currently a toxic pit of despair.

We’re good with technology, so we’re VERY easily able to find our EXACT preferred porn for our EXACT fetishes. That snowballs.

Also, forget ALT-TAB. We Linux users LOVE having keyboard shortcuts for completely different desktops… for reasons.

They can rent out or sell the building and recoup a measure of that investment. It’s nothing compared to the windfall they’ll get from selling snake oil on a military procurement contract.

As soon as people stop looking, Google will shut down the whole office. It’s how tons of huge companies get around “can’t lay off union workers”.

Yeah.

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