willington

More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.

They already squeezed the open net for all its worth.

Can't prove anything, but I have always had trust issues with Youtube's numbers. Youtube is a for profit company with horrible owners at the top, and would they distort the numbers for political or financial reasons? I think they would.

I think Youtube and Reddit inflate and deflate vote counts and view counts when something is important to the owners.

Granted that is what I think. Can't prove it. But Google, Alphabet, Youtube, and the new entrants like Grumble, they are black box for profit companies. Can they pass an independent audit for their view and subscriber counts? We should not trust anything from these bad actors. Certainly don't assume good faith. Audit them by five (more than one) independent and transparent auditing companies to prove their numbers are legit. Every six months. Every year. Forever. Until then I take all those view and subscriber numbers with a fistful of salt.

Linus from LTT was ostensibly really popular. I never watched it. Lets say their old numbers were legit. Is it possible some nephew of Youtube's CEO is starting a competing channel and Youtube fudges the numbers to help push the nepo channel ahead? To me, yes, it is possible. I have very little trust for those black boxes. "Trust me bro" is all they got so far, and I have little reason to trust these entities.

So basically Google/Alphabet/Youtube reports a new number to Linus. Are the old and the new numbers legit? Can we ascertain it beyond the Youtube's "trust me bro" nonsense? We need to start there, and don't jump to conclusions about the viewership habits.

I don't want to eat paint chips. Dating AI is even less appealing.

I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.

Legal, yes.

Literal, no.

Corporations are people too, friend.

/s

Jesus, how the heck is this called "sideloading is so easy on an iPhone"?

That's a nightmare procedure, and completely unnecessary.

Obviously Apple makes sideloading as hard as possible.

You probably didn't do it on purpose, but you made a comparison on Apple's terms, thus implicitly priveleging Apple.

Last thing Apple needs is us priveleging it.

Openness isn't just a nice to have. It is essential.

The difference between general purpose computing and gatekept walled garden computing is night and day.

Identifying the devs is not in the "need to know" for Google. Google sells or helps to sell a general purpose open device where it is on us to exploit that device however we will.

Now Google wants to switch to a walled garden, moderated development model.

If Google promises it won't use those dev IDs to moderate development, their promise is only worth the wind it moves and the sound it makes.

Not a solution to our problem, but this is a crumb in our favor.

Bias is inevitable.

It makes no sense to work to eliminate it.

It's like trying to breed a new species of humans that are void of preferences. An impossible task. If such a breeding process somehow succeded, the resulting product would not be a human anyway.

If anyone claims to be unbiased themselves, or claims freedom from bias for someone else, even just implying that someone somewhere is unbiased, I immediately know bullshit is afoot. Such claims are not always knowingly malicious, but are always detrimental to my interests should I start foolishly believing them.

If the problem we want to solve is how to consolidate wealth and power in a few private hands the fastest, the unregulated free markets is the solution.