FWIW a VPN prevents them from inspecting your traffic, so if you’re concerned about this it might be a worthwhile investment.

First off, yes, he didn’t want to buy Twitter. That much is established fact. He went to court to get out of buying Twitter (unless we’re suddenly supposed to believe that was some kind of elaborate 5D chess move made for reasons our puny mortal minds cannot understand).

Given that he didn’t want to buy the company in the first place, why would he be digging that hole deeper by deliberately destroying it?

“He’s a idiot” is not a satisfactory explanation. Idiots don’t crash their cars on purpose just because they were idiots. They crash their cars for numerous reasons such as texting and driving, drinking and driving, etc, but not “Because they wanted to.”

To be clear, Musk is an idiot. We can thank this whole debacle for finally helping people finally grasp that. But he thinks he’s smart. He thinks he’s a good businessman. That’s why he’s doing all the things that he’s doing; because he genuinely thinks this is how to be successful. That’s why he attached his beloved X brand to this sinking ship; because he’s too caught up in his own ego to recognize that it’s sinking, and that he’s the one sinking it.

“He’s trying to kill Twitter” is an excuse that people come up with because they spent so long believing the man was a genius that now they can’t square that with the recent flood of evidence that he’s not. So they need there to be some other explanation. It can’t be that he’s just incompetent. It has to be that this is all part of his master plan. This is no different than QAnons trying to rationalize away every stupid thing Trump does by claiming its all secretly genius.

By this person’s logic, Musk was willing to tank 200bn of his net worth to kill twitter. Why would he give a single flying shit about a lawsuit or four? At best he’d owe them back the value of their investment, which is apparently, according to the insane logic of the “He’s deliberately killing twitter” crowd, small change to see a single social media site dead.

killing twitter is the goal

Please explain the following:

1. Why is killing Twitter worth half of his entire fortune?
2. Why would he attach the X brand to it, something that has been his personal obsession throughout his life, if the goal was to kill it?
3. Why isn’t it dead yet? He owns Twitter outright. He’s not the CEO. He’s not a major shareholder. He’s the owner. Full stop. If the goal was to kill it, he could fire everyone, shut the doors and turn off the lights. So why hasn’t he?

You’re absolutely right, but I want to add that there are meaningful, practical differences as well.

The reality is that cruise control doesn’t tend to create accidents because by its very nature it still requires an almost constant level of engagement from the driver. There are very few places where you can run a vehicle on cruise with literally zero user input for more than a few minutes without starting to veer off the road. It assists the driver, but it doesn’t replace their role.

FSD does replace the driver, right up until the moment where the driver needs to step in and correct it. Psychologically, this is a very different interaction. Automation blindness kicks in. If we spend 99% of our time trusting the actions of the machine it becomes very, very difficult to maintain enough focus and attentiveness to recognise the 1% of times when we need to override the machine (this happens in all instances of human oversight over automated processes).

Yeah, it’s not like the Servarr application suite has made piracy literally easier than using streaming services.

The resource implications are the problem. The cost - in terms of compute time - to bake those ads eats into the profit earned from advertising as a whole. Since only a fraction of users adblock, they would probably lose more money than they gained.

They’ll consider it once the compute cost inserting the ads is low enough that it’s worth it. I have no idea if we’ve reached that point yet, but I’m guessing not, since otherwise they’d already be doing it.

What’s this app only mode you speak of? I am intrigued.

No, Firefox is basically the opposite of spyware. They do so much more than other browsers to protect your privacy.

Jesus Christ, this is I getting nsane. When did it become unacceptable to say that genocide is bad?

Yup. By all accounts she’s been a shitty boss everywhere she works, with a penchant for dealing with bad news by sticking her head in the sand. Big Trump fan too.

Iger: “Oh. No. I am so owned right now. Oh dear. Please stop. However will I and my enormous media empire survive.”

“Gay furry hackers…”

You can just say hackers, you don’t need to repeat yourself.

At some point CZ outlined a bunch of “rules” for winning bigly in crypto (read: “getting suckered by his scam”) and rule 4 was “Ignore FUD.” Ever since, when bad news happened he would just reply with “4” as a shorthand.

Centralized exchanges were always inevitable, for a few basic reasons.

As soon as crypto started getting big, it ran headlong into a fundamental problem;

• The value proposition of cryptocurrencies is that one day they will be legitimate (“mass adoption is coming”); you need to get in now so that you’re a crypto millionaire when the world finally gets on board.
• Without legitimacy, they might as well be monopoly money. There’s no reason why you can’t pay for things in monopoly money if the person receiving the money is cool with it, but at some point you hit that wall around your closed “monopoly money is cool” community.
• Crypto is, fundamentally, very difficult for the average person to use. Trading one currency for another, for example, requires you to find a specific person who wants to sell exactly as much of that currency as you want to buy.
• Centralised exchanges remove a lot of the friction from this process. They have (nominally) customer support teams and other things normies expect from a place where they’re being asked to store their life savings.
• Without usability for the average idiot (not just bunch of weirdo hardcore nerds) crypto cannot get big. Without getting big crypto cannot get mass adoption. So no matter how much a bunch of elitist tech-nerds want to parrot “Not your keys”, the reality is that the entire project of making crypto meaningful was doomed to fail without centralised exchanges.

But of course, it was also doomed to fail with centralised exchanges. Because the second reason why they exist is that even after you solve the usability problems with crypto, the growth is still limited, because there really aren’t that many people who are jazzed about buying into a hypothetical currency just because someday it might be a real boy. The engine was clearly running out of steam, and the exchanges needed to come up with “staking” to make people actually want to invest. And by “invest” we of course mean “throw their money into a Ponzi scheme” (look up the actual definition of a Ponzi, then look up how staking worked on every single exchange; the intention is irrelevant, the effect is a Ponzi whether it was meant to be or not).

There’s no version of crypto that exists without centralized exchanges while still holding value outside of very limited, very niche spaces.

“The data will show it. We’re just not done falsifying it yet.”

You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).

Meanwhile Media Matters are absolutely salivating over the thought of what they can get in discovery. Never sue journalists unless you’re really comfortable giving them unfettered access to your server logs, internal communications, and much, much more.

Even if you do think it’s plausible that Google can do this in a way that can’t be beaten (at every step so far they’ve lost this war, so the odds really aren’t on their side, but let’s allow it as a possibility), this just means that we need to get more people onto non-Chromium browsers (meaning Firefox and whatever else comes along) so that it becomes infeasible to run a website that only supports chromium based browsers.

Well, that’s gonna get solved for you pretty soon then. They’re planning to auction off handles from accounts that haven’t logged in in the last few months.