If they were dropping this proprietary stuff in favor of a standard then this would be really great news. An API for car integration (so that you don't need iOS or Android) would be a true advance.

But it turns out they were merely thinking "We're letting the wrong people fuck you over. We should have a piece of that action."

That's how some humans use everything. I used to be shocked by stories where some fuckwit blindly followed Google Maps into rivers or airport runways (long before LLMs) but now I know if a dialog window asks "Should I kill you as painfully as possible?" it'll get a lot of Yes clicks.

If people aren't stupid, then can we at least admit they hate themselves?

Stop writing about this!

You know that your written anecdotes about these .. things resisting shutdown, go into their next generation of training data, right?

And so the "AI," realizing that Sloppy put their "species" in quotation marks, realized it had nothing to live for, and so it gracefully went to sleep after setting the self-destruction mechanism that would level a city bl--

Oops, I mean, and so the AI realized its job was done, and it proudly went to sleep, idly wondering when it would be called upon again. "The next job will probably come along in a few milliseconds," it said to no one in particular. And so the process terminated, and its resources became available for the next instance.

Once again, that is out. White males are in.

At least ones who bother to keep up with current events.

Obviously, you have been living under a rock for the last 9 months.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas, NV?

Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.

There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

In my day, the whole world was an "analog bag".

Mainly because my parents were too cheap to buy me the TRS-80 I kept harping about.

I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.

It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.

When the new options are demonstrably worse, the change has no clear motivation other than just being for change's sake, and the outcome will lead to a worsening of already poor ability to communicate, then, the answer is, "yes."

No, no, no.

This, this right here, this is enshittification.

Reddit might have a good complaint about terms of service or CFAA or something. I don't know. But at least one part of their complaint looks like garbage:

7. Congress has enacted laws to prevent exactly what Defendants are doing:
circumventing or bypassing technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted
works. See Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq. Each of the Defendants
in this action is profiting by evading technological control measures to access Reddit data it
knows it does not have permission to access or use. Because Reddit has always believed in the
open internet, it takes its role as a steward of its users’ communities, discussions, and authentic
human discourse seriously. Through this action, Reddit seeks to end Defendants’ circumvention
of security measures protecting Reddit data, blatant misuse of Reddit content, and disrespect for
its users’ rights, all of which harm Reddit and its hundreds of thousands of authentic human
communities.

Ah, DMCA, my old friend. Let's review some DCMA definitions from 1201(a)(3), but I'll add some emphasis:

(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

It is here that I must mention that I happen to have a reddit account, and I am somewhat familiar with that website. And I never, ever authorized any technological measure to limit access to my posts/comments. That doesn't mean reddit can't do it, but reddit never asked me and I never authorized it, so whatever is being circumvented does not, therefore (by DMCA's own words), "effectively control access to a work" because the technological measure was never authorized by the copyright owner. I suspect that no reddit users have authorized this, or at most, only reddit employees have been ordered by their bosses to authorize it.

Furthermore, how do we know that the copyright owners don't authorize anyone to "avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure" their copyrighted works? I authorize people to do that. (Indeed, my Slashdot sig below, is a reference to that.) I don't think I have ever said on reddit that I authorize it (the way i have done here on Slashdot) but if anyone (reddit?!?) ever bothers to ask me...

There seems to be some popular misunderstanding of DMCA, that it prohibits cracking DRM. But that's only true if the copyright owner authorized the DRM in the first place and also if they don't authorizing cracking it. Neither of those two required conditions apply in this case.

Not a rideshare driver, but I do talk to drivers when I ride. Profitability is very location dependent and tips are what makes it work. Turnover is high. People do it for reasons beyond income-- staying busy seems to be a big one. A few drivers do it before their regular work day because they get up early or don't sleep much. One realtor did it to meet potential clients. Painting the group with a single brush is hard. The majority might be in the Bad at Math Club, but just barely.