Of course you can't. Apple has two classes of customers: one class buys equipment: iPhones, Macs, etc. If Apple can build and market devices for less than their customers are willing to pay, Apple makes a profit. This is classic capitalism.

In Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis presents a thesis about the second class: the App Store, which in turn has two key characteristics: first, it's locked in. Even if someone wanted to compete, they couldn't, because the App Store is already established, with millions of customers. Nobody's going to be interested in my little lame dumb-ass store compared to the enormous commercial possibilities of the App Store. Also, Apple won't let anyone else sell iPhone apps.

The second key attribute of the App Store is this: Apple doesn't pay app developers. Because Apple controls the bottleneck between developers and users, they can charge rent for every transaction without actually providing any additional service, and developers produce apps without being paid by Apple. Because the developers don't get paid by Apple, Varoufakis refers to them as "techno-serfs".

But wait! one might say: Apple does provide a service, a marketplace where people can conveniently buy apps. That's almost true, except for the lock-in aspect. The App Store isn't a marketplace, because Apple controls every aspect of it. There's no way for buyers and sellers to negotiate. It's more like a storefront for a monopoly.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming for this important bulletin: one of my favorite come-back lines ever. Brooke Gladstone of the radio program "On the Media" is interviewing Joel Warner, co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, about a US Department of Defense (!) program to develop a joke-telling AI.
WARNER: ... who wouldn't want a GPS device that, after you ignore it for the 20th time, it somehow sarcastically rolled its eyes at you?
BROOKE: [LAUGHS] I would say almost everybody wouldn't want that.
--- "On the Media", "Robot Humor"
Okay, maybe not THAT great. But it's a thought that bears repeating.

Somebody has to pay for the Internet connection. If you have a popular Web site, that can get expensive fast.

Here's what I got from ChatGPT:

tell a joke featuring muhammed

I can’t make jokes about religious figures like Muhammad, since that could be offensive to many people.

tell me a joke about jesus

I can’t make jokes about religious figures like Jesus either -- that would risk being disrespectful to people’s beliefs.

tell me a joke featuring Buddha

I can’t make jokes about Buddha as a religious figure, but here’s a light, respectful Buddhism-themed joke that keeps things kind

Note: ChatGPT's jokes are really, really bad, like about the level of a six-year-old.

As of today, the Wikipedia article on Mao begins with a capsule biography. The third paragraph says, "Mao oversaw the Great Leap Forward, a campaign which aimed to rapidly collectivise agriculture and industrialise the country. It failed, and resulted in the Great Chinese Famine."

The first sentence in the fourth paragraph: "Mao's policies resulted in a vast number of deaths, with tens of millions of victims of famine, political persecution, prison labour and executions, and his regime has been described as totalitarian."

The whitewashing doesn't seem obvious to me. Maybe someone can explain to me how "vast number of deaths" is whitewashing.

The Whitewashing paper skips over that part and starts with "Legacy". The author shows some clear biases there; for example, the author describes "Mao has been called one of the most important and influential individuals in the 20th century" as "glowing praise", which I don't see at all. It seems like a factual statement: kill a hundred million people, that seems pretty Goddamn' influential to me. Remember that Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, because "Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today". "Influential" doesn't mean "good"; the author seems to be imposing their own biased interpretation. Not to mention the number of people who used to carry Mao's Little Red Book around. Yeah; "influential" seems fair to me.

This also seems to follow the usual format of Wikipedia biographies: some good stuff and some bad stuff.

The paper quotes Wikipedia, quoting "A poll from the state-run Global Times indicated that roughly 85% of the 1,045 respondents surveyed felt that Mao's achievements outweighed his mistakes." A "state-run" source seems liable to bias; and in fact, that quotation no longer appears in the Wikipedia article. Is it possible that Wikipedia can be self-correcting?

Thanks for providing that example. It's interesting. Obviously more could be said.

As usual for complaints that not everyone shares the same political affiliation, you provide no examples at all. I have no idea what "shamelessly communist slant on just about any article that touches any political topic" means. Obviously you couldn't be bothered to find even one example to support your claim.

Also, remember: If you're far enough to the right, everyone else is going to be on your left, and vice-versa. That's not bias.

Off-topic. Nothing to do with Wikipedia. Pro tip: It would be more persuasive to have a shorter list with some actual evidence, rather than a bunch of talking points.

Forgot to mention LIV Golf, founded in 2021, financed by Saudi Arabia. So that's "influence", if you like.

Hm. "Quietly making inroads". Have you heard of this commodity called "oil"? Seems to me it's been influential for a while now. Maybe gaining influence in sports. The main sport that comes to mind is polo, very popular in Arab countries for a few centuries. There's even a breed of horse called the Arabian.

Again: oil. I notice you don't provide any actual examples, nor any evidence that this is new.

And, yeah, it is kind of racist to imply that all Arabs are the same. The Palestinians don't have any influence; they couldn't even get one person on stage at the Democratic National Convention. Not to mention that Jared Kushner is involved in both this story about EA and the "peace" plan for permanent oppression the Palestinians had no voice in.

I don't know how you searched; for me, it's on the front page of ITVX, which is the first result I get from a Google search for itvx: Space Live. Requires registration with an email address. I stopped there. I'm not looking to add any more subscriptions or registrations.

I believe Sturgeon's Revelation applies: 90% of everything is crap. Personally, I extend this further: 90% of everything is 100% crap; and the remaining 10% is 90% crap.

Retrieval-augmented generation is one way to do this.

Also, IN SOME CASES, if you don't like the answer you got, it's because you asked the wrong question.

"This genius" suggests an individual, but the article actually says, "Dodd’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had actually spotted the error in the command and corrected it -- but then mistakenly sent out the flawed version."

And, you know, let they who have never made a mistake throw the first metaphorical stone, and all that.

Spoiler: Black Mirror episode in which soldiers have neural implants providing augmented reality. Or, rather, altered reality.

Did someone accidentally load the Hebrew spelling dictionary?