davidagain

Past me has sometimes been a bit of a dick. I forgive him, though.

Another thread suggests that the people calling the cybertruck a swastikar might be discouraging other people from buying them.

Absolutely.

Not any more, they don't!

When they removed their "don't be evil" motto, I thought it was hilariously bad optics but probably came from some misguided thinking that if they stopped talking about the potential for evil, people would stop wondering whether they had bad motives and needed the motto to keep straight.

It became clearer and clearer that they removed the motto because they felt it was holding them back from greater profits and was skewing employee behaviours in ways they didn't want and bringing up objections to policy ideas that they wanted to avoid. It was never about the optics, it was about the profits.

Now, when Google removes a pledge not to make portable killer AIs and skynet, you have to accept that it's because they see making portable killer AIs and skynet as hugely profitable for them, and they don't want any good intentions or moral behaviour getting in the way of that profit.

Absolutely, signal isn't federated, but I don't want my messaging app to be federated. I want my social media to be federated. Lemmy is good because it's open. Signal is good because it's shut.

"Copilot, read this map of Gaza, and prioritising plausible denyability, give me a list of coordinates of sites that I can claim were being used by Hamas. Rank them in order of increasing atrocity, and make the list really really long, so that by the time we're literally just bombing schoolchildren, everyone's kinda got used to it and it's not much of a headline."

"Sure thing, IDF, I am well trained to help you with the media management of your atrocities, and you can rest assured that I won't let facts get in the way of your genocidal plans. I am engineered from the bottom up to sound plausible and like I know what I'm talking about, and I never cared much for the distinction between reality and narrative-confirming fiction anyway."

It's my computer, not theirs. Watching a video isn't the same as taking money, you seem to have a lot of confusion on this point.

Oh, I consent to the content. Just not to the ads, so I stream the content and my software skips the ads for me automatically. Couldn't be simpler. Puts me in control over what I do and don't download onto my computer. I'm not buying anything.

I don't consent to watching the same ads over and over. I don't consent to them being downloaded onto my computer against my will. You consent, that's fine. You enemies consent to sending the richest corporations on the globe your hard earned cash so you can avoid the same ads I don't want, and they still send you ads. I don't know why you like that stuff, but I don't. I'm in charge of what I do and don't download onto my computer.

Not really.

You're trying really hard, for days and days, trying to make me feel guilty about skipping ads, and it's just not working. At all. But you persist. It's weird.