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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25587 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I believe what you're describing could happen. The closest analogy I can think of is companies black boxing equipment to prevent you from working on it yourself:

LESTER GRAHAM, BYLINE: About an hour south of Detroit, Mark Metz and his father farm 1,800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat. He says a computer error showed up on his dashboard in his tractor. With no access to information about the tractor software, he had no choice but to ask the dealership to send someone out to look at it.

MARK METZ: We deal with a dealer that's a little over an hour away. And, of course, you're paying for their road times. So, I mean, we pay a good two to 2 1/2 hours of just time just to get them here.

GRAHAM: The dealership's guy found it was just a wire that had come unplugged. He plugged it in. The initial bill for that repair was $800. Metz says had it been his truck, he could have taken it to a nearby auto parts store.

Or someone posted the crazy story about the trains in Poland. I'm too lazy to find their writeup on TheMotte, but hopefully this reddit post will point you in the right direction if you missed it.

That being said, you're conflating congress and private industry under the umbrella of busybodies:

If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible.

Tech companies have a clear profit motive to force you to buy their software, same way that John Deere has a clear profit motive to stop you from repairing their tractors when they can charge you 800$ to plug in a wire themselves. They're not afraid of you shitposting about your waifu LLMs on reddit, they want you to buy the latest and shittier version of Windows, Now With More Advertisements And Less Functionality. It's the Suits, not the HR and DEI consultants.

Or someone posted the crazy story about the trains in Poland

Here.

Tech companies have a clear profit motive to force you to buy their software, same way that John Deere has a clear profit motive to stop you from repairing their tractors when they can charge you 800$ to plug in a wire themselves. They're not afraid of you shitposting about your waifu LLMs on reddit, they want you to buy the latest and shittier version of Windows, Now With More Advertisements And Less Functionality. It's the Suits, not the HR and DEI consultants.

I think it's worse in the sense that there's a million different excuses. There are legitimate security issues. iOS has, as a philosophical position that it has held for over a decade and through the death of its leader, against porn on the iOS store.

((Of course, the same people allow web browsers to submit OS-level notifications or can't stop the simplest malware, so fuck em.))

Interest in freedom is fundamentally the interest of a minority of one.

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