georgie01

joogabah said:

No hypocrisy there at all.  America never bombs other countries or invades and topples other governments, even on false pretexts.  And America had nothing to do with Ukraine's 2014 coup either.  And it didn't state explicitly its plan to balkanize Russia as a prelude to war with China which it can't compete against.

Yes, long gone are the days when we could point the finger at other ‘evil’ countries as if the US and the West are much different. There was a time when the US was impressive, but we’re just standing on those past successes thinking we can redefine obvious truths and be successful when in reality we’re on a downward spiral. We need to fix ourselves before complaining about Russia.

I’d support these apps 100% if Apple didn’t decide to do a subscription. A company of Apple’s size to use subscription payments for an app is absurd. Unlike mobile phone service, internet service, iCloud, etc., software has no required development cost after release. To say users should be forced to fund ‘ongoing development and updates’ is a manipulative stretch that only makes sense for very small companies who don’t want to go out of business after two years because they can’t sell their software past the first major release or two. Even then, it’s still customer manipulation. 

Apple’s reach is so large and their pockets are so full that a subscription is ridiculous.

That is amazing news that I’d never support. An app subscription from Apple?!

I’ve always felt that subscription-only apps are cheap manipulation, but I did sort of understand it from desperate developers who are wanting to stay in business for longer.

When a company like Apple does this that’s basically the beginning of the end of personal ownership in computing. And this won’t stop with software.

It’s also programmed to respond in a certain way—the results are not always unbiased (and sometimes reach a shamefully biased level). For instance, given some of the widely published idiocy, it’s not far fetched to think it would try and choose a culturally ‘diverse’ cake recipe option instead of just the best option (whatever best means), because the programmers behind the scenes want to impose their perception of diversity over cake quality.

While I think this stuff is cool, along with the cool will come bad and when the primary function of AI will be to think or do for us, I’m not sure the end result will ever be good. We assume we will continue to be able to think and assess, but most people can barely do that now. How much less when they become even more used to being told? 

beowulfschmidt said:

"Corporations are people" is probably one of the most harmful decisions SCOTUS has ever made.

Except that corporations are 100% run by people, and decisions are made by people. They aren’t run by people who are capable of temporarily suspending their personhood to assume a personless role as company worker.