Recently had to cancel Xfinity. Had to wait for a text chat so I could schedule a cancellation appointment. They didn’t call at the requested time. I called instead to make an appointment for them to call me back.

30 minutes of waiting and questions about what it would take to retain me as a customer or who could take over my account. I told them up front that Xfinity isn’t available at my new address but they had to ask all the questions anyway.

All of this nonsense meant I was 6 days into the billing cycle, so they had already charged me for a full month and held onto the remainder until the next month.

Ugh.

I fully expect that, just like the rest of the account management parts of Xfinity’s site, the page that serves the “cancel” button will be horribly slow to load, frequently broken, and borderline unusable, while the upselling pages remain lightning fast and reliable.

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

I haven’t tried it yet, but GrayJay purports to be an aggregator along those lines: https://grayjay.app/

Crash reporting, probably.

They did issue a fix: “Buy a new CPU please!”

That’s why they don’t mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they’re still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won’t forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.

To libertarians, yes.

Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?

We do what we can, because we must.

Why is it the exposed shoulder that bothers me the most?

Yep. History is written by the victors. And Western textbooks are full of Greek names. But when it comes to Eastern contributions…? Eh, let’s just call it the “Chinese Remainder Theorem”. They don’t get names.

It paints a real strange picture.

“Plastic air pollution” is perhaps the most 21st-century phrase I’ve heard yet.

Go get em, Khan!

If I could predict what happens to the tech market when XYZ policy is enacted, I wouldn’t be posting on Lemmy during my tea breaks. Whatever policies end up sticking around, success is gonna require a lot of us having ideas, trying them out, and recombining them.

But I’ll claim this about my personal metric of “success”: If the future of open source looks like copying the extractive data-mining model of big tech and hoping we can shove the entire history of human thought into a blender faster than them, I think we’ve failed.

I don’t see why those are the only two options.

We could update GPL, CC, etc. licensing so that it specifies whether the author intends to allow their work to be used for LLM training. And you could still put a non-commercial or share-alike constraint on it.

Hooray, open source is saved while greedy grubby hands are thwarted.