Sometimes the monopolist does something better for everyone. I’m this case, it’s selfish, of course, because they want people to click the back button to get back into their advertising platform “ecosystem”, but it’s nice to catch a W from "Don’t be evil [when you’re building marketshare]” Google.
It’s done by Temu and AliExpress, too. Not sure how much power the Canadian government has on direct-from-China online storefronts, but it’s already happening to Canadians, if not by Canadian businesses.
I think that the core idea, that Ubuntu is taking risks, shipping an LTS with major changes, is concerning. New core utils that don’t have feature parity, pipewire as a snap, a single-digit-days-old kernel (which has major changes to scheduling that cause known major regressions with some major software until they get updated), a new sudo implementation that may not be as secure (?), etc. Plus, jumping the hardware req to 6 GB and removing a GUI app for non-snap apps…
Just more evidence that Ubuntu isn’t a good recommendation anymore.
I’d go a step further, and say it’s a bad idea to recommend any Ubuntu-based distros. Yes, that means Mint.
Is Prime Gaming going to be affected?
My read is that this is shutting down all free access to Luna game streaming. I don’t read anything that implies this will affect game codes.
Totally agreed, but authors are straight fucked if they try. Popular authors in my genre of choice have tried, and they all say it was a financial disaster for them, and that they can’t afford to be a full time author without KU income. And readers will follow where authors are, since those are the books they want to read.
Amazon’s monopoly on self publishing is probably illegal, but until regulators notice, network effects and anticompetitive practices from Amazon reinforce their monopoly.
Like, my options are, literally:
Authors have also said that they’re so dependent on The Algorithm, that pirating their books hits them double, from the lost revenue and from the reduced visibility. So that’s a double dick move.
I hate it, but here we are.
At least I read so much that Amazon pays authors like 10× what I pay to subscribe, so that’s pretty cool. (~300-400 books/year adds up to a lot of KENP pages!) And I’m not paying $3-5K/year for books to buy them all, sorry. I can’t afford that!
And another reason to support Canada joining the EU.
Economies of scale can make a huge difference in costs, and requiring all cloud services to be entirely domestic would greatly limit options and increase costs. If we can join the EU, then we’ll be part of a big enough economic block to get full benefits from economies of scale and still retain data sovereignty within the context of membership.
Fuck US corporations, their lobbyists, the regulatory capture that leads to their anti-consumer laws, and trade agreements exporting their wealth-concentration laws globally. Disney, in particular, can get fucked with their life-of-creator-plus-90-years copyright terms. But I digress.
The challenge is the monopolistic death grip Amazon has on self publishing.
For many genres, authors get almost all of their income from Kindle Unlimited. KU requires exclusivity. The result is entire genres of books that are almost entirely Kindle exclusive.
So, the only real options for readers of these genes is either Kindle Unlimited (or buying on Kindle, I suppose) or piracy.
Some authors release serialized content on Patreon or a similar paid or free platform, but those platforms often only get first drafts, are difficult to navigate to get full books, and only cover a subset of authors anyway. And books get “stubbed”, which means everything past the 10% mark gets deleted to comply with Amazon exclusivity, so this is only even an option if you read the whole thing as it is being written. (FWIW, it’s also crazy expensive if you want to support authors; it can easily cost hundreds of dollars monthly with all the subscriptions.)
So, if you want authors to get paid for their work, then, realistically, you’re stuck using Kindle.
It sucks, but that’s the reality until regulators prevent Amazon from forcing exclusivity for inclusion in the KU program.
It’s still easy/cheap to buy new or used legacy USB data cables.
One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.
I think it’s likely more about DRM.
Old Kindles are incompatible with Amazon’s .kfx format ebooks and newer, stronger DRM. With an old Kindle, it was trivially easy to rip Kindle books to retail-quality epubs.
With these devices ceasing to work with Kindle books starting next month, that loophole closes.
Also, old Kindles will continue to work with already-downloaded Kindle books and DRM-free books, but new files can only be added by USB cable, not using Amazon’s services.
The newer DRM also has working exploits, but it’s not nearly as easy, and they’ve indirectly hinted that one of the remaining methods may be closing soon. But, fundamentally, static media DRM (books, music, movies) is inherently beatable; the full content gets displayed to the user, so it can be intercepted and ripped. Worst case, someone will make a screen-capture app that uses perfect OCR to recreate the book. That’s already a solved problem, basically, it’s just horribly inefficient.
So Amazon will continue to play whack-a-mole, turning millions of devices into e-waste, without even causing a blip for book pirates and those needing format shifting for accessibility.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands AI and copyright.
Straight dumps of AI output can’t be copyrighted, but as soon as it’s modified by a human in nontrivial ways, it’s copyrightable again. If open source projects are using straight dumps of AI output without modifications, then the project will be irrelevant before copyright matters, lol.
Not if you’re running an Arch-based distro, like CachyOS. Between CachyOS’s Hello app and Octopi, it just works.
Granted, I do use the terminal, but that’s because I’m a tinkerer and I want to do unusual things, not just web + games + office suite. For most users, they never need to see the terminal, aside from hitting “q” and “y” when they install or update things a few times.
I’m not a kernel developer, but it does seem weird to remove the legacy function in the same patch as the replacement function is shipped.
That said, isn’t it fairly easy to install a modified kernel? Or is that hard on Ubuntu for some reason? I suppose it’s to do with official support cycles and patches, so that’s only really a viable fix if the distro manages to kernel options, to ensure timelines with security patches and commercial support.
100% agree. Israel has been committing war crimes, and the West (broadly) is thereby complicit. By continuing to support Israel’s genocide for 2½ years, Western democracies have eroded international law to the point of uselessness.
The Geneva conventions are dead in the water, and good luck to anyone who is ever in a war zone in the 21st century. The destruction of civilian infrastructure and disregard for civilian life is now, de facto, acceptable.
I appreciate that the author suggests that Google take on maintenance of the Drive integration. I’d rather volunteers work on supporting open platforms and protocols, which seems to be what they’re doing.
Which reminds me: I need to get a Syncthing server set up.
The article mentions that there are performance penalties to running hypervisor cracks in a VM with GPU passthrough, but if you’re dual-booting barebones Arch (just enough to get a VM running), is there really a significant performance loss?
And once you have that set up on a separate boot, then it should be safe and fairly efficient to set up a bunch of these hypervisor cracks, I’d expect.
I don’t care enough or have time to tinker with this myself, but that sounds like a more fun project than actually playing one of these AAA games, lol.
Sounds like Windows Search Indexer. I just changed the settings in my Win 11 VM to only index the Start menu, but I’m also an old school folder user, so I never use the Windows menu to find files anyway.
Before the change, my VM was arbitrarily locking up, unable to do just about anything. It’s been a lot smoother since the change.
The article highlights how the UK is moving to ban infinite scrolling access autoplay videos. So, thankfully, those changes are coming in at least some jurisdictions.
That said, the article also helpfully points out that the Republican administration has stuffed their science & tech advisory panel with Meta and Google execs, so I’m doubtful that the US will regulate anything reasonable.
I’d like a ban in effect for children below 16, but enforcement should be a misdemeanor on the parent. It should be a social worker coming to discuss with the parents the known harms of the platforms and let them get away with a warning, but that there will be fines if this damaging behaviour continues with an automatic 1-year (or whatever) follow-up. Basically, treat it the way it’s treated if parents are giving cigarettes to their children.
It’s a win, regardless, but the response is important.
The response should be:
Like, there’s nothing wrong with social media as a concept, it’s that profit seeking + network effects + regulatory capture have incentivized harmful social media.
I’m with you. I started boycotting tourism (and shopping) travel to the US when they re-elected Bush.
I drove through the US a few times to save hours of driving when Obama was president, but otherwise I haven’t been south of the border in over 2 decades.
The Republican Apparatus is the problem, and Trump is one of many symptoms. As much as it will be painful in the short term, I have high hopes for the end of American hegemony. It’s been a long time coming.
Great article, and the author brings receipts.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not an AI doomer. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that a word prediction machine (LLM) is capable of intelligence. We’re no closer to AGI with LLMs than we ever were.
I also think AI has its uses; it’s a great tool, for narrow, constrained use cases. Editing text and vibe coding simple scripts, for example—but even in incredibly simple cases, it gets shit wildly wrong very frequently.
But the benefits are massively outweighed by the harms. Coaching suicide. Filling the web with AI slop. Reputational harm from not catching hallucinations. Semantic ablation.
We’re not getting rid of AI; the models are here to stay, and anyone with $2K of hardware can run a decent model at home. But that’s also going to be the end of the AI bubble. There are no natural moats to protect a monopoly. OpenAI will never be profitable since the value they create is less than their operational costs. It’s a money pit.
So, in a sense, I guess I am an AI doomer —the inevitable collapse of the AI bubble is going to cause a major recession, at least as big as the '08 financial crash, and these tech bros are doing massive harm both now and when the economic fallout lands. No surprise people want them dead.
But I’m not worried about LLMs turning into SkyNet.