The Libertarians - I used to be one - are generally OK with anything a company does which doesn't involve force or fraud. So I wouldn't expect them to complain about what Google does. And lots of them have zero interest in smoking dope and boffing sixteen-year-olds. They just want to make sure that the government doesn't try to stop such people from doing those things if they want, provided that everyone consents.

As for "Google monitoring every line of code you write and tying it back to your personal identity", millions of programmers work under those conditions every day. In Google's case, even the app authors who don't charge money are still using a system which Google funds, so Google gets to set the rules.

I find it distasteful too, but it's a symptom, not the disease. Neo-Liberalism and its bastard children by corporate welfare are the disease.

In other circumstances such naivete might be cut and touching. But here and now, it's just dangerous.

Me too - when you're on fire, even being doused with sewer water is a welcome change. But the problem is that if Newsom becomes president, that will simply land the country back where it was before Trump. Then America will blow up again - maybe in some other way, or maybe in a repeat of the Trump phenomenon.

If America is going to regain stability and the respect and trust of the rest of the world, fundamental changes will need to be made. Newsom ain't the guy to do that.

Geez - modded down as flamebait for saying something that's patently obvious to even me, a Canadian. Moderation around here is starting to get really sucky.

As far as I can see, if Newsom manages to become President, he'll simply put the country back on the well-trodden neo-Liberal path that landed it in its current hellscape. Lather, rinse, repeat until somebody comes along who realizes that brogligarchs and other parasites shouldn't be running countries.

I frequently see value in what you have to say, but the post I'm responding to seems both off-topic and a touch unhinged. Maybe you should allow a little more time between clicking Preview and Submit?

Damn - I'm fresh out of mod points. You may have been modded down because somebody thinks you're paranoid, but I think you have an interesting and valid point. Google is not immune to serious pressure from an administration whose Fascism is becoming bolder and more undeniable.

Thanks for the idea. I don't even need the VM, as I still have an older laptop with an earlier LTS and a good version of T-Bird. But I don't have any clue about how to find all the necessary "bits" I need.

It's an interesting idea though; I may try backing up all the Thunderbird stuff on this computer, copying the executable from the older one, and running it. The error messages might give me enough info to piece it all together.

I really wish Mozilla made it easier to keep old versions running, especially in light of all the pushback they get from users on their change-for-the-sake-of-change UI insanity.

Your argument seems to be based on an implicit assumption that humans don't reason via "probability based text completion". Forgetting for the moment the impossibility of proving a negative, I would love to hear your arguments that we don't reason that way.

Clearly we're capable of reasoning without language, because babies who can't yet talk demonstrate something that looks like reason. But when I examine my own thinking and reasoning, I see probability as a factor in the words I think with.

If we use words to reason; and we have multiple words and combinations thereof available; then at some point probability is a factor. I wouldn't say that "probability based text completion" is our only mode of reasoning, but I'm pretty sure that it's one of our modes.

Short of identity theft or SIM cloning, shouldn't it be fairly simple for the platform to contact the true owner of the artist account when new tracks are uploaded? When music is posted under an artist's name, couldn't Spotify's servers automatically reach out to the artist with details of the upload, and then await confirmation from the artist before allowing the upload to be streamed?

I don't use any music streaming services so I may be missing something that's obvious to more knowledgeable folks. But I do know that the technology to do this exists, and I find it hard to believe that setting up such a confirmation process would be prohibitively expensive.

The last good version I had was 115. I got a new laptop, installed a newer LTS of Linux Mint, and got stuck with Mozilla's latest shit-show, version 128. There are one or two changes which I might grudgingly call improvements, and whole lot of pontless shits 'n' giggles stuff that heavily favoured the "shit" end of the scale.

I searched far and wide for version 115 in an Appimage or a Flatpak, or even a Snap (ugh), but had no luck. I found a deb but it wouldn't install. I considered building from source, but I've never done that before and it would be a major PITA to maintain anyway. So in the end I gave in. Between addons and a bunch of about:config tweaks I managed to make it (just) usable.

I recommend the "Get All Mail Button" addon. The button ends up in a stupid place, because Mozilla devs would never use plentiful horizontal screen space when they can instead waste precious vertical space in the service of non-intuitive layout and flow.

Thanks - that's good to know. I sure hope the LLM can be disabled - that kind of activity will bring under-powered computers to their knees.

And if you are worried about addons, don't install addons. They can now, without any LLM as justification, send home all data they asked to access when you installed them.

Just picture me with my fingers in my ears, singing "la-la-la..." ;-) Seriously though, I do pay attention to the caveats when I install addons.

YouTube seems social in the sense that it fosters an illusion of community and connection. The comments make the illusion even more compelling.

If old-fashioned TV had had a built-in way of connecting viewers with each other - and of allowing some of those viewers to create TV shows of their own - then it too would have been social media.

That "We" must be the royal one. If the societal "we" was truly tired of being told what they want, social media would be either reformed or dead.

And then, pay for a Premium account to get fewer ads that can be skipped. Then, the "fewer" and or the "skippable" will go away. The only thing remaining will be a paid Premium account with lots of non-skippable ads. Free accounts will no longer exist.