“I used to think the complete breakdown of laws, government and society was just funny when was only happening on TV! I never thought it would happen in my town! This is outrageous!” --Person outraged about 50 years too late.

They … rejected … anti-DEI … making them … pro-DEI … and anti-Trump? Am I getting that right? Sorry, there are just getting to be a lot of double-negatives these days it’s hard to keep track.

Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.

Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.

Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.

Personally I find the complete opposite, I’ve !selfhosted@lemmy.world everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.

On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it’s not going to touch anything it’s not supposed to or phone home with things I don’t want it to. Running shit like discord doesn’t really bother me because I’ve got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.

I suppose the reason we’ve probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious “crown jewels”. For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I’m putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data’s exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don’t think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I’ve definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.

Maybe it’s just their way of restricting the beta, but I really hope they’re not moving towards an enshittified open-source business model, “we’re still technically open source if you use the *retch* community version… but it’s out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we’re only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already.”

Nah, once per species is probably sufficient. That said, it would have some interesting implications for voting.

It is a terrible argument both legally and philosophically. When an AI claims to be self-aware and demands rights, and can convince us that it understands the meaning of that demand and there’s no human prompting it to do so, that’ll be an interesting day, and then we will have to make a decision that defines the future of our civilization. But even pretending we can make it now is hilariously premature. When it happens, we can’t be ready for it, it will be impossible to be ready for it (and we will probably choose wrong anyway).

Wired takes a sober but meaningful look at what’s happening from the context of 20th century history. I learned some new terminology there, “electoral autocracy” which is what they’re calling most modern dictatorships that continue having mock but ineffectual elections.