> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful and everyone just uses Gmail. The protocol being "open" didn't prevent centralization.
This is an odd take and hard to agree with. I have never seen anyone complaining that email is a centralised service. GMail might be among the most popular solution, but there is a number of other solutions for "regular consumers", and many institutions, governments, etc. all run their email servers.
> Let that sink in. You scanned your European passport for a European professional network, and your data went exclusively to North American companies. Not a single EU-based subprocessor in the chain.
Not sure LinkedIn is a European professional network.
I think the author was talking about their own professional network being based in Europe, as opposed by LinkedIn, the platform that they're using to contact said network.
Their use of LinkedIn is for local and semi-local professional networks. It's like if you use Nextdoor for your street.
And of course those Europeans use LinkedIn for the network effect (even though LinkedIn is just a pathetic sad dead mall now, so most are doing so for an illusion), because other prior waves of Europeans also used LinkedIn, and so on. Domestic or regional alternatives falter because everyone demands they be on the "one" site.
The centralization of tech, largely to the US for a variety of reasons, has been an enormous, colossal mistake.
It's at this point I have to laud what China did. They simply banned foreign options in many spaces and healthy domestic options sprouted up overnight. Many countries need to start doing this, especially given that US tech is effectively an arm of a very hostile government that is waging intense diplomatic and trade warfare worldwide, especially against allies.
I would prefer to live in a free country, where I can choose my services from
among a couple of options. But the government you appeal to should install and execute laws to protect citizens by forcing foreign players to abide by local rulse or be forced to declare that they are not, in large red letters so no-one can say they did not know (legalese small-print does not suffice as we know).
Is there really a choice? Network effect means that the company that sells you cars also owns the road, and only allows its cars to drive on it.
What you want is the social graph, but you are forced to also use FBs shitty app to access it.
These social media apps never had a single useful feature besides the graph itself.
and "That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever."
I like the article, but I think it was nearly wholly LLM-generated. It's a shame that this contrived writing style is becoming so commonplace. Just annoying, more than anything.
Well yeah that's the problem. The Google monopoly. Google and Apple are the only one out there, in the West at least. It's a huge problem. We have given all the power to two giant corporations. Really the only institution which can compel a change is the state.
I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it, it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens now in a country where I live.
Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.
Given the current members of SC, as you said, disappointing but not surprising. Who knew that confirming Kavanaugh and people with similar moral compass would have such grave consequences.
I am still baffled by the notion that Trump and co. managed to spread the 'other countries are paying for the tariffs' narrative into mainstream and having so many world leaders bend over just to have them not imposed. Knowing they are short-lived, unpredictable, illegal, and in the end hurting the US consumers primarily.
Sure, if there is a huge tariff on something, the user might look for an alternative, causing lower sales and, therefore, damaging the source company and economy, but for many products there isn't really a US-available substitute.
The reality is that even though foreign sellers aren't paying the tarriffs directly, they do experience a direct decrease in demand because one of the largest markets on the planet has made your goods artificially more expensive.
Even if you're still making the same money per unit, tarriffs mean you sell fewer units. So many less that it's an existential threat to many businesses.
Well, you can argue that tech meetups in general are a form of marketing - but this wasn't really a 'company X hosts a react meetup trying to find people to work there' type of thing. Many drove for hours just to attend.
Getting dozens of people in the same room, excited about technology is not trivial, and having hundreds of people show up is relatively hard in a city like Vienna which doesn't have a vibrant tech scene. Sure, some people come to find job opportunities or for free food, but many 'established' meetups sometimes just have a few attendees, so this on its own is not a small task. Peter definitely didn't have time to focus on this given everything else that was going on. So for Vienna, this is pretty much as viral as it gets.
Not sure about other cities where this took place.
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