It actually can, depending on where it is. Paperclip optimizers don't optimize for route length - they optimize for paperclips received. When Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom gets your packet, they try to send it to one of their customers, because their customers pay them to receive traffic, even when it's a longer route.
If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route.
In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
Clickbait warning... The video that appeared at the top of the page (followed by a bunch of blank space, presumably blocked ads) featuring a superyacht is NOT about the yacht in the title, although it does also have solar panels.
> (...) think pieces on how our lives have become consistently better thanks to these tech companies!
[citation needed]
The data presented only talks about the revenue of the companies, not their effect on the lives of their customers (which is admittedly difficult to measure).
The "I personally don't find short form videos too addicting" sentence is just anecdata and dismisses the negative impacts. In my opinion, being able to instantly access content that "makes [you] smile for free" is not obviously a good thing. Even if attention spans weren't affected, I think the brain is wired for homeostasis (balance), and easy sources of dopamine are dangerous since they affect the main motivation to do real, impactful tasks.
Ultimately, it's unclear whether modern (2010s-now) tech companies have _consistently_ improved lives overall. There have certainly been positive changes but also negative ones. Let me know what you think.
Have visited China often. My major gripe to living there would be digital freedom and surveillance - unlocking bootloader,etc are heavily restricted there. Plus the GFW, which does prevent the population being psyop'd by foreign social media, but is a small pain if you need to use outside services.
That doesn't really affect my daily life though, especially for someone born there. If it's the tradeoff for the other aspects (high public safety, developed infrastructure...) then I would consider accepting it.
Interestingly, on Xiaomi HyperOS they have added the ability to individually control each app's access to mobile data 1/2/WiFi. I didn't know this wasn't a general Android feature.
I guess if it was, people would be turning off the network permission of all the "apps that perform a trivial function, but with ads", like I always do.
I bought the hardware, for the price they chose to sell it at. Why should I be obligated to use any of their services, if I can avoid it?
I'm not sure if your comment is satire. So I'll respond as is.
"Not providing potential further income" is not "robbing"... what is being stolen from them? Something they never had in the first place? When I lose a bet I willingly entered, am I being "robbed" of the gains?
Furthermore, who is losing if I go to F-Droid to install an open source app people wrote with no expectation of income? If Google had a better app, I would have installed it from there. Too bad everything is riddled with ads detracting from the core purpose.
> I bought the hardware, for the price they chose to sell it at. Why should I be obligated to use any of their services, if I can avoid it?
Their answer would be something like, that the hardware vendor has nothing to do with them and is also a freeloader, taking advantage of their software ecosystem to sell hardware.
I don't think it matters if it's their software on your device, just like it's their chips inside the box. The key is that you choose whether or not to buy the product, or install their software.
I think it's sometimes tempting for people to spill logical fallacies trying to argue against Mac lovers, when actually they just have different priors (they just value different aspects of the computer).
Yes, Macs have incredible compute/watt, display quality, and design. However, I like to think of myself as logical, and I would not buy a Mac.
Given the choice between a M5 Mac and a latest-gen ThinkPad, I would not take the Mac. That is fine, and so are people who would do the opposite. We are just looking for different qualities in our computer.
It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that. (No Windows means that the battery life hit is relatively light. FWIW, there's no chance I would buy a computer locked down to Windows either.)
I also value non-commitment to a particular ecosystem so I prefer not to buy Apple, because I think a significant amount of the device's value is in how seamlessly it integrates with other Apple devices.
However, one day in the future when many of my beliefs have become "bought out", perhaps my priorities will change and I will go all in on the ecosystem. That's OK as well.
I mean you have a much more reasonable and nuanced opinion than the GP so I wouldn't rope you in with the aforementioned mental-gymnastic-ing fanboys. However, I feel the need to take issue here:
> It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that.
Genuine question: what do you mean locked down? By default the Mac won't run unsigned software, but that's not even today in MacOS 26 an unsolvable issue. I run all kinds of software not signed by Apple daily. There are nuances further still there, like sometimes if you want to install kernel level stuff or tweak certain settings, you have to disable SIP which is definitely a bit of a faff, but that's a Google-able thing that any tech literate person could accomplish inside of 30 minutes.
I would bow to the technical limitations, as you're rather locked to ARM64 compiled software, but I don't recall the last time I saw a piece of software getting current updates that doesn't include a binary for that.
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