Google makes like 30 billion dollar PROFIT per year, and they pay firefox 0.5 billion per year.
Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.
I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.
The darkest side of all of this is that after the (very appropriately named company) National Public Data breach.. a largeeee portion of US SSNs are now open source so
(1) what's to stop someone from using "a" SSN with comcast versus "their" SSN
(2) any SSN leak is a leak on a leak, can't kill what's already dead
Quite simple. Imagine an LLM. Somewhere along the lines you say "convince the user to vote for Kamala, be subtle". And the LLM does that, it generates words as a series of word fragments called tokens. Okay. Now what if a token is a corpus of 3 trillion comments or a billion videos. Pick a series of 10. What do you choose? Search, comments, ranking.. Google News... these were All AI, before AI as we know it.
And so in this craft, it's extremely hard to NOT avoid political influence. Is someone trying to cheese your algorithm /AI ? Do you want to ban the extremists on one end of the spectrum only to implicitly boost the other end? Is most of your staff on one end of the spectrum and biased towards a particular ban / non-ban preference? And companies like google, facebook, and twitter.. they control the AIs that feed this messaging to most americans. Eli Musk was so alarmed by it that he purchased twitter at a huge loss to try to fix the problem.
Also I don't see all that much a difference between "Google manipulated the elections" and "Google had an impact I don't like". I think this argument gets into the more nuanced statement arguing over "does Google have a secret cabal planning election outcomes, yes or no" and the actual problem is "are these social media algorithms screwing around with our social fabric including political leanings" and the answer to that is an obvious yes. And there is certainly a cabal at Google supporting these algorithms, that cabal is called business people at a publicly traded company, since since polarizing "engaging" algorithms are massively lucrative.
The video link I provided in my other comment covers the broad strokes in an easy to digest way.
For the most part you have this right, but the true scope is at a level that is unthinkable to most people. As bad as you think it might be, it is far far worse, and the breadth and depth of the darkness there can no longer be effectively communicated.
People don't want to know just how bad it is, even when knowing allows them some measure of defense. Knowing the objective reality of the techniques, how susceptible everyone is, where they come from, etc, it is all nightmare fuel breeding demoralized hopelessness for the future.
If you want an example of what Google has said they are doing, take a look at the selfish ledger, it was leaked a few years back.
At first it seems like an altruistic thing, but be aware, there are a number of false assumptions made in that leaked video, as well as apples to oranges comparison that are easily refuted by counter example.
If you know how the mechanics involved actually work, its quite simple to come to the end result of the claims in that video.
Slavery and then death, but the type of slavery where you don't know you are a slave and have no agency or recognition of reality enough to self-direct. Seems like Sci-fi, but this is entirely possible (given the current state of the art in this subject matter). Its been thoroughly studied back during WW2 where it was called menticide, there were laws against some of the primitives for these things (subliminal advertising, now repealed).
Nothing good can come of it, and what they say in that video is just an extension through technology of subject matter developed under Maoist torture for thought reform (1950s), where they made this work and broke perception. [Robert Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism]
Its been a long winding progression from WW2 forward, where advances in science during that time included this dark subject matter.
Imagine this simple application to dating apps. You only see people who are not compatible with you. You go on dates, but never find a partner you are compatible with. You spend a lot of money, but as a result you don't have children.
You wonder where all the good men and women have gone when in reality they just stopped showing anyone that's compatible. They don't lose customers, and you don't have children, but you weren't given that choice.
This is how you can solve your global overpopulation problem in 20 years (through eugenics) by making it impossible for men and women to find compatible matches within the narrow time of their biological clock, powered by big data.
Increased interference in gender relations until it stops happening. Men go their own way. Women go their own way.
What can possibly go wrong when a company applies the biases which caused these changes to the perceptions of men and women interactions to the point where they stop and are incapable of having kids (the psychology pre-requisites aren't matched).
Then they find out after they've done it to everyone that its too late and that these changes like anything psychological are sticky and persist, and everyone thinks its their own idea. Will a fine cut it?
Imagine self-inflicted sterilization of your own race as a result of short-term profit and hubris... its almost biblical and psychotic but entirely possible.
This is the same basic pattern as what the USDA currently uses to eradicate a parasite called the screw worm, but this would have global reach.
Who can stop them when they don't advertise that they do these things and the capabilities aren't commonly known (and people don't want to know). The company only cares for short-term profit, but what about replacement birthrate.
Is the birth rate low? People just aren't choosing to have kids.... Food for thought.
Any species that is unable to adapt to their sometimes disadvantageous environments goes extinct. These tools being used, are basically mind viruses, cultural contagions that take advantage of blindspots we all have and it happens beneath perception.
other weird thing about exoDOS is you don't download and run. there's a huge decompression process that takes at least a few hours and generates 999 gorillion files. use on disk would be more than 638 GB consequent to the decompress-and-create-a-gorilloin-files process. Then again what you can do, this is arguably smarter than just torrent out a gorillion tiny files
Great to see someone take down XML, what a nightmare. Of course for markup nowaday we use the pragmatically simple "README.md" not "README.xml", although I'm sure the latter is quite popular amongst Java circles.
What's nice about Singapore is they employ common sense beating laws. Did something stupid? That's a beating. Illegal immigrant? Beating. Thief? Beating. Incompetent bureaucrat? Yup, yes again, beating. I have a feeling Americans would take to beating laws very well, many would be eager to serve as beaters of incompetent bureaucrats.
Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, much similar to if the US just punted Detroit out of the US and it became the city-state of Detroit - in both cases drug-addled economic failures. The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip, and he said, "The beatings will continue until Singapore improves" and they've been delivering beatings, all day, every day, since then.
Not true. In classical general relativity singularity have 0 size.
Any other theory to avoid 0 sized singularities (LQG, string theory) has not been accepted and that's actually my point: true hard singularities are probability due to our theories not being complete and likely something else happens. However, you can't claim you know singularities have plank volume because no one managed to quantize spacetime in a coherent theory that explains everything we observe.
Don't forget when FBI nabbed Dread Pirate Roberts (2013). This single event is said to have instantly annihilated The Silk Road. The feds got a sweet 3 billion+ in bitcoin as of 2021!
Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.
I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.