Sure, but profit may not be the most important factor for Bytedance here. They say they’re more willing to shut down than negotiate divestment.

It’s a lot easier to scan for very specific code behavior than it is to scan for “anything useful for espionage”. And that still wouldn’t solve the question of what their server software is doing or where the collected data is ending up.

If the code were static and unchanging, sure. But it’s not possible to conduct such analysis every time an update is issued on a continuing basis, without fast becoming a hundreds of millions of dollars or more program.

So the better question isn’t whether it’s possible — it’s whether it’s feasible. And the answer is no, it’s not.

It also can’t track the users nearly as well.

It’s not perceived political messaging that’s at issue, but the potential for sensitive national security data collection by an adversary. That’s what made TikTok an explicit target of the law.

For the record, I don’t have a strong opinion either way on whether the law is good or bad (if you think it’s bad, vote against your congresspeople that supported it). I just don’t see TikTok’s legal argument against it as very strong, constitutionally speaking.

The only freedom restricted in the law is that of Bytedance to own a social media platform in the US. I find it difficult to define that freedom as “speech”. Citizens’ United dealt with a company’s freedom to fund political campaigns — which is at least easier to define as “speech”.

My read of the situation is that this was driven by Google rather than LF (as in I think Google approached LF about the idea first) in an effort to give then an argument that the court shouldn’'t take Chrome away from them (the only way Google would ever give up control over Chrome).

The law in question bans social media (of a sufficient size) being owned by an entity in a geopolitical rival nation.

Its relation to Citizens’ United is pretty thin, really only sharing the concept of a corporation’s First Amendment rights. But there’s a lot of reason to doubt Bytedance’s First Amendment argument holds legal water here, as the law is regulating business operation — not speech.

Funcom (Conan games and an upcoming Dune game) and Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) as well.

Tencent likely has a sizeable stake, but is unlikely to hold a majority stake of Discord.

I thought DTS:X was the (at least more) open version of Dolby Atmos.

I see what they did there with the “ICE9” name.

If it works, it sounds like it’d be something meant for a future Steam Deck to experiment with.

I’m actually surprised AGI isn’t better defined in the contract

There’ll be a significant lawsuit if OpenAI tries such a declaration without MS on board with it.

But i’m not sure how much OpenAI is even investing toward AGI. LLM is their bread and butter and I don’t know many experts that think LLM is the path to AGI.

Mojeek has its own index as well.

That’s true from our perspective, but not from someone like Cory’s.

The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesn’t just have friends and people he follows on these platforms — he has an audience. And closing his Twitter or Facebook or whatever would mean leaving large audiences that he has built up behind.

Cory stays on those platforms as his own version of the (justifiable, but regretful) compromise he writes about companies making. Better to stay on those shitty platforms and continue to reach people than abandon both the shitty platforms and his audiences there.

That’s why he doesn’t want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.

Sprint was not a splinter of ATT.

musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him, and while musk might have comprehended how shitty a deal it was (i mean he tried to back out of the contract and all); he doesn’t seem like the guy who would be smart enough to avoid cost sunk fallacy and might want to buy bluesky to keep digging that hole. and jack wouldn’t turn him down for a bid on bluesky for the same reason he didn’t turn him down before - money.

That’s actually not as easy with Bluesky. It’s decentralized enough that buying it doesn’t help control it that well. The previous owners or someone else could easily go set up another shop and compete using the same network and protocol.

Do I wish Mastodon were coming out on top? Sure. But Bluesky is still a significant improvement.

I wonder if this gives them the rights to all of Infowars’ library of footage. Maybe they could “keep” Jones as a host by cutting up old clips kinda how South Park did with Isaac Hayes for Chef’s last episode.

I switched to Thunderbird when they started to get insistent about switching to Outlook.

Disowning current tariffs doesn’t mean they’ll go away, either, though.

Tariffs are easy to put in place, but hard to roll back. You can put then in place on a whim, basically, but then the target country will retaliate with their own. As a result, removing them requires diplomatic negotiation to make sure the removal is bilateral. That’s not easy to do during times of icy relations like China and we currently have.