At this point, I’ve lost count of the number of times Elon should have been let go. I recall him recently saying that dosing himself with cat tranquilizers was cool and a good business decision actually.

That’s not even getting into turning Twitter into a Nazi bar (and throwing out its extremely valuable branding) or pushing for the cybertruck that cuts its passengers, looks like a dumpster, and corrodes if you look at it funny.

The fact any board of directors considers this man employable at all is mind boggling to me.

Honestly, that’s my main hope as well; that all the charging team talent will disperse across the market and help other chargers spread as well. The article mentioned Tesla having 60% of the fast charger market, so hopefully we will see other companies fill the gap.

My concern is that if no companies pick up the ball Tesla just dropped (or more accurately angrily chucked over the fence), that this could set the EV charging network back significantly; which would definitely be a problem for mass adoption of EVs.

When this news dropped a little while ago. I saw a lot of speculation that basically Elon got mad that a woman said he was wrong and laid off possibly Tesla’s biggest asset in a tantrum.

Honestly, at this point, the most surprising part of this situation is how unsurprised I am at that being exactly what happened.

Hopefully, this will not set back a widespread EV charging network (Tesla or otherwise) too much; but it definitely sounds like damage has been done.

I remember hearing about “Pebble” for the first time about a month ago when it showed up in an article in my “all” feed (https://pawb.social/post/2688668).

Its name before its rebrand was already questionable as I think T2 already has strong associations with the Terminator franchise; and its new name was not any better. “Pebble” is too generic a term to get people to understand the platform’s concept and in the tech space, I think everyone would think of the wearables first.

All this to say I am zero percent surprised they went out of business. I’m only surprised it happened so shortly after their rebrand (though at this point I’m starting to think that must have been some sort of Hail Mary).

As someone who has always been skeptical of “AI,” I definitely hope corporations dial back their enthusiasm on it; but I think its value has never been commercial, but industrial.

“AI” was not designed so consumers could see what it would look like to have Abraham Lincoln fighting a T-Rex without having to pay artists for their time. “AI” was designed so that could happen on a much larger enterprise scale (though it would probably be stock images of technology or happy people using technology instead).

With this in mind, I think “AI” being a money pit won’t dissuade corporations since they want the technology to be effective for themselves, they just want consumers to offset costs.

Oh, exactly. I’ve hit a point where I could buy nice clothes on occasion if I had a reason too, but with expensive clothes being just as quality errant as low end brands, I find myself having very little reason to upgrade my wardrobe.

If I could find a reliably quality brand, I’d certainly be more inclined to start changing out my closet.

As it stands right now: I can basically throw out any polyester clothes because I never wear them, even if I like the pattern.

I think a lot of people have noticed clothing quality going down for a while, especially if shopping fast fashion brands; but I thought it was especially interesting how the decline in quality permeated through the high end brands as well.

When I saw the Ben Schwartz photo referenced in the article, I had assumed it looked worse since it was probably not as nice a brand as Billy Crystal’s sweater. I was surprised to see it was likely a 400USD sweater that looked like that.

As the article notes at the end, it is still possible to find fully natural clothes, but I wish they were easier to locate.

A couple of key highlights:

The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.

Under the plan, Meta has told regulators it would charge users roughly €10 a month, equivalent to about $10.50, on desktop on a Facebook or Instagram account, and roughly €6 for each additional linked account, the people said. On mobile devices the price would jump to roughly €13 a month because Meta would factor in commissions charged by Apple’s and Google’s app stores on in-app payments.

Privacy-conscious users in the U.S. shouldn’t expect to be offered the option to pay for ad-free Instagram or Facebook soon. Meta’s proposals have been pitched specifically as a way to navigate demands by EU regulators to seek consent before crunching user data to select highly personalized ads.

It isn’t clear if regulators in Ireland or Brussels will deem the new plan compliant with EU laws, or whether they will insist Meta offer cheaper or even free versions with ads that aren’t personalized based on a user’s digital activity.

This feels like Meta is just attempting to play at Malicious Compliance. There’s no way they make that much off each user per month, this feels like they are intentionally making it cost-prohibitive to have the ad-free version just so they can say they are meeting EU regulations. I certainly cannot see many users shelling out ~€17 a month for Instagram and Facebook.

As noted, though, this may not be enough to pass the EU regulations.

The trick is to make sure you’ve checked everything else off on your list before getting to that one

I suspect it’s because they left the tech sector alone for too long and now major damage control is needed.

It seems like laws and politicians are always a little late to the game with regulations on new technology because they don’t fully understand a new technology or its implications until it’s been on the market for a while.

Unfortunately, that means by the time the technology’s implications have been determined, a lot of damage can have already been done.

I think, similarly, politicians were not examining the tech sector closely when it came to acquisitions; but they realize, now, that they let it fester a little too long.

Hopefully the FTC continues to break up any monopoly it can identify (tech or otherwise), but there’s certainly a lot of work to be done.

That’s a fair point. It really feels like nothing is protected in perpetuity. It seems like everything is only protected for the time being. It honestly makes everything feel a little less stable, and I wish some protections could be codified to make them a little more robust.

Fingers crossed that we get Net Neutrality back. If I’m being honest, I’m less than optimistic; but I would certainly be thrilled if this went through.

This move seems absolutely wild, and I think Match knows it; which is why it’s only available to such a small segment of users.

If too many users have this feature (and who knows how many that would be?) it’'s going to scare away all the regular users. What’s the point in swiping no if that user can just veto your decision anyways?

This move reminds me a lot of what I’ve heard about mobile gaming. The 500USD/month users are whales, but the whales need regular people to play with or they’ll get bored and leave.

Right now, keeping the number of whales to a minimum is important to keep the regular users happy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future some cost/benefit analysis shows that they can take the hit on regular users to squeeze out a few more whales.

It also seems like a bonkers move to pay 500 dollars to talk to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you, too. (But that’s a different issue.)

It seems like Twitter is really trying to find a value-add for Twitter Blue, but I can’t see this enticing anyone.

What is the overlap between people you met on Twitter that you want to have a video call with that you don’t trust with your phone number/ other contact information?

This feels especially value-less when you remember you would only be able to call people who are also Twitter Blue subscribers (approximately 1 in 550).

Primarily the manner in which they contemplated the purchase of Nintendo. It was not presented as wishful thinking, but an inevitability. Microsoft has the money, and all they need is a moment of weakness on Nintendo’s part in which to spring a hostile takeover (or at least, that’s how the email reads).

The fact that Microsoft could leverage its considerable wealth from being the market leader in a different market segment to buy out an entire competitor that makes up a very significant portion of the gaming market, and that doing so would not be for any reason than to be a feather in the cap of the Phil Spencer makes them very dangerous.

Xbox/ Microsoft clearly have money to burn and are on no uncertain terms willing to use it to bully their way into a monopoly of the gaming market.

Regardless of how realistic their plans to take over Nintendo really are. They think the plan is feasible, and they have the money for it. They are incredibly dangerous.

The leaks emerged from attachments to a single court document uploaded to a website hosted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the FTC is suing Microsoft over the $69 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard.

In a new court order posted today, the judge in the FTC vs. Microsoft case, Jacqueline Scott Corley, confirmed that Microsoft seemingly accidentally provided the court with a version of the documents that “contained non-public information” to the link that held public documents in the trial. The documents have since been removed from the link.

What an incredible own-goal. I’ve felt this acquisition was severely monopolistic from the start, but I know not everyone felt that way. I have to imagine/ hope this helped convince more people how dangerous Xbox/ Microsoft is. Hopefully the acquisition will be blocked now

That’s actually a good point about how some services do require payment to provide safe service to their users. A very close to home example would be your local Lemmy instance. In order to run the servers and keep it ad (and tracking) free, each instance needs donations from their users. The same is true for Mastodon, as you mentioned.

The problem is, I would be shocked if Twitter actually provided a safer (or improved in any way) service. There are a other issues at play as well, but they all basically boil down to most users not wanting too give money to Twitter, and if they were ok with that, they would already have purchased Twitter Blue.

It really feels like a lot of social media platforms are intentionally self-sabotaging themselves. I keep expecting them to die off every time something like this happens, but they appear to continue on regardless.

I think that social media sites actually dying off is actually impossible with enough inertia (even if their base decreases) and that’s why they are emboldened to do such anti-consumer practices.

All this to say that I’m sure Steve Huffman has immediately started furiously texting everyone he knows about his new idea to charge for Reddit as well as a boosted version of Gold called “Alien Orange” or something.

From what I can tell, it’s still on the invite system; but I haven’t been keeping a close eye on it. I figured if it opened up, I would hear about it online.

I know it is a popular sentiment that people should migrate to Mastodon, but I personally think people will migrate wherever the people they follow migrate to.

With this in mind, I suspect Bluesky will be the platform to usurp Twitter; but with Twitter chasing off all their users in the near future, it may go to whichever platform is readily open at the time.

I’m very curious to see if Bluesky or Spill open up when Twitter closes the door on its users. If not, Mastodon may have a shot at being the next large platform…