I know times are hard, but you could build/find a PC for <$300 that doesn’t run that badly. Hell, even a ~$150-200 tablet would be way better than that.

This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.

This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible

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The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They’re just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You cannot have a small business* and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta’s ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.

The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you’ll just be fucking yourself in the long run.

Edit in advance: I should clarify that there will of course be exceptions where a small business can be successful just fine without advertising, but for those that rely on being discovered on a larger scale versus purely local, it is essential.

You’re being downvoted, but it’s true. Will it further enable lazy/dumb people to continue being lazy/dumb? Absolutely. But summarizing notes, generating boilerplate emails or script blocks, etc. was never deep, rigorous thinking to begin with. People literally said the same thing about handheld calculators, word processors, etc. Will some methods/techniques become esoteric as more and more mundane tasks are automated away? Almost certainly. Is that inherently a bad thing? Not in the majority of cases, in my opinion.

And before anyone chimes in with students abusing this tech and thus not becoming properly educated: All this means, is that various methods for gauging whether a student has achieved the baseline in any given subject will need to be implemented, e.g. proctored hand-written exams, homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.

We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays… destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.

It’s terrifying, honestly. As sociology, psychology, and neurology research becomes more and more understood, feels like it enables governments to become more and more effective at mass manipulation.

The worst part is, there’s barely anything that can be done to combat it. The general population can’t be assed to give up the worst offending platforms that enable it (e.g. Twitter, Meta, TikTok, etc), despite the plethora of warnings that have been issued over the last 10+ years. The one sliver of hope is the youngest generation not using those platforms because, “those are for old people,” but it’s just a matter of time for the next “cool” social platform becomes just as corrupted/infested.

100% this. Our local cable company, a subsidiary of Spectrum, refused to lay fiber to anywhere but our core metro centers and even then, only to businesses. It wasn’t until our metros collectively agreed to subsidize another, smaller ISP to come in and lay fiber to every neighborhood across the region (I live somewhere that has like 6 cities all closely clumped together). The monopoly cable company sued for years trying to block it. They allllmost succeeded, too, until a state appeals court finally overturned their injunction. Now we finally have competition and it’s glorious. I pay less than half what I did before and get twice the speed.

Fuck Broadcom. We’re still dealing with that bullshit, as there aren’t a lot of viable alternatives at the enterprise scale.