For me personally, the two main factors that made me buy a home (and avoid renting anything when not required) are stability and control. Renting leaves those up to a third party, ownership means you're the master of your own domain.
That's important for both political and social reasons, and for peace of mind ones. For example, I know way too many people who rented a place, treated it well, paid exactly what they needed to and who were model tenants... that then got kicked out in short order because the landlord decided they'd make more money selling the property or by trying to find new (and better paying) inhabitants.
Owning means not worrying about that situation. About being told you've got a few months to get lost, and the resulting pressure to find a new place before homelessness sets in.
There's also the political side. I know rental agreements are stronger than many similar ones in other industries, and that it seems unlikely now, but renting feels like you're leaving your life and usage of a service up to the whims of a third party, and one that could easily decide to terminate said service if you get into a controversy or legal trouble. We've all seen cases where large companies kicked out customers that made them look bad, even when what they were doing was entirely legal.
Owning things means you don't lose them if someone else hates you and everything you stand for, and gives you stability when you get caught in drama of any kind.
Meanwhile, the control side can't be overstated here. Landlords can decide you can't alter the property in any way, including hanging up paintings or shelves or changing the lighting. They can decide that pets aren't allowed, or how many people can live at a property. They can refuse to upgrade or install services that might be necessary for many of us, like high-speed internet.
Owning means you're the one that chooses how you want to decorate the property, what changes can be made, and who/what can live there. I can choose to have everything remodelled or reinstalled or replaced depending on my tastes, to have pets or roommates, to upgrade or install whatever services I need and how I want everything room laid out and decorated.
For me, that's how I treat basically everything. Why give up stability and control for convenience in any situation? I don't lease vehicles, use streaming services or rent any physical object, and I avoid digital games and cloud services unless absolutely necessary.
100% this. Way too many developers and companies release projects under licenses that allow for others to use it, then complain that they're using as it allowed by the license.
If you don't want people to use your product to build their own services without paying things back, use the AGPL rather than the GPL. If you don't want people to compete with you altogether or redistribute your work, don't use an open source license.
It's honestly kinda amusing that Matt and Automattic are behaving this way, given how many third party WordPress plugin and theme developers make the exact same mistake.
Practically speaking, it's going to be both more impactful than we think and less impactful than we think at the same time.
On the one hand, there are a lot of fields that this form of AI can and will either replace or significantly reduce the number of jobs in. Entry level web development and software engineering is at serious risk, as is copywriting, design and art for corporate clients, research assistant roles and a lot of grunt work in various creative fields. If the output of your work is heavily represented in these models, or the quality of the output matters less than having something, ANYTHING to fill a gap on a page/in an app, then you're probably in trouble. If your work involves collating a bunch of existing resources, then you're probably in trouble.
At the same time, it's not going to be anywhere near as powerful as certain companies think. AI can help software engineers in generating boilerplate code or setup things that others have done millions of times before, but the quality of its output for new tasks is questionable at best, especially when the language or framework isn't heavily represented in the model. And any attempts to replace things like lawyers, doctors or other such professions with AI alone are probably doomed to fail, at least for the moment. If getting things wrong is a dealbreaker that will result in severe legal consequences, AI will never be able to entirely replace humans in that field.
Basically, AI is great for grunt work, and fields where the actual result doesn't need to be perfect (or even good). It's not a good option for anything with actual consequences for screwing up, or where the knowledge needed is specialist enough that the model won't contain it.
Hmm, I'm not sure the former holds true anymore. We're seeing societies getting far more polarised with some extreme rhetoric and and proposals coming from political parties, especially in places like the US and Western Europe.
Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
Yes, that's been the explicitly stated goal for the last decade or two. Like, no one is even attempting to hide it.
A lot of them are just moneymaking machines, they don't really want community engagement. This is demonstrated in their approaches to community organizing / engagement. I directly witnessed this as a boardmember of an organization ostensibly representing over 100,000 voters:
1) The "90%-ers" view of the suggestion that they identify and court their supporters from (for them) the "40%-er" constituencies because they would be able to sway other 40%-ers due to the "liking" "weapon of influence" (Cialdini): this was mostly treated like a suggestion that they lick dog vomit.
2) Community / consensus building: what issues should we focus on? This was done by dividing participants up by some feature and then having those subgroups come up with maybe half a dozen concerns each. (Something is supposed to happen here before the next step.) Then those concerns were listed on a board and the concern(s) which were reflected across the most subgroups were selected to focus on. The missing piece, which the organizers absolutely knew about: the caucus! What goes wrong without it is that concerns about pedestrian safety, speeding, children walking to school, people getting to bus stops, etc. all get listed differently by the subgroups and... awwww, too bad, you were the only group which cared about children walking to schools... but every group cares about saving the whales (no offense to the whales)! But no whales live here, so what are we to do?
> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
They definitely are. The goal for Trump this election was clearly to stoke the base with inflammatory rhetoric bolstered by influencers spouting that same rhetoric.
"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets."
Seeing Musk buy Twitter and start promoting right wing speech rather than left wing speech was quite the shock to these people. Suddenly the realisation dawned that corporate censorship could be used against those you agreed with, and in favour of your opponents.
(it was also amusingly the time in which the right went quiet on censorship on Twitter, for much the same reason).
Either way, it's become really apparent that most people don't have any consistent political beliefs or values, and only value freedom of speech so much as 'their' team gets to say what they want without consequences and their opponents get bullied and shut down at a moment's notice.
The right went quiet about censorship on X because there just isn't much of it. I remember at the time when people were asked to justify the claim X was censoring the left people could only cite three examples, two of which were mistakes and their profiles were rapidly restored (yet they were still being cited as examples of leftists who were kicked off the platform), and one of which was an Antifa account permabanned for ... inciting violence against the right.
In the Twitter years the right could produce endless lists of right wing people banned from the platform, and we now know there were tons of internal emails and discussions about that exact policy. The fact that nobody could produce similar lists for the left post-Musk indicates that he really has significantly improved the free speech situation there.
Fortunately, a video does need to have a vertical screen resolution to be counted as a short. So landscape/widescreen videos don't seem to be affected there.
But this can definitely trip people up, especially now the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes instead of 1. If you recorded a 3 minute video on a phone (or other random vertical screen device like a Game Boy/DS/3DS), YouTube will classify it as a short and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
Feels like you could write the same article about theme parks nowadays too. Okay, there are still a fair few physical attractions there, but the likes of Universal Studios were infamous for having 'rollercoaster' like rides which were just simulators on a screen rather than relying on physical scenery, animatronics, etc.
Feels like there's a lot of attempts to integrate smartphones into the parks too, like through activities that involve using a mobile app instead of a physical prop or console.
I worked at disney when they were developing what became "Avatar Flight of Passage" where you ride a dragon wearing 3d headset. The ride vehicle moved in sync so it was pretty immersive.
On the other side "Toy Story Midway Mania" totally sucks
Basically, there’s nothing wrong with screens if they’re used thoughtfully, but they can be overused especially if they’re being used in an environment of budget pressures.
Just a nitpick though, Avatar Flight of Passage is just 3D glasses. The ride system actually suspends everyone in a vertical moving theater in front of a spherical theater screen similar to IMAX Omni.
I don't think it can be emphasised enough how big of a deal the ease of deploying applications written in these languages is. The fact you can just upload the files with FTP, SSH, by pulling them from version control, etc makes learning so much easier than it'd be otherwise, and really speeds up deployment for software using these languages.
Like, this genuinely might be one of the big reasons that scripts like WordPress, MediaWiki and XenForo still use PHP. The people installing these things don't have to be technically minded in the slightest, and can get their sites running on a 5 quid a year shared hosting service without the need to understand the command line, shell scripting, containers, server management, etc.
Is it secure? Probably not. Is it best practice? No. But you can test your changes near instantaneously, and it takes like 30 seconds to get set up. Ease of use is huge.
This is probably a huge factor for sure. Both the UK theory and practical tests are somewhat tricky, at least compared to those in places like the US. Many people will fail them the first time around, and a fair few will fail them multiple times.
The official statistics have a rate of about 40-60% for these tests:
It's closer to a school exam in terms of difficulty, rather than the quick drive around a parking lot that it seems a lot of places have.
So people seem a lot more prepared than in many other places, since they actually have to be able to spot hazards and do driving maneuvers to get their license in the first place.
I'm still not a fan of how 'web3' has become a buzzword for crypto. The name seems like it should describe a much more interesting and general concept, not just "it's a service, except you can make money/sell NFTs/whatever".
But I'm not sure I'd write the decentralised web off yet. A lot of the issues it's faced are UX and design problems more than fundamental issues, and the way the world is going makes it seem like a comeback could be inevitable at some point.
After all, a good federated or decentralised system could be resistant to the age gating laws in places like the UK and Australia at the moment, and be a lot more tolerant of content that's critical of those in power than Twitter or Reddit would be (like with criticism of Israel and the goings on in Gaza, criticism of Trump and his administration, protests against authoritarian regimes worldwide, etc).
Large social media services are very willing to bend the knee to those with power (both political and corporate), while a more decentralised service may very well not be, especially if either the people using it are hard to identify or the infrastructure is spread across the world/in places with much more lax laws.
That's important for both political and social reasons, and for peace of mind ones. For example, I know way too many people who rented a place, treated it well, paid exactly what they needed to and who were model tenants... that then got kicked out in short order because the landlord decided they'd make more money selling the property or by trying to find new (and better paying) inhabitants.
Owning means not worrying about that situation. About being told you've got a few months to get lost, and the resulting pressure to find a new place before homelessness sets in.
There's also the political side. I know rental agreements are stronger than many similar ones in other industries, and that it seems unlikely now, but renting feels like you're leaving your life and usage of a service up to the whims of a third party, and one that could easily decide to terminate said service if you get into a controversy or legal trouble. We've all seen cases where large companies kicked out customers that made them look bad, even when what they were doing was entirely legal.
Owning things means you don't lose them if someone else hates you and everything you stand for, and gives you stability when you get caught in drama of any kind.
Meanwhile, the control side can't be overstated here. Landlords can decide you can't alter the property in any way, including hanging up paintings or shelves or changing the lighting. They can decide that pets aren't allowed, or how many people can live at a property. They can refuse to upgrade or install services that might be necessary for many of us, like high-speed internet.
Owning means you're the one that chooses how you want to decorate the property, what changes can be made, and who/what can live there. I can choose to have everything remodelled or reinstalled or replaced depending on my tastes, to have pets or roommates, to upgrade or install whatever services I need and how I want everything room laid out and decorated.
For me, that's how I treat basically everything. Why give up stability and control for convenience in any situation? I don't lease vehicles, use streaming services or rent any physical object, and I avoid digital games and cloud services unless absolutely necessary.