fellellor

It’s only a fuck up if there are adverse consequences.

My point is that it’s easy to make an argument about this aspect of SM than to talk about the money, trace it, and pinpoint blame. Nowadays, there is plenty of evidence available about the psychological effects/harm of social media. So it’s easy/harmless to fund this kind of exposition than anything that talks about the finance side.

Sorry, but this sounds mean.

Most systems won’t change overnight because of the guy on top. What makes you so sure Brazil would have done better with the opposing party candidate as president?

Maybe the problem lies in a supposedly chronically underfunded healthcare system, by a number of previous administrations? This would then reflect, in an electoral democracy, of the citizenry’s misplaced priorities.

I couldn’t help but thinking of the movie/documentary itself as an act of manipulation and an attempt to distract from the real issue.

The real problem is the way big venture capital is funding these companies. Allowing them to become so big, while suppressing all competition in order to concentrate profits. This is what has made these companies into the monsters they are now. In this era of big tech focus has shifted, IMO, from creating and implementing fair and simple common standards to , among other things, walled gardens and egregious bullshit wherein people don’t even own most things they’re paying for.

The act of manipulating others into situations that are favourable to yourself is not something new and has probably been practiced for centuries. The documentary, which I admittedly couldn’t force myself to finish, seemed to gloss over the big money aspect to focus (in the most cringe way) on the psychological manipulation aspect, which made its insights unoriginal and shallow.

I’m glad that I’ve stopped watching TV news.

There are. Tiktok was banned in India on an earlier occasion because some women’s groups, or a ruling party politician, I fail to remember which, had claimed the app was morally corrupting the youth or some such thing. This ban was overturned once the company filed a case in the courts. IIRC, one of the arguments the defence successfully used was the ban would result in large job losses within the company. We are obviously way past any such argument now.

All that is fine, but in this context you’re talking about placing gates over open source software. I hope the solution to this problem is much more well thought out that a simple comparison of free speech and hate speech.

It’s alarming that github is being used for this bullshit. 4chan is a pile of trash anyway, but GitHub is supposed to be different. This makes me fearful for the future and very sad that people are being harassed in professional platforms like this.

The same points hold for India as well. We’ve never had SIM locking and exit penalties and have had number portability for quite a long time. Cellular infrastructure though was handled by “non public facing” companies, owned by consortiums of telecom companies. With the entry of Reliance Jio, these companies joined hands to lock Jio out of their networks. For quite some time, cross network calls would be of very poor quality or almost impossible. Things have improved a lot since then.

However, it’s great the Israel has made it possible for infrastructure to be shared as a utility, allowing new players an easier entry. That will keep things competitive for a long time.

Not this shit again...!

PPP becomes meaningless when you try to buy international standard products or services which are almost always priced in USD, irrespective of purchasing parity.

This also holds true for products and services which are needed for professional skill development and their upkeep. The massive disparity between some countries’ PPP and nominal revenue/income is foolishly portrayed by some economists as a good thing, but at an individual level it’s a huge disadvantage.

Where it is relevant is groceries, fully local services and products.

The lack of competition is not enforced. The advent of 4G and the heavy investment by telcos in earlier generations of telephony has left them unable to compete financially with Jio. The nature of 4G technology means that the other telcos’ business models and borrowing structures are now simply unviable, unserviceable.

Jio 4G quality not being the best in the world is not inconceivable but it’s not part of some crackpot conspiracy involving some Chinese style oligopoly.

For a more competitive telecom market, the GoI has to do large scale debt restructuring and let go of a lot of revenue that they expect from the other competing players.

But this will also not be understood or forgiven by many of the leftists, who are a bunch of malicious hypocrites and keep weaving the story of “evil Reliance”.

This was fun. It failed though, when I made the penis veiny, large or hairy.

This is a publicity disaster. The government should have packaged it with a cute game, like how Nintendo did with street pass, to make it more ethical and acceptable.

I’d have joined Indian Stasi for some Mario.

"The Annotated Turing" by Charles Petzold is an in depth look into the seminal paper by Claude Shannon that started this whole "tech" thing.

I have a feeling this doesn’t work even in the developed countries. Sometimes people are just testing the boundaries of what they can really when a new system is brought in.

Can I finally develop apps on this one?

I am a free man, unbound by the chains of expectations.

> I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong?

I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their videos. So it’s not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it’s more profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great videos from different creators.

In a way I’m happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at least, I’ll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting failure than I already am.

Thanks for the link. A lot of helpful stuff on that page.

There is too much of that going around these days. Almost as if it’s in fashion. It doesn’t really bother me, except for the ones saying, "I’m Indian too, and I hate my kind".

Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India. It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.

And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never really bothered me though.

In general, it’s accurate to say that I’ve never come across great videos because YouTube recommended them to me.

It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard.

Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around.

Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter.

Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.

My biggest complaint with any of these mobile devices is that you can’t write any software for them, using the device itself. This is regressive and I also think it impedes the growth of technology. Maybe this is what companies like Apple want. Not a much larger pie but the largest portion of a much smaller pie.

Antifa?

Ok

Chidambaram and his entire family are a bunch of amoral kleptocrats. He laid the roots of the current Indian security state before Modi was elected. He is now being prosecuted for arm twisting and even blackmailing corporates into giving him money, shares etc. If there were any justice in this world, that man would die in a jail cell along with his son. Now your comment is implying that he is some persecuted liberal rights activist. This is either pretty clueless or a malicious attempt to sway opinions of people, who being outsiders, know nothing.

Someone smart, once said, "Watch what they do, and not what they say".

Unless google is actually spending serious money lobbying for laws that impose any restriction, this is just bland obligatory public speech, that the culture demands.

BS. It is targeted at illegal Bangladeshi migrants and doesn’t touch anyone else.

This entire sequence is incorrect. The sequence dates back to the Assam Accord of 1985 when the current BJP was nowhere close to power. Then there was the Supreme Court mandated NRC process which was decided in 2013. Without mention of these, your so called sequence of events is nothing but a bunch of lies.

Followed the Geneva Convention?

You guys literally invented the suicide bomb.

Everyone deserves to have a second chance, and war is hell and crazy things happen. So I hope you live a decent life from now on.

But don't for a second claim that LTTE weren't a bunch of brutal thugs who forced non combatants into war, brainwashed kids and girls and themselves gleefully committed all manner of war crimes to achieve their objectives. And for what, Prabhakaran himself turned out to be a run of the mill dictator who exploited the people around him to glorify himself.