The article is somewhat old, but the quality of the Medium code continues to be terrible. What made me think about this is how the front-end of Substack, which has stolen Medium's thunder, also looks terrible these days. It wasn't always like this. But these platforms always seem to follow this standardisation pattern.
>defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content
It feels if they were a slightly smarter and not had made an announcement that about such fact they would have gotten away with it hell, this probably happens all the time, but other administrations maybe were more discreet. Be that as it may, regardless of this decision, which can be appealed by the way, there is that saying: there is nothing more coward than money – and would argue power as well. A single discreet Trump meting with Tim Cook, and Trump saying "I would be really happy if you removed that app, and not tell anyone that I asked you for it", could have been enough.
It seems these sort decisions are fundamentally useless:
* It doesn't even force companies to reinstate such apps.
* It doesn't give any constitutional right for apps to be on the app stores.
* It doesn't force companies to allow people to install apps from whatever they want, which would be by far the best solution
Generally speaking, unless there was a sort of constitutional right of people submitting apps to app stores, I find it somewhat complicated, because the multibillion dollar corporation could always argue, "Oh, we didn't remove it because the government asked us to gain some favor with the current administration, but rather because it violated our user policy." Like, you can very, very, very easily hide behind a private corporation deciding to exercise its power to decide such an app violated their internal user policy.
Hell, even if there were a public register of Trump asking them to remove an app, you could always argue, "Well, anyone, regardless of them being president of the United States or not, is free to ask for an app to be removed; anyone could theoretically demand and protest anything, and Trump, as any citizen, has this right" (not saying I agree with that thesis, to be clear).
But I do believe the whole point highlights a bigger problem: a negative relation between big corporations and the government. I'm not sure how anyone would solve it. Maybe by sidelining the whole issue by making it easier for people to install apps from whatever the fuck they want, without the app stores gatekeeping what software one installs on their device.
But if anything, we are moving far away from that, even on Android
I think article sounds click bait or at the very least not representing the facts fairly. Also, debloating is not only about performance, but about you not seeing random crap, when open the star menu for instance, other similar anti-user features, like the new context menu that doesn't offer you the same functionality as the old.
What I would agree or say, is that if you debloat and update Windows, the update will most likely undo whatever you did, and well, that's part of the game. I usually solve this by disabling updates and deciding when I will update the system, so I'm prepared and have reserved time to re-apply the patches on that day.
It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.
It also probably won't work if the person actually wants your content and is checking if the thing they scraped actually makes sense or it just noise. Like, none of these are new things. Site owners send junk/fake data to webscrapers since web scraping was invented.
Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users
I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like.
The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.
Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
Regardless of what the company publicly says, I'm somewhat skeptical Chinese companies will block Chinese users from generating copyrighted characters in China out of love for US intellectual property..
As a windows power user myself, many of my workflows don't translate that easily. If you are an experienced Windows user, you probably have programs that you use on Windows and that aren't available for Linux. It's not that you couldn't theoretically translate that workflow into Linux, but boy, it would be a headache.
To give an example: I use AutoHotkey, it's a scripting language for Windows that allows you to do a bunch of things. You can customize the keyboard, mouse, you can create menus and toolboxes, you can target specific applications inside. It's a fantastic tool. But it isn't available for Linux for obvious reasons; Linux is much more fragmented. You need like 3 or 5 different programs to achieve the same result in some cases, depending on your given script.
In other words: debloating Windows and customizing it is considerably easier than installing Linux. Let alone some really good software you end up finding along the way: Everything, which is an amazing search program that allows you to create custom categories and the like. EmEditor, which is really good software to open and visualize really large text files, like it can open a 4GB txt with no problems.
About the last sentence:
>If customisability is important
People value both things: customisability but also they value their time (of not having to come up with a new workflow), they value the programs and workflow they already learned to use through the years, and so on and so forth.
Like, the technology behind this is no secret at this point. If not China, it will be Russia, or Belarus, or Iran, or whatever. Somewhere with electricity, servers, and a disregard for US intellectual proprietary laws. Also, even in China, I'm really skeptical that they would put filters for Chinese users (unless you are trying to make of Xi Jipinin that it is). The most likely outcome is that America/Europe get safeguards and Chinese users don't, which would lead to a funny situation of Westerners using Chinese VPNs to access a more unrestricted version of the model.
And that's not even to mention open source, which is the future of this tech. Open source, local, censorship-free models that you will be able to run on your home.