Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

#startup #business #tech #technology @technology

59 years ago today, the first computer program written in #BASIC was run.

The easy-to-learn and -use #programming language revolutionized #computing. A decade later, #BillGates would co-found #Microsoft to develop and sell the BASIC interpreter for the #Altair 8800, the first commercially successful desktop microcomputer.

More from when #Dartmouth celebrated BASIC’s fiftieth anniversary: https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty

#ProgrammingLanguages #ComputingHistory #retrocomputing #coding

I have performed an unscientific survey of people who are working in coding and cybersecurity to see what language they use most often.

The result: profanity.

Good article from the @eff -

"The fediverse is an evolving project, and it won’t solve all of the challenges that we’ve seen with big social media platforms. Like other distributed systems, it does have some drawbacks and complications. But a federated social media ecosystem represents some possible escape hatches from some of the more serious problems we have been experiencing in the centralized, platform social media world."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/fediverse-could-be-awesome-if-we-dont-screw-it