AI was supposed to replace juniors and then climb up the ladder with each new release, eventually leaving any work only for the creme of the crop. Which would make the current generation of software engineers the last, but who cares - stocks go up.
Now apparently we've switched to pairing poor kids with an agreeable digital moron that reads and types real fast and expecting them to somehow get good at the job. Stocks still go up, so I guess we'll be doing this for a while.
Self-hosting for mobiles doesn't even reliably work for torrents. I frequently can't seed torrents from my phone.
If, theoretically, there would be a way to resolve domain name to a specific phone, I can see self-hosting site apps getting popular.
Nowdays there are a few solutions (phone hosts a site, shows QR-code with its current IP and a port, and you can actually open the site in browser), but it is mostly for "right there right now" solutions. Site will go down the moment this phone changes the tower.
The best example of mobile hosting I have found, comes from AmnesiaVPN team. You have to rent a server, but then you just feed server IP and password to an app, and from there the app controls the server.
I imagine a future where big VPS companies started to make apps that made buying domain name, renting a servere, hosting and backuping a basic website/forum easy.
It's an unlikely future, but a fun one
Invite only, laws, law enforcement, exile.
Federated sovereign clusters.
Digital nations, ultimately. Except you don't need weapons and a piece of land to establish a new one.
(We already have these, we just let corporations run them)
Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods of power grabs are also fairly universal.
The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.
US gets to decide how at least half the fund gets spent, so it's US businesses who get the investment and eventually reap the profits. Ukraine obviously doesn't have the cash to give back and it will never have any without reconstruction. This is one way US gets anything at all back at a pace it has any control over.
But you are correct that without security guarantees there will be no development, no reconstruction, no investments. The deal just does nothing.
The only part of you post that can be steelmanned into what can be considered an argument is "NATO expansion". And that argument falls apart if you actually think and explore it for like 15 minutes. Like, what is NATO and its purpose, how does "expansion" actually work in terms of process, what events took place on the continent between 90s and new NATO members joining, what else could have compelled parties to go through the process and how durable that would be?
And then the rest of your "question" is straight up factually false.
Well if it's so clear to you, why can't you give a straight up argument? People always say things like "explore it for 15 minutes" or "think about it" or whatever. But I think people are just repeating what other people say. And yeah if everyone's opinion is like this, and you explore it for 15 minutes, and you're the kind of person that repeats what everybody says, then I can understand. But then you can't explain why you actually have that opinion.
Eastern Europe rushed towards NATO as soon as the Russian-controlled Eastern Bloc dictatorships crumbled, to secure themselves from falling prey to Russia ever again. Existing NATO members were for a long time very lukewarm about the idea of accepting new members.
The US did not push or expand NATO onto anyone, but Eastern Europe did everything they could to pull NATO towards them to gain additional security against the very same Russia that had just reluctantly agreed to the dismantlement of their dictatorships and removal of their armies from Eastern Europe.
Are you not aware that the Russian-run communist dictatorships were not voluntary, but forced upon Eastern Europe? That's the key to understanding everything.
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
I feel those are how Pandora and Last.fm (used to?) work respectively. Nowadays everything seems to just put a bunch of tags on a track and suggest you things with the same tags to the tracks you liked. Doesn't even need to match the same combination of tags, just some number of them. The problem is, you probably care about the small, specific tags, and the system cares about wide "popular" tags. If you like a couple niche genre covers of songs that happen to be featured in TV openings/OSTs, you are not getting more songs in that genre - you are getting a bunch of covers and OSTs.
I wish I had a music recommendation service built on Pandora's immense dataset of music tags that could build me a playlist that I could link back to whichever music service I happen to be using at the time. I could have it do things like require at least 3 tags in common between adjacent tracks such that it could jump around between 2 dozen genres but the transaction between any 2 given tracks isn't too jarring. It'd also be nice if I could tell it to make a playlist where every song shares one particular tag in common.
Maybe I'll build that. Sure would be nice to have.
The primary advantage of Pandora's algorithm is the human-labelled Music Genome database. I haven't seen any other company do music discovery as well as Pandora, and don't expect that to change any time soon.
I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
Now apparently we've switched to pairing poor kids with an agreeable digital moron that reads and types real fast and expecting them to somehow get good at the job. Stocks still go up, so I guess we'll be doing this for a while.