They both agreed with each other but were arguing with a strawman. One said

their precious smartphones might be problematic.

The other said

maybe smartphones play a role

Which mean the same thing.

I’m not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

2FA is entirely offline. So it’s not really the same service and there’s nothing to breach.

Don’t buy a Windows key. If Windows was installed initially it should remember your hardware and activate. If it doesn’t, there’s numerous ways to pirate Windows.

Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.

Unlike Google Maps, OSM is just as useful if you don’t drive. I love it for walking and cycling, it’s got all the little paths, categorized correctly.

Debian. The basic install is very bare bones.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

Further evidence for this is ChromeOS. It’s just a Linux distro, but worse. It does little more than run Chrome. Yet it’s popular. Anyone that tolerates ChromeOS would have an even better time on most of the standard distros if they had someone to set it up for them.

Absolutely, there’s lots of possibilities. But I don’t think that negates the point that the most sensible approach to any unknown situation is to be cautious and lie low until you fully understand the situation.

Of course, flawed as we are, we’re not doing that, as we aren’t responding to other potential existential threats.

Have you heard of the Fermi paradox?

The best estimates of how many intelligent civilizations there should be suggest that the galaxy should be teeming with them. If any of them evolved mere millions of years before we did, given our pace of technological improvement they should have figured out interstellar travel by now, and they should be broadcasting communication across the galaxy like we’re doing. Yet we’ve detected nothing. Why?

A possible explanation is that an advanced civilization is exterminating all other civilizations, perhaps to avoid competition. It seems like a sensible approach to lie low until we can figure this out, just in case.

The same could be said for K-9. What more could you want from an email app.

If it’s faster to get an AI to write your commit messages than to write them yourself, your commit messages are too long. They should be one sentence.

That sounds like a great outcome for the original company

Yes, exactly, you get it! I don’t like paying for things, you don’t like paying for things. Paying for things sucks. We need post scarcity communism.

If people took existential threats seriously, we should immediately devote all our resources into escaping the simulation to prevent it from being turned off. But yeah… we’d ignore it and go back to TikTok

Elon must have spent so much on x.com yet it still redirects to the primary URL twitter.com

Paracetamol is not considered an anti-inflammatory.

Why would there be load on the clutch if the handbrake is on?

True, but low rez web jpegs is a huge part of the market for images. AI will replace stock photos and that’s incredibly disruptive on it’s own.