The iPhone was the first smartphone that hot insanely popular. It launched the app store model that’s now used on every mobile platform including Android. Those apps have gotten hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India and China who are doing e-commerce and opening small businesses from their phones. That’s food on the table for the working class. They can earn money while looking after their children because they’re not chained to a desktop computer for internet access. People in remote areas can know instantly about natural disasters and the news, educating them and making them active citizens in a democracy.

People across the world can chat with each other for nearly free using messaging and social media apps, and won’t have to send letters or pay extra fees for long-distance calls. The iPhone got more people onto what formerly only Blackberry-owning business executive had.

It’s such a first world thing to belittle the impact of smartphone (an industry which the iPhone shaped tremendously), when it has so much tangible impact, especially to working people.

How accepting is society and school for trans children in South Africa?

It’s just extra seasoning.

The article in fact says this:

Hamas has said all four were killed in Israeli airstrikes while Israel had previously said it had ”grave concern” for the lives of the Bibas family.

Nowhere in the headline does it say who or what killed them, so you were never misled. It is you yourself who added new meaning to the headline by asserting without basis that it suggests Hamas was responsible. And you ended up having a strong emotional reaction to that meaning you invented.

If you have read the article past the headline before engaging in ad hominem, you would’ve known that the writer makes clear who said what on the responsibility for the deaths.

See, this falls apart when there’s another instance that focuses on solarpunk. When some communities on that instance become more popular and active than the communities in your local instance, you’d want to be subscribed to the solar punk communities on that new instance too. Now, your local feed is only showing you solarpunk communities hosted on slrpnk.net but not solarpunk communities on other instances. This distinction is not meaningful because where a community is hosted can be totally detached from the content. The users you know by handle can also be very active, if not more active, on other instances talking about solarpunk than slrpnk.net.

Unique interests can be already be self-curated by subscribing to certain communities. All apps have the subscribed feed. There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.

Edit: typo

Why did the UK refuse?

Hmmm… This sounds like DEI?

It’s an example of one company coercing another to enshittify for revenue. Getty also gets the blame here.

• Google Image Search removing the ability to go directly to the raw image after Getty complained that web users are bypassing its website and therefore not generating traffic
• Facebook removing chronological feed
• Facebook showing you pages that you never followed on your home feed without the ability to turn this off
• Microsoft trying to introduce ads to Explorer and the start menu
• Microsoft making it difficult to create a local Windows account by making the process unintuitive, leading the user to believe that a Microsoft account is needed to use Windows
• Apple dropping support for iOS web apps because it doesn’t want to support browsers other than Safari
• Reddit and Twitter’s ban of third-party API use that killed nearly all third-party clients
• EA producing games that require users to be always online, despite the game being single-player, presumably as a DRM measure
• Ad companies making it easy for you to give consent to data sharing and selling but really difficult for you to opt-out

Edit: More examples

I don’t like the normalizing of using “woke” to describe progressives.

The article doesn’t say it’s happening. This is from another source:

Mao Xiangdong, vice-president of the Shanghai Institute of Technology and a member of the standing committee of the municipal people’s congress, proposed the idea during Shanghai’s ongoing legislative sessions, according to a post by China Development News, a newspaper under the National Development and Reform Commission.

It is not clear when the post was put online but it was removed on Friday morning

Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3295169/unplug-great-firewall-boost-chinas-competitiveness-shanghai-lawmaker-says

CNN++?

Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?

This is more circlejerk from Von der Leyen. Before Trump became president, she was talking about de-risking from China, reducimg economic reliance on other countries, including Russian energy, and now somehow, all of a sudden, she is boasting the EU’s ability to trade with Mexico and China?

Seriously, the EU can’t compete with the US because it cares about its people. Its superior economic, human, social, and civil rights come at the cost of strictly regulating businesses, which kills off innovation and profit making by big businsses. The American syatem rewards monopoly, the lack of labor rights, and increasing wealth inequality by not regulating enough. That breeds big tech, big pharma, big tobacco, big oil, and Wall Street, but that’s what’s driving the American economy. The EU is too ethical for that.

Oh, how thoughtful.

Came here for this. Did not disappoint.

Lol fuck Elon. Leave and divest.

What a clickbait title. It’s just a generative AI that turns meme images to short videos. Big deal.

Trump is garbage. Biden is running against Trump. Therefore, Biden is the anti-garbage. Basic reasoning, man.