This is a textbook strawman argument. The foundational premise of this argument is that the only reason someone could have for opposing a tool like this is because of a desire to exclude others from accessing specific works that they believe hold a specific degree of cultural capital, and, as such, anyone who makes an argument against this technology must, therefore, automatically hold this position.

Which is not the case. One argument against this technology is that it at best mangles and at worst destroys the underlying meaning and significance of a work of literature. Your argument seems to consider the form of language of a work of literature as window dressing to it - something with far less meaning or significance than its summarizable content. But for many works of literature, it’s not. Some things are written to be difficult. Some things are written to be accessible purely to adults with a complex grasp of the language. Some thing are meant to challenge a reader. That’s why every year in school you’re assigned slightly harder books - because learning is a process of continually being challenged. And this is a tool that actively seeks to negate that. If you’re learning English and you want to read a famously difficult English novel, why reduce its complexity to the point where you’re not even reading the actual novel instead of just reading a version translated into your native language? Or get two copies, one in English and one in your native language, side by side and compare the language in each? A good translation by a skilled translator can preserve most, if not all, of the artistic value of the original, as opposed to this, where a huge chunk of the underlying artistic value of the work itself has been drained from it like blood from a slaughtered animal.

As such, the issue is not “wanting to keep the work out of the hands of ESL learners or children.” It’s about not wanting the underlying work diminished.

I would also argue that this is a tool ripe for exploitation in the worst ways possible, as “simplification” is a stone’s throw from censorship. Some group doesn’t like the inclusion of LGBT characters in a famous book? Use this AI tool to programmatically erase any mention of them. Some group doesn’t like that a book is critical of capitalism? Suddenly, large parts read like a parable straight from the mouth of Supply-Side Jesus. I know, let’s cut out all mention of race in Huckleberry Finn. Now it’s just a fun story about a kid and his…“friend”…traveling down the Mississippi! And if you were reading a novel in this way for the first time, you probably wouldn’t have any idea that this wasn’t what the author themselves had written and that you were reading a warped, ideologically twisted homunculus of the original.

“The highs were high and the lows were low. Specifically for the two cities and the people in them that this novel is about.”

As a note, the Israelites would in later generations go on to kill a shitload of people. It’s one of those things where it seems like the Bible only really considers it murder if God doesn’t sanction it. It’s honestly one of the many sticking points that makes Abrahamic religions a hard sell for modern individuals. That said, if you look at it from a historical perspective, it really comes across more like a religious version of the Code of Hammurabi. It’s less “don’t kill” as a philosophical or religious position and more about sanctions against killing in a practical legal sense. A functioning society has laws that formally govern behavior and the Israelites were essentially an ecclesiarchy, with Moses being both head of state and high priest. The same laws that governed social life were always going to intersect with laws that governed spiritual life.

Not the person you originally asked, but the main reason is probably that referring to it as gnu/Linux is 1) already deeply associated with the Richard Stallman meme, to the point that referring to it in that way automatically comes across as either a joke or just a person being intentionally contrarian, and 2) just really weird sounding. In the minds of most people, there is no real reason to refer to it as GNU/Linux, because the actual operating system that does the things the operating system is expected to do - as in provide an API for syscalls, memory management, etc - is just “Linux.” That it’s routinely built alongside a set of core utilities designed and maintained by GNU is largely pointless. It’d be like referring to a hamburger as Buns/Hamburger or Buns+Hamburger. It’s just…weird.

2015

A classic.

You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.

Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.

Yep, that would be a great system. /s

Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.

If he wants to name it after something he loves, he could name it ApartheidOS, EmeraldMineOS, ApartheidEmeraldMineOS, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Realistically, he would call it ElonOS, hire a bunch of shitty systems programmers to cobble together a bullshit operating system mostly comprised of code stolen from other open source projects, insist that it be written in python because “python is critical to AI,” talk about how the OS integrates with AI seamlessly while having no actual AI in it at all, sell it with a tiered subscription that locked basic functionality, like being able to use the file system, behind a paywall, and then quickly abandon the project and fire everyone involved, having made no real money from the venture but still referring to it as a “triumph of engineering.”

A lot of people forget how overwhelmingly, insanely popular Musk was with way too online nerds. He was reddit’s golden child for years. Part of this is that whenever Disney started releasing the Marvel movies, beginning with Iron Man, Musk was front and center as the core inspiration for Tony Stark (yes, I’m serious, the director and Robert Downey Jr. basically went on record as saying as much) and he fucking milked that shit. It’s also important to understand that for a time he was seen as a forward looking entrepreneur whose business was “going to help save the planet by making electric cars so popular that every car manufacturer would switch to electric vehicle production to keep up.” If Musk was a genius at one thing, it was manipulating public perception of himself and his enterprises. It took years of him being a thin-skinned weirdo and massive corporate tool to undo the amount of positive sentiment he’d built for himself and Tesla.

It’s also how we got snap packages and apartheid, and I’m not even sure which of those is worse. (yes, I’m joking)

I think cultures can definitely be rated by and advance in the category of how well the people living in it are treated

See, a conversation like this has to be based on a shared set of foundational premises, and those premises can be fairly complex and couched in their own assumptions. My argument is that you can’t describe a culture utilizing the same kind of language that you would, say, a tech tree, where you would need a formal system of writing before you get the printing press, or combustion rockets before the warp drive. That’s not to say that you can’t describe a society or compare its faults and merits, but you can’t really couch that in the language of “advancement.” Advancement is iteration or demonstrative improvement on previous forms, and while the idea of a cultural endpoint is, admittedly, a common feature of materialist philosophical traditions (Marx, for example, believed Capitalism was a stage of economic and social development preceding communism), to argue that it’s inevitable is to argue for something of which we have no real material evidence. Progressive or liberal societies can gradually slip into fascism just as easily as fascist societies can gradually become progressive and tolerant, and there’s nothing that guarantees a clear relationship between societal virtues and technological acumen. Star Trek itself shows a number of very old, very powerful and technologically advanced expansionist empires, like the Romulans or the Dominion, living alongside the more tolerant Federation.