I guess I was wrong about Orbán. He seemed to want his boots licked, turns out he wants to be a bootlicker. Go figure.

This had me in the first half, but the last sentence makes it clear it’s a complete fabrication with no basis in fact. Business tycoons have always had a disdain for the poor.

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It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don’t even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.

I’m skeptical. Trillian still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. It can’t connect to a bunch of services because their operators decided to disable third-party access, and I remember that even back in the day it was constantly playing catch-up with network updates that broke compatibility. “One chat app to rule them all” is a neat idea, but I don’t see it working in practice.

Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.

Maybe I’m financially illiterate, but I don’t understand how that works. Like… if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn’t get me off the hook. If anything, I’ll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk’s debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?

That’s probably true, but there are always alternatives.

Right? And at this stage, it’s basically subsidized by venture capitalists looking to eventually turn a profit. I see nothing morally wrong with enjoying a product or service paid for by a greedy billionaire.

The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.

Maybe get independence from bing.

The only alternative to dependence on Bing is dependence on Google. Indexing the entirety of the internet is such an expensive project that there are only two companies on the planet that can afford it.

Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.