Amazon.com Inc. equipped some delivery vans in Europe with defibrillators to see if drivers crisscrossing residential areas could speed up aid to heart-attack victims.
So dystopian. Traumatising drivers even more with the added responsibility of responding to heart attacks; a future where Amazon Prime members get priority response from those drivers if they ever get a heart attack, further locking people in; or more public health functions being relegated to Amazon and its ilk...
Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673921
Laws included in trade deals protect US companies’ rent extraction schemes and stop us from fixing or improving our own devices — from phones and tractors to insulin pumps. Repealing them will save billions and hit Trump’s donor class.
Repealing anticircumvention laws would allow the world’s small tech companies to make — and export — tools that “jailbreak” tractors, printers, insulin pumps, cars, consoles, and phones. We could end the perverse system in which a euro, dollar, or peso spent on a locally made app goes on a round trip through Cupertino, California, and comes back 30 percent lighter.
Domestic firms could export jailbreaking tools for printers to support third-party ink cartridge sellers — breaking the grip of the printer-ink cartel, which has driven prices higher than $10,000 a gallon, making ink the most expensive fluid a civilian can buy without a permit.
...platforms [like YouTube] need to understand that it is in their own interest to make it easy for visitors to become true fans using established sites like Patreon and the new ones that are being launched. Making it hard to do that in a misguided attempt to maximise the time that people spend on sites like YouTube and TikTok will ultimately harm the creators they depend on. Whether they are called true fans, core fans or superfans, they are vital for the future of creativity, not least in a world beyond copyright.
@cstross@wandering.shop Do we need a different word from #enshittification to describe forcible insertion of unwanted #AI features into products or services? As I understand it, @pluralistic’s term describes a quite specific multi-step process, not simply "making things worse”.
I propose “encruftening” for "adding unrequested and undesirable features to an existing product”, which covers "AI", blockchain & whatever other horrors they have in store for us. Other suggestions?