I mean... those non-compete clauses are legally unenforceable in the UK. They're in contracts all the time, people ignore them all the time and get new jobs elsewhere, and on the rare occasions the previous employer actually tries to sue, the courts chuck it out because banning someone from working in their entire profession, globally, is almost always treated as an automatically unfair contract term that cannot be enforced. The cases where non-competes are upheld are for very specific instances (very high-level employees handling sensitive client data or very new innovations, patents, etc, or alternatively going to work for the direct competitor right across the street), and wouldn't apply to someone who had simply been a team lead for a couple of months. And since Blizzard wanted to treat him as a UK employee for salary purposes, he'd count as a UK employee for legal purposes too.
Back in the late 90s, I made a website, which was inspired by another website I had seen - which I had found by chance on whichever search engine I was using at the time (there were so many back then). I was not the only one. A good 30 or 40 of us ended up with a bunch of separate but connected websites that traded stories and art, resulting in a whole community revolving around a shared interest.
It all faded away in the mid/late 00s as people got jobs and families, and ISPs stopped offering webhosting and Geocities was shut down... But it was still something that stayed with me as a lot of fond memories (plus some not-so-fond ones, because let's face it, teenagers can be dramatic). In the midst of the pandemic, I got an email one day from someone from that community who was wondering if anyone was interested in starting it back up again, and so was reaching out to see if any of the old email addresses were still active. Well, mine was, and it turned out quite a few of the others were too - and other people were reachable under the same usernames on other platforms.
Long story short, we've got a group of almost 30 people who resurrected an old 90s and 00s community. Most participated in the original version, others were friends who joined the new version because it looked like fun. We've all got websites in various stages of construction (yep, after 3 years, some of these websites are still only barely functional!), mostly using our own webhosting or borrowing a subdomain on someone else's - and most using nothing more than HTML and CSS. Some things are different: back in the old days, I never hesitated to put my email address on the site to invite contributions from others in the community. I wouldn't do that now. We use Discord and Google Forms instead.
Where I'm going with this is that keeping a little bit of the internet alive has taken a deliberate effort. It was definitely all of us who vanished, and we had to make the effort to get back together, to rebuild websites, to share old files to help reconstruct information that's lost to the mists of time (a shared records database runs to 22,000 entries). I very much doubt any of it is discoverable without very specific search terms. But I think that's okay.
I honestly do not understand moving support pages and forums to Discord. All it achieves is guaranteeing a thousand different people with the same problem will all ask exactly the same question over and over again, because they're unable or unwilling to scroll back through hundreds or thousands of messages in a Discord channel. It might seem like less effort than setting up support pages with answers to all the common problems, but it's actually more effort in the long run because so much work is duplicated just by the nature of the format.
It's worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.
What matters isn't whether any of this has been done before, and more authentically, and well enough to be built upon—what matters is that this particular rich man-child hasn't done it yet, from scratch, for himself and for his own dream of being The Most Special Boy.
The whole piece was a good read, but this quote stands out to me, because it literally summarises every single thing Elon Musk is involved with.
I'm inclined to agree. I was definitely an internet addict when I was a teenager, but now as a 40 year old, I'm persistently depressed by how many people my age simply cannot use more than the absolute basics of their phone and computer. Like sure, they can send a text and write in a Word document, but become completely paralysed by anything more complicated than that because they're so terrified they'll break something if they click on the wrong button. Those of us that are used to technology have no fear of pressing buttons to find out what they do.
I feel like there ought to be a sensible middle ground somewhere, where kids can be taught how to use the tools they'll be relying on as adults, without exposing them to all the downsides of the internet and exploitative apps.
When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.
I'm not convinced of this. There are plenty of creators who are shitty people, but nevertheless ended up with fandoms that are incredibly inclusive. For example, Anne McCaffrey was incredibly homophobic, misogynistic, and classist, and the fandom simply discarded those elements of her books and uses its own interpretation of the worlds she created that are more inclusive. And an awful lot of Harry Potter fans very pointedly reject JK Rowling's transphobia, which is reflected in their interpretation of the Harry Potter universe.
It's not the foundations that determine how racist and misogynistic a fandom is. It's the type of fans. Star Wars has a lot of white male fans, and spaces inhabited by a large proportion of white male fans are more racist and misogynistic regardless of fandom. When you start looking at the fandom spaces with lots of women and LGBT people, you see a lot more inclusivity. You can barely move for LGBT-positive Star Wars fanfiction, a space that is traditionally overwhelmingly female and LGBT.
It does increasingly feel like the EU is the only institution that has any willingness to stand up to big tech.
So, basically... "an investigation into whether we lied to customers in order to sell them stuff would have an impact on our business". Well, yeah, that's true. Shockingly, customers don't like being lied to about the quality of the goods they're buying, and hearing that there's enough indication of lying to warrant a full probe into it would make future customers hesitant to buy. While wrongdoing hasn't been proven yet, I can't imagine this probe would be happening "just in case" Tesla lied - there must have been a high volume of complaints from customers who aren't happy. The precedent set by not investigating would be awful. It'd basically say businesses can claim whatever they like about their products, because being caught lying about them would always have the consequence of "material adverse impact on our business".
The whole premise that trans healthcare isn't "deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition" would seem to apply to an awful lot of modern healthcare. Florida should also decide that, say, hair transplants, penis pumps, and Viagra are not constitutional. Funny how modern healthcare is fine when it's something old, rich, white men want to have, but not when it's something trans people need.
I can't help but think of a comparison with print newspapers, which undoubtedly is where the idea of funding the internet through ads started. It made a certain sense: newspapers and magazines partially support themselves through adverts, so websites (particularly those with regularly updated content) could also rely on ad revenue.
But the big difference is that with a print newspaper, the customer pays to buy the paper, and the customer also has the choice to not look at the ads. I've got a print newspaper subscription. All the ads are clustered together on a few specific pages, not interspersed amongst the real content, which allows me to just skip right past them.
Ads on the internet, however, have become increasingly insidious over the years, often blocking access to the website's real content. And the more obnoxious they are and the harder they are for people to avoid, the more likely people are to utilise adblockers, because ultimately they want to see ads on the internet about as much as I want to read the adverts page in the newspaper (apart from the personal ads, those are a good giggle). Forcing people to look at content they don't want to look at is always going to end badly.
I'm quite happy for the ad-based internet to die. Websites with good content and good communities don't need revenue from adverts, because they will always have support from the communities they create. Most people aren't averse to donating even a few {currency of choice} to help keep something they love running, especially when they know it's not an extractive, exploitative business model.
Techbros once again surprised at how their technology is used.
The other breaking headlines for today:
Shock discovery that water is wet.
Toddler discovers that fire is hot after touching it.
Bear shits in woods.
Pope revealed to be Catholic.