I may not be well informed, so feel free to cite sources that prove me wrong, but I’m not 100% convinced about the co-ops being equally competitive or that they’ll be just as profit-seeking.

Yes, individuals outside of sociopathic executives are also driven by profit, but they’re also more influenced by other factors. For example, most non-executives might opt for a more ethical solution over a more profitable solution. This may also carry over to efficiency: maybe a co-op could opt for a more efficient, if less profitable, solution in order to keep prices low. There are several incentives for this: long-term growth, social good of making things more affordable, personal pride in being the lowest price, general lack of desire to optimize for a single metric (profit). Now, these are all guesses. I don’t know of any good studies about co-op behaviors in aggregate versus traditional corporations, but this sounds feasible to me.

All that said, it sounds like you’re better read on this than I am, so I’d love to learn if you can throw some sources at me

I didn’t know there was a term for this! Thank you! I try to convey this concept all the time, especially for intelligence and skills, so having a word for it is immensely helpful.

This is short-sighted. It also reeks of “Fuck you, I got mine!” I know that’s not your intention. I just think you haven’t thought super hard about it. I was the same with privacy concerns.

So let me throw some edge cases at you.

You remember the network time protocol vulnerability that was used to power botnets for a little bit? Well, until everyone upgraded their shit, service providers had to just block IP ranges of compromised machines until enough machines in that block stopped DDoS’ing them.

So what happens when some script kiddy pays for time on the botnet, which includes your box, to smash Wizards while you’re trying to look things up? Or what if someone uses your box as a jump box to go attack some giant corporation, and shit gets traced back to you? Or what if someone decides you’re the unlucky one where their whole goal is to dominate your entire home network, and they get your phone when it’s on your home wifi?

Not all AI is equal. Europe does embrace certain types of AI depending on their production and usage. I work at a company pushing our AI throughout Europe, and the reception is generally very positive.

These LLMs are just shit built in shitty ways. Their problem definition is shit, and the marketing of what they can do effectively is bullshit. There are some LLM efforts that are less shitty, but they’re not very popular yet

I’m not convinced of this. One could argue that profit is waste. It’s an overhead of wealth delivered for value provided. If co-ops are less incentives towards profit, e.g. by not having a tradeable stock to manage, then the pursuit of profit is a lesser priority. This means the overhead is less, which could mean lower prices.

To put it bluntly, if you don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders who deliver no value or huge bonuses to executives at the top, maybe the operating costs could be lower. Yes, the cooperative members would take some of that money as profit sharing among the members, but the working class tends to be less sociopathically greedy than those in power.

Definitely open to feedback. This kind of thinking is newer to me

Got it. That makes much more sense. Thank you for the clarification! And very clear explanation

That all makes sense except the class distinctions part. If whole cooperatives share the capital of the organization, how is there a class divide?

Everything you’re saying about competition and private interest makes sense, with my limited understanding. I just don’t get the class point you made. Help me understand?

Rulest

The problem is that they’re too fucking big. Office used to be the shining star of Microsoft, but now, it’s a total piece of shit. My company recently switched from Google to Microsoft, and holy shit, it’s a downgrade.

Outlook is the biggest pile of shit software I’ve encountered in years. It’s eventually consistent but without user feedback, it’s very slow, meeting rooms aren’t consistent about meeting room responses, email filtering rules don’t work reliably… I could go on.

Word sucks, too. Google Docs is way easier to use. In Word, copy and paste doesn’t work as you’d expect, even from Word doc to Word doc, there’s no templating in OneDrive, there aren’t shared folders unless you set up a whole SharePoint site… I could go on here, too.

It’s this stupid, stupid focus on AI tools. AI ain’t making shit better! AI shouldn’t replace humans or things humans work on: it should augment humans. Products still need development on UX. AI should be incorporated into UX without being shoved down our throats. But these dumbass investors who don’t understand tech are jumping on the fucking bandwagon, and execs are towing the line.

Sorry for the rant, but Microsoft is more than just development tools.

Also, they need to get ads out of my fucking operating system. I don’t want my operating system natively communicating with the internet and recommending news stories. Fucking cancer