alt Hacker Newswhat alternative to WEI do you propose? it solves a bajillion Internet-existential problems. it is definitely a crisis. the bot problem is at least as serious as facebook, gmail serving without https.
the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...
that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
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Bombing every AI data center on Earth would also solve the Internet-existential problems we're facing. But that solution is beyond the pale of course, instead it's incumbent on me to prove to you that panopticon surveillance of every living human being from now until the Sun consumes us is not a reasonable solution to "bots use the Internet".
People use iMessage because it has worked for a long time, during which all the leading alternatives were terrible. Maybe they still are cause I'm still not convinced that RCS even works reliably, seeing how Android users go on WhatsApp instead.