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Originally Posted by Voidbarker
actual daily awful: remembering that amazon exists and that technology could be used to help disabled people but is instead used for weirdly specific advertisements and shit like that instead of actually improving the world.
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It
is being used to help disabled people. The way progress in technology tends to go is that the R&D happens in a field where they can make money on it (research is expensive!) and then as things mature they start looking for more applications to help people. For example, I know that predictive text has been great for improving on input devices for paralyzed people. And I know the same kinds of models that are used for ad targeting are used for things like epidemiology. (I just today saw an article outraged that Google was working on healthcare research, so it's kind of a catch-22: if you're a big company, you're going to have people mad at you no matter what.)
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also microsoft and apple are lobbying for not being able to repair things. we should have the right to repair things, it's not a fucking service, it's physical shit that we have to be able to repair in the case it breaks. we can't always just buy another one.
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"Right to repair" is kind of a bad name for it. You ALWAYS have a right to repair your stuff; the doctrine of first sale guarantees it. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are lobbying to change that. And it only makes sense that manufacturers aren't going to want to provide support if you've changed the product from what was sold to you; Chevrolet isn't going to help you if your car breaks down in the middle of the highway because you botched an at-home fix.
And so because people have latched onto this "right to repair" label, they misunderstand what the problem actually is, which means they're not able to fight it meaningfully. Your comment here demonstrates that problem -- you've been misinformed, so if an Apple fanboy were here replying to you they'd probably call you an idiot even though you're perfectly intelligent and you got it wrong through no fault of your own.
The problem is that Apple has for many years now done everything in their power to make sure that you can't get access to the parts and information you would need to perform the repairs. (They've also shifted to designs and manufacturing processes that are harder to repair even if you do have the parts and knowledge, but that's a side effect of improving technology, not an intentional thing.) Until very recently they wouldn't sell parts to
anyone, and they've stopped putting diagnostic software on their systems, and they use (and sometimes abuse) the legal system to try to keep third parties from selling parts or sharing diagrams or software.
(Compared to Apple, Microsoft is pretty innocent. Their hardware is difficult to repair because of the manufacturing processes, and the security system makes it difficult to change the software, but neither of those are really unethical, just inconvenient. It's just a case of the things that you really do want under normal circumstances being things that get in your way when something goes wrong.)