Knew what? That someone doesn’t want the thing they pay for to get enshittified? That it’s smart to make plans to not let any company control how you communicate?

Wow. Such insight.

Yeah, was that supposed to be profound or something?

As the 1% that actually pays, I’m invested in them succeeding and not enshittifying so I don’t have to take the time to move my email hosting. End of story. I have my own email domain, so I can kick them to the curb any day I like. And expect to have to one day.

Did you need to complain about it some more? Does baby need a Binky? Or did you only ever use the free thing and it didn’t meet your expectations of what free things should be? Sorry your free thing wasn’t spectacular enough :(

Imagine being so disillusioned with the world that you assume that no one can have an opinion and think critically about two opposing views without it necessarily being some corporate brand fanboy bullshit.

If you haven’t used it professionally, LLMs can and do provide huge help. Making this a specially all or nothing argument only highlights a knowledge and experience gap on the part of someone making that argument.

Buuuuut, only an idiot asks for anything better than a starting point or a check of existing work. People relying on it to produce whole cloth work is for hobbyists and sloppers that don’t care or know any better.

You ask why they need to use LLMs at all, and they host their own, Lumo. What clear, financially solid argument can you make that LLMs are an objective net negative to every company? If they see benefits from a headstart on coding and ability to test their security, why demand they take that away when no human code is 100% perfect anyway?

If you read the Proton response to this article, it actually does seem like trying to figure out what’s going on with business process in a big picture way. Senior managers are interviewing, too. Not all staff are interviewing.

Personally, I think it’s just as much about seeing who can’t QC the slop out off their code as anything else. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong, I dunno.

Guns, Germs, and Steel might be a pretty good starting point. That’s more global in scope, but the guns and steel parts apply.

An African History of Africa by Zainab Badawi is dense, but is a bit more in depth than a typical history that condenses 12,000 years of history into half a chapter, then 15 chapters on the last 400 years when Europeans were involved.

Otherwise, you’re looking more at histories centered on regions and cultures and moments in time. Which is why it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s a whole continent, its history is complex, just as is Asia or South America or Europe.

That’s not how real life works. This is projection of very recent media-driven natives on pre-history and low-development modernity.

Tribes and tribalism by necessity predate “culture wars” because the nuance of culture and use of culture as the basis for conflict would come after the conflict over resources. Can’t have a culture war if the other people already starved to death.

On top of the fact that this assumes a very wealthy, western media habit. In a village with no power, the funnel through which “culture war” can even reach eyes and ears arrives is pretty narrow. And not even in a language some people speak. Not everyone on Earth speaks English, abokina.

You can’t just blame everything on the new phrases you know with thousands of years of real history to look at. Please try to read some history and anthropology if you can’t spend time in places that aren’t like where you know.

It’s a nice attempt, but it seems like you don’t really understand either Kwame Nkruma’s motivations, nor what xenophobia actually is.

First off, xenophobia is a popular sentiment, not something that elites necessarily control. They can, obviously, via the media, but sometimes it just happens naturally in any society under pressure. For example, around 10 years ago in Zambia there was a rash of xenophobia attacks based on fears that Congolais migrants were doing human sacrifices following some “mad gasser attacks” panic. Yes, you read that right. The government tried to tell people to stop it and they didn’t.

Second, don’t drag Kwame Nkruma into the argument unless you have actually read some of his work. His motivations for copying the proto-EU in Africa were based on Marcus Garvey’s Pan Africanism to garner support, but Nkruma saw he needed economic and political weight. Which is true. Nkruma was good friends with Josip Tito, the President of Yugoslavia, which has managed to form a strong economy and manufacturing base around Yugoslavia’s unification. Nkruma wanted the same from Africa, rather than letting the colonial borders dilute political power.

Buuuuuuuuuuuut, no one like that idea. Regardless of who you or Nkruma blamed for why he got deposed, he spent a lot of time not in Ghana as president. He was gone, on his way to China. And hey, for what it’s worth, Nkruma was Ashanti, despised by a Ga army officer in Accra, an ethnically Ga part of the county.

LOL. Xenophobia across Africa and human history is as old as time itself. Tribalism started with literal, actual tribes, you know. Same as it has in most places.

Would you like to see examples of modern xenophobia in Africa that predate your American notions of it?

Let’s try… 1969!

https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/DCS/article/view/12874

I’m genuinely curious why you think strongly there wouldn’t be one.

It’s the strongest economy in the region, with basketcase Zim and hot mess Moz right next door.