It's not a very good counterpoint is it? Insulting, patronising, talking down, squashing dreams and ideology and recommending a "give up and lose" course of action.
> There are more important things in life that tabs or spaces, or carriage returns and line feeds.
Things like rights to control the things you own, to know what they are doing, and to understand and repair them. Things like being able to use a device for as long as you choose without it relying on a third-party service which could be shut down any time it becomes unprofitable. Being able to control where your personal information is, and more widely, a population being able to control such; not being a source of information for surveillance capitalism - or having some chance of opting out without using a closed black box system.
> People pay for things that will work together seamlessly, that takes the least effort to work with.
Seems like a good reason to push for open standards instead of proprietary protocols, proprietary encryption and authentication schemes, proprietary connectors, and warranties that void if you look at them wrongly. As the "internet of things" grows, do we want to be building a population which picks which nanny-corp handles their doorbell, smoke alarm, intruder alarm, CO2 detector, and lighting system - you get Apple, Nest, Google, Philips, Amazon, Logitech, Sony .. but whichever you choose they will all send your life to an unsecured MongoDB in the cloud, and won't interoperate with each other to lock you in to a platform.
A decade (or two?) ago there was a guy who put sensors all over his neighbour's house and wrote software to stalk them, predicting when they were in or out, who was home, and watching them. He was arrested. Now that's de rigueur and you don't know who is, or can, access your data.
> I think it's time we admitted to ourselves, that we can't decide on anything collectively
But we are better off disagreeing about JSON and TOML and YAML instead of being unaware and unable to disagree about Google encrypted binary config blob, Microsoft encrypted binary config blob, Amazon encrypted binary config blob, Apple encrypted ... etc.
> We'll all die soon and everyone will be paying for software as a service
This is what capitalism wants. That doesn't mean it's what we should accept.
> Stop being so self-centered and churlish.
Who is it here advocating "as long as it works for me and I get paid, that's the most important thing"? How self-centered is that as an attitude?
> Get a good night's sleep.
Track your good night's sleep on a FitBit, upload it to Amazon, have it tied to your speculative future purchases predictions, maybe have it resold to your health insurance provider why not. What could go wrong.