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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#391

Post by geniium »

2036: Virtual Reality Social Distancing becomes a thing, where people attend virtual parties by sending holographic avatars, ensuring they’re “virtually” present without the need to physically mingle. Emoji dance-offs are all the rage!

2037: The “Mind-Meets-Code” era begins, allowing developers to write code directly with their thoughts. Unfortunately, this leads to a surge in “accidental” code commits when programmers have random thoughts about pizza while coding.

2040: The “Everything-as-a-Service” (EaaS) model reaches its peak, where even physical activities like jogging or cooking are offered as subscription services. People realize they miss the old days of doing things for free and embark on a global “DIY Renaissance.”

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#392

Post by dvdkon »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #353
dTal wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't remember the last time I encountered a library or program in my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone GPLd I don't know what line of work you're in but this seems quite unlikely. GTK and Qt are both LGPL (and GNOME and Plasma are GPL). WebKit's JavaScript engine is LGPL. MySQL is GPL. Blender is GPL. Arduino is AGPL. GCC is GPL. Bash is GPLv3. It's hard for me to believe you use the Linux kernel witho…

I don't use GTK, Qt because macOS provides its own UI toolkit (+electron etc). I don't use MySQL, I use Postgres (not copyleft). I don't use Blender. I use the default compiler of the OS, so I don't use gcc. macOS switched to zsh (not copyleft) so I don't use bash either. GPL isn't wildly popular by any possible definition of the term. It was more popular in the past which is why there's a base of software that still…

I don't feel the need to fight the "new and shiny" war, because yesteryear's problems are far from gone. Windows' dominance affects end users, people like me who had no hand in creating it and now have to deal with a near-monopoly. Companies tied to Azure are where they are due to their own business decisions, and I feel no need to bail them out. If my competitors waste money, let them, it makes me more likely to succeed. They could change everything if they cared anyway. Users, actual people screwed over by proprietary vendors, can't.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#393

Post by Macha »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #390
Macha wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing two things: 1. You're in a tech bubble. For a counter anecdote, the only Macs I encounter are those provided by my US employers in the technology sector. The US is particularly high in Mac market share, California more so, and the bay area may be the one Mac OS majority desktop/laptop share region on the planet. 2. Windows laptops don't get replaced that often. I know it's hard to believe from a tech/h…

I can't read the source without an account, but 55% + 30% = 85%. Is the last 15% Chromebooks? (I guess there's also traditional desktop Linux but I can't imagine that's more than 2% at most.)

Yeah, Chromebooks, Android (tablets presumably, or it would be first), Linux, and unknown.

I guess they're either rate limiting by IP or checking referrer, since I can't open it again either. Chromebooks were at 7% as the next largest segment, but I don't remember the relative shared of android tablets, linux or unknown.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#394

Post by huhtenberg »

attah_ wrote: post #97
huhtenberg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. Mozilla is hanging tightly on the Google's tit though. It won't be shocking to see Firefox deteriorate rapidly should it start gaining ground on Chrome. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Sigh. Another of the long line of defeatist non-arguments. What is your point? Should we all just roll over and die? Writing just to be contrarian?

The point is that for the Firefox to gain more foothold Mozilla first needs to break the dependency on Google's money. And this won't happen without deep restructuring of the Mozilla corp, starting from the top and shedding all the blubber all the way down. The chances of that happening are next to zero. You can label that as "defeatist non-arguments" all you want, but that's a very unfortunate reality. Saying this as a die-hard Firefox user of almost 20 years.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#395

Post by brightlancer »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #322
verisimi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a p…

Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead of me. And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to labe…

> And I believe in actual government

No, you believe in _utopian_ government, which is not actual government. Actual government is what we have right now, in reality.

> I call this real government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#396

Post by mtnygard »

I don’t think the main point is that these are exactly the increments. Rather, that it _is_ a series of increments where each step builds on the ones before and enables the next ones. It’s also illustrating the iterative loop from tech vendor to government and the increase from “recommended” to “mandatory.”

We are well along this process already.

Larry Lessig wrote “Code and other laws of cyberspace” back in the 90s (I think). It’s scary how much of what he wrote now looks _optimistic_.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#397

Post by midasuni »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #308
midasuni wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.

No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the…

Yes you are immune to the efforts of a trillion dollar industry that has spent the best pet of a century working out exactly how to manipulate you without you even knowing.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#398

Post by brightlancer »

verisimi wrote: post #230
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia. Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to i…

You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a p…

> The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do,

Plainly, most people disagree with you. They find it perfectly acceptable to force others to (not) do things.

> if they are not harming you.

The fact is that people do not agree what "harm" is.

To pick an obvious argument, many people oppose abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim it harms the offspring and the mother, while many people support abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim forcing a woman to carry to term harms the woman.

How do we handle situations where people disagree on the definition of "harm"?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#399

Post by Eduard »

rocho wrote: post #389
Daril wrote: post #328

There is hope: - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few. - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we h…

The options might exist, but that doesn't mean that they are viable/usable. I agree with many of your points, but regarding document processing, LibreOffice really does not compare with any of the best alternatives (Google Documents, Office Word). It lacks options, if the options exists they are hidden in obscure menus, it doesn't display many things correctly (at least on my Linux computer), etc. For document proces…

I prefer LibreOffice so much more over Microsoft Word and Google Documents.

yes, with LibreOffice, often options are hidden somewhere that I wish there was just an autocomplete box to type in what I'm looking for (e. g. "Page numbering", "page break l");

BUT: finding those options in Word is complicated as well, and on top of it it reshuffles with every new version

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#400

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bombolo wrote: post #276
attah_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to thei…

My bank's webserver recently decided to drop connections when a firefox user agent is received. No message, no nothing, just close the socket.

If you're in the US, write to the FTC and complain that this is discriminatory toward the disabled who may need special user agent accessibility features unavailable in Chrome.
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