61–70 of 195 posts
These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.
I make an explicit decision not to get any Amazon hardware within my household. I don’t even trust the Eero brand.
They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the original retail buyer was offered a choice between paying $X for ads-free or $X-minus-discount for with-ads. And it was disclosed upfront what they were buying into. Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
You bought a device that obeys its manufacturer instead of you. A device you have no control over. Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the original retail buyer was offered a choice between paying $X for ads-free or $X-minus-discount for with-ads. And it was disclosed upfront what they were buying into. Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Nice deal for Amazon because they get to double-dip as the same device served ads for some time for the first owner and then they still get the ad-free uplift eventually. Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.
And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?
Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
Simple enshitification, literally everything is going down that road. Somewhere a VP with a dashboard is super happy: they will get their $1M bonus and "après moi le déluge". Even local businesses get snatched by PE firms left and right, prices skyrocket, customers are pissed.... Is the business-consumer relationship valued at exactly $0? There is no system we can think of to avoid that?
>There is no system we can think of to avoid that? There is, but it requires thinking outside the box of "free market" capitalism, something most Americans are incapable of.
"Nothing is certain but death ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶.̶"̶, taxes, and ads."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues
Many with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card. No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):
#!/bin/sh -x
DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
cd ~/doc || exit 1
rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
Status=$?
umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
exit $Status
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0We're way overdue to abolish the DMCA, in particular the "anti-circumvention" felonies. It shouldn't be a crime for me to customize the product I purchased. Or to sell people a kit to do the customization themselves.
Throw away the DMCA and you throw away all safe harbors for websites, and then the internet is truly screwed. There's no way the current congress would ever accept such a thing again -- Section 230 has been weaponized against it already. What we should be saying is Improve the DMCA. You've already clued into the biggest thing that needs to change (DRM/anti-anti-circumvention). Let's not throw the baby out with the ba…