Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they’ll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.
(My guess is that there isn’t because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)
The biggest theft in history, even.
Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it’s okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let’s imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!
That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?
It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.
I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.
One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.
It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.
Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.
Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)
And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.
It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn’t happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.
I don’t have any suggestions, but this is incredibly impressive. I haven’t heard of jmp.chat before, but it sounds like you can create multiple identities using different phone numbers - is that correct?
If so, that sounds amazing. I really hate how the modern world is trying to force people into a singular identity online, and the way that they’re using phone numbers to do it. This sounds like it could be a pretty decent method to avoid that.
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How is it that you’re so well-versed in all of Stallman’s negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?
On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
I don’t doubt you at all - I’ve seen quite a few stories of Google exhibiting retribution against employees attempting to unionize.
The point I was trying to make (admittedly quite badly) is that Google employees should have unionized a long time ago, when they had the upper hand. At this point, it’s a much steeper uphill climb. But it is still a very worthy fight.
You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.
If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, “why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don’t need to unionize!” And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don’t buy insurance for the same reason.
I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.
(I’m not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)
All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it’s greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it’s high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.
we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.
That’s not completely true though! One thing that a lot of people forget about Google is that they didn’t have to become a publicly traded for-profit company. A lot of people around 2002-2004-ish saw Google’s meteoric rise and wondered what path they were going to take. Some speculated/hoped that they would go the Wikipedia route and become a service that existed for the public good instead of a for-profit venture.
We all know what happened after. The pursuit of profit inevitably leads all companies to becoming sociopathic and evil. They didn’t have to be this way. And this is true for lots of tech startups. I wish we had seen more of them become wikipedias instead of googles.
It’s also worth pointing out that the original founders did want to make a company that was good and not evil. They tried to succeed by creating legitimately good products, and not screwing over their users. They did make mistakes along the way, but their intentions were at least good. The major problems started (as they usually do), when the second CEO took charge of the company, and it was evident that he had not clue whatsoever how to create a product. All Sundar Pichai knows how to do is suck as much blood as he can out of a stone. But Google’s founders are not blameless here: they were the ones that set the corporate structure up this way, and they were the ones that got bored and decided to fuck off. And they cheated on their taxes the way all corporations do, so no matter how good their intentions were, they were still pretty awful people.
Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.
I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.
+1, I would recommend neovim with lazyvim. The documentation is excellent, and it’s very easy to set up.
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
Welcome to the crowd! Eventually, you realize that an operating system is just an operating system: something you use to get work done, and the less you notice it, the better it’s doing its job. The pride of setting it all up mostly ends very shortly after you’re done. At that point, you realize that pretty much all distros are the same, give or take.
That said, there are always moments that make you realize that your OS is amazing. When you’re faced with a new and difficult task that you don’t know how to achieve, then you look at your distro’s documentation and solve it in a few elegant steps. And I’m not an Arch user, but that’s when the Arch wiki will really be your friend, as well as all the other resources that Arch has for its users. I can’t think of examples of these kinds of moments because they’re so rare, but those are the moments that feel great and really make you appreciate your OS.
Yes, I agree, and I think it’s a reflection of society’s values over the past 50 years.
We are living in a world with more of a “make money and fuck all else” mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.
We’re seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends…
(And for what it’s worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)
But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.
Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.
That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.