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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • >dinner is done
    >announce dinner
    >everyone shows up 10 minutes later

    Some of the food is cold because I didn’t cover it, but why should I? It would have been fine if they came to the table when I announced dinner.

    >next day
    >dinner is almost done
    >remembering yesterday, I decide to announce dinner 10 minutes early so that 10 minutes later is “on time”
    >everyone arrives to the table immediately, remembering that it was cold yesterday not wanting that to happen again
    >mfw






  • Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven’t done any open source work on either of the two. I’d be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.

    Honestly my main examples I’d point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don’t get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to “default choice” psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that’s increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that’s why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.

    Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.

    There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I’m hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?

    I’d be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!


  • Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.

    I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.









  • Hot take:

    Every time I see a Doctor Seuss parody that doesn’t respect the very strict meter that made his stuff flow so well, it’s always followed by about five minutes of me trying to fix it and then stopping because that was supposed to be the author’s responsibility. You can sneak in an extra syllable here or there, and there will be situations where it’s ambiguous based on word pronunciation, but any more than two syllables off and you should’ve workshopped it some more.

    Take all of these matters most seriously
    The gravest of grave should be clear
    To step out of meter where any could see
    Will only get side-glancing sneers

    And who, then, shall patch up this unfinished road
    Assembled with half-baked word stones?
    'Tis not my intent but I think it’s best flowed
    With a concrete from Onceler’s old bones



  • The thing is, too, that remembering your decision to reject all has to be done through a cookie, and they know this and take advantage of that fact! 99.9% of websites only offer a choice that makes you dig through at least one menu, or a choice that makes you have to click the ‘reject all’ button every time the page reloads.

    There needs to be a mandate to add an option to “reject all except my decision to reject” that corresponds to a single boolean. It should exist under a standardized id, and if it’s set to true, the site would be required to stop showing you cookie popups. And if the cookie contains anything more than that single boolean and the website it applies to at most, it should be illegal and reportable as such.

    Of course, as you mentioned, that would probably be quite difficult to accomplish legally.