And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple.

We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked.

The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.

Silos like Facebook rank content that isn't hosted internally lower, so the open web has atrophied.

And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.

I don't hate computers. I hate the grifters and gaslighters that have taken the good parts away and told us our way of thinking is the problem.

This is the case with virtually everything these days. Stallman is/was right about this. You only rent the movies on Netflix, the games on Steam, the books on Amazon Kindle, and so forth. Everything could be taken away from you for absurd reasons. Who would have thought that your account could be disabled for reasons that it could get disabled today? It is not going to get better. You cannot even play a single player game offline, without running Steam. Torrents/Warez will never go away thankfully. Screw DRM anyways.

Edit: according to this post on the forum the feature is not maintained or supported (as of 2016).

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt/how_can_i_...

But Galaxy is optional, you can download the offline installers directly from the site. I have around 680 games on GOG and all of them are in my external HDD in their offline installers - i never installed Galaxy on my PC.

Its selection is small but it has a few exclusives - Alien Trilogy was released recently-ish there. Also they're the only place where you can find the original Duke Nukem 3D with all of its expansions due to some perpetual contracts they had with 3D Realms before the IP was acquired by Gearbox.

youtube-dl is amazing. It supports a lot of platforms, and you can download entire playlists by just using the URL to the playlist itself.

Against the ToS? Perhaps. But it's my book, damnit.

Only buy, fix and support those who have your ideals.

Wow, putting it like that makes me realize it's just part of the larger societal trend toward authoritarianism. I guess this is one of those 'Stallman was right' moments.

RE the wider trend toward authoritarianism, I'm not yet sure I see it clearly, at least outside the privacy space. But I do feel trends towards taking away end-user control and turning everything into a service, which are very much market-driven, though perhaps they also are a subset of authoritarianism.

I came of age during a time when we on the left believed fiercely in personal freedoms, especially freedom of speech. We would blast music that would say things like, "F--k you I won't do what you tell me." [1]

Now the same left I loved can't erupt in protest fast enough when social media aren't censoring idiots. We used to all know that censoring of anybody was wrong, but also that it didn't work. Censoring was what corporations and authoritarian states did to people, and we hated it.

That's just one example of the change people have gone through.

[1] https://genius.com/Rage-against-the-machine-killing-in-the-n...

And also, step back a bit and look at the state of digitally distributed disinformation. We've elected politicians that look like characters from an absurdist satire, loony conspiracy theories are going mainstream, climate change isn't real, the pandemic is a lie, a significant percentage of the US population thinks the presidental election was completely fraudulent... and so on.

Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society. I'd love to think that if you let people figure things out for themselves they'll eventually manage it. That they'll eventually stop believing wild claims based on no evidence.

But we don't have time to test that theory.

Should the big platforms have the power over the digital public square that they do? Definitely not. But they do have it. Pressuring them to deal with misinformation is something I completely support.

The alternative is tech illiterate legislation because the misinformation problem isn't going to go away on it's own.

I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.

Allowing the lunatics to spread their message via effective platforms that are designed to promote your brand of bullshit to the people most likely to be vulnerable to it does NOT stop it from festering it actually maximizes the spread of the cancer. If it spreads fast enough you wont have a society to inform anymore because fascists only believe in free speech when its their speech if they gain enough power they will quickly take yours from you.

The people creating propaganda are also interested in enforcing censorship if they are in the position to do so.

Propaganda and censorship work far better together than individually for groups that want to brainwash society into certain beliefs.

The trick is simply keeping people like that out of power.

But since you go on about advertising, that is a way for groups that want it, is to be able to force people to listen to their message. This robs people of their agency to listen to what they choose to. Censorship also doesn't allow people to listen to what they choose to. This makes advertising and censorship very alike. They both result in a persons loss of freedom to choose what information they get.

This idea, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it. In fact, surely we're owed some justification for the principle - does exposing widespread misinformation correct the bad effects before it was exposed? Some harm has already been done, and I'm not sure how that is justified by the principle.

I think that principle is lacking in empirical evidence, and theoretical justification for the harms it allows, which seem to be based on a shaky idea of the greater good.

The most egregious I can think of is the Russian government after the Bolshevik revolution. It had the death penalty for being in possession of certain books. In the end these censorship loving people (for other people, not them) killed tens of millions of people they governed (gulags, deliberate starvation of masses of people for instance), yet it is hardly talked about.

These bad effects of not censoring that people talk about seem so pitiful and small compared to what has happened when people willing to censor other people have got into power. Seriously, people stating things like 'sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it' are promoting things that totalitarian groups are very pleased to have, and despite asking for evidence, they provide no evidence that what they are trying to push is not far worse than what they are purportedly against. Along with the destruction of freedom that censorship brings to all the people that it applies to. Those that promote censorship can not be hypocritical and start with themselves first, but they won't, I'm sure they will scream loudest about how horrible censorship is if some other group got the power to censor what they may want to say.

I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good faith" argument would win.

I think our problem is that, as you know, humans are subject to a ton of logical fallacies and 'hack vectors' of rhetoric (see also Shopenhauer's 38 strategems). If we, participating in or viewing an argument, fight to overcome these, we're able to have debates of rhetoric - the "truth" wins out in a debate.

But it's a lot worse than a situation where some number of people didn't learn this in school, or can't be bothered to cut through the logical fallacies. Rather, the problem is that these particular kind of lies have a seductive capacity - they 'feel right', because they operate in the part of human speech and human logic that's driven by our instinct, rather than driven by learned behavior. People aren't neutral, and evenly likely to pick the lies versus the truth - they're overwhelmingly more likely to pick the lies, unless they've both deliberately trained themselves not to, and also personally value objective truth over feeling good. Most people don't - even scientists struggle with this.

Not all lies are seductive like this - but the kind that slot into "tricks of debate" absolutely are. They're the bread and butter of con men.

This is why every formal "forum of debate" - in the sciences or academia et al, has it as just a basic rule that they can just get shown the door immediately if they're caught lying. If you just straight-up-lie on a paper getting submitted to i.e. Nature, it can ruin your career. It's why perjury is a crime - because lies of that type just have far stronger evolutionary fitness compared to truth. It's because the rule-setters in these fields care more about reaching the objective truth than they do about feeling good - and they know how dangerous this is, so they treat it with a scorched earth policy.

---

I believe we've been able to get away with free speech because - thus far - most of our media wasn't censored, so much as it was mandated to be "true". You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was plausibly true - people fudged stuff all the time but it generally couldn't be bald-faced lies. As long as that was enforced, then what you said about "good speech being the antidote to bad speech" could work.

But for a few decades, we've had no such enforcement of truth in lots of our media, especially the internet, and I believe the number of people believing outright falsehoods has gotten an awful lot worse. Dangerously so.

That said, you seem to have presupposed that the people doing the censoring are always (or mostly) right. Why? Because they happen to be in power?

Twitter (and I think Facebook) censored the New York Post, even disabling their account, over a major news story that turned out to be true. It went against thev censor's preconceived ideas of how the world is, and they smashed that button as fast as they could.

What makes you think the people doing the censoring are somehow unbiased righteous purveyors of truth, absent their own instinctive biases that mislead then into censoring unfairly? Surely history has shown that to rarely if ever be the case.

I totally agree with your analysis of the problem, but I follow it to a much different conclusion: humans can't be trusted to wield power of speech over others. They are too subject to their own instinctive and emotional reactions to information they don't like.

The internet has made outcomes immediate. The internet has also removed the human element of social interaction. I think these two mix in a terrible way. I have no idea what can or should be done about it though.

The recent push to censor and silence dissent isn't an anomaly: the several hundreds years post enlightenment that gave us the ideas of individual rights and freedoms were the anomaly.

I also do not believe anyone advocating the censoring of others has been themselves censored, or put in a minority position where they were afraid to express dissent. Because if you have that experience, it tends to give one a dim view of censorship.

[citation needed]

The problem with your statement isn't the claim that tribal behaviours are a natural tendency in humans. Of course they are. The problem is your claim that they are somehow primary. There are many other tendencies of comparable weight, and how strongly they are expressed relative to each other depends very much on the individual.

Not to mention that when it comes to tribal instincts, there's a huge difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be. Their nuclear family? Their town/state/country? Their profession? Participants in their hobby? Their "race"? All of humanity?

Pretty much the whole of human history? There's no shortage of examples. To the contrary, it's more difficult to find examples that do not demonstrate tribalism.

> difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be

This is a recent luxury that hasn't existed for more than a century. Other than a few cultures here and there that encouraged blended demographics (usually as a consequence of conquest, think Rome).

It's not perfect there but most of the world is currently functioning.

Now what we are seeing with social media platforms (and I ould argue it started already earlier with the raise of fox news) at the moment is that we see that there are elements of society who found that facts and truth don't matter and freedom of speech doesn't matter if you have big enough pockets and use the right psychological strategies. Essentially the way society and particulary social media is set up is, that the richest voice gets heard (at least by some people) and the truth of what is being said is not important anymore. In other words the platform are used for controlling us (not by the government, but vested interests) and destroying society, freedom of speech is not helping against this if anything it's a hindrance because it assumes all speech is equal, which it isn't.

I don't have a solution and I would like a way to defend us without destroying freedom of speech, but I don't have a good solution.

Also these platforms have been "censoring" for a long time, nobody was batting an eyelid when Isis accounts and videos were removed. In fact many of the outlets who are now screaming about censorship were shouting that twitter et al. were not doing enough. That tells you a lot about howmuch they care about freedom of speech.

Some of them have taken the cues and actually committed such murders. The problem is there is money and importance to be earned by trivial to construct lies that a functioning marketplace of ideas would trivially discard but it turns out ours really doesn't work so well and freedom without responsibility is a clusterfuck.

We let the liars run wild and ended up with a reality TV star killing hundreds of thousands of people with his incompetence and working hard to start a war that would kill hundreds of thousands more in the last days of his regime. Perhaps visualize every one of those corpses stacked one in a reeking pile and realize that censorship may be the lesser of two evils.

They also suspended an account of a sitting state senator in Pennsylvania who was holding a hearing on alleged election fraud: https://www.ntd.com/twitter-suspends-account-of-state-senato...

There is no valid theory of morality which allows one to simply disregard predicable consequences of ones actions in preference for purely theoretical considerations.

This is why many other publications refused to run with this story because merely presenting "both sides" would not in fact be morally neutral it would have been wrong.

In the same vein Sen. Doug Mastriano was not presenting legitimate concerns about election fraud. There isn't any evidence for such it is literally a smokescreen for a desired takeover of the American government by a hostile minority.

The nypost and Mastriano are traitors in the old and simple constitutional sense of conspirators against the legitimate form of government on which all other freedoms hinge. It isn't that they are attacking Biden he like all leaders will be a transitory feature in our system of government here today and gone tomorrow. What they are attacking is a democratic form of government by polluting the essential contest by which we choose our leaders with lies about candidates and lies about the process in order to undermine the whole thing.

The fact that such actions aren't sufficiently clear cut to rise to prosecutable crimes doesn't mean we ought to forget their betrayal. It is OK if twitter doesn't lend its microphone to Mastriano or the nypost. Let them rent their own website if they prefer. Ntd.com is incidentally a laughable source that nobody ought to credit. For gods sake the story you linked is actually them reporting on a story from the epoch times. For the record the real and complete story is that twitter NEVER suspended the senators government account and says that it suspended the personal account because someone reported it for impersonating the senator and it was reinstated.

Presumably a more reliable source would have included the entire story.

But your point is well taken in that the way the computer and the stream of data isn't owned by the average user has a serious impact on society. The way the Youtube algorithm pushes people towards extremism is the most extreme, obvious example.

People with the weakest filters seem like they're the victim of this stuff. But overall, the problem is the situation doesn't teach people to have filters.

Filtering and ranking (and their visual presentation to the user) are the most prized aspects of Google, Twitter and Facebook for their impact in advertising and activism. Everyone wants attention, attention is money and power. Attention is the value system on the internet.

So of course they don't want to share it, not even with the user. But we want to have a say about content evaluation as well, we have our own values.

Perhaps the best way to neuter Google, FB and Twitter is to spin out the ranking/filtering/presentation part and make many of them. I don't care about the indexer too much, it can stay in one piece. But for ranking and filtering I'd like to select other settings than they allow. Maybe settings proposed by EFF or other NGO's I trust more than a for profit company.

It used to be that we only had the option of a few channels to watch and newspapers to read. You could switch but they would be very restrictive in the choice of content. Internet gave us freedom and a high variety of options, but now ranking and filtering take them back. They want to take choice from us and impose theirs.

All of the really good hardware is cryptographically locked to software that you can't alter.

Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.

They are also free to play and usually not in a minor way. Some of the latest Gacha games have a dozen hours of storyline (or more) before starting the infinite grind.

> when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun

People have hated games forever so that isn't much of a barometer. Not commenting on whether P2W is more problematic but people have been listing forever the things that got in the way of their fun.

This situation is entirely the fault of web developers at large tech firms who have been pushing "the web as app publishing platform".

It used to be that you'd install a program and run it locally but of course javascript developers didn't want to learn C++ and here we are.

Citation needed. I can think of precious few applications that are better in the browser than native.

MS Office and Libre Office are significantly better than the horrid google docs experience.

Not a single web-based text or code editor is worth a damn.

Games are better, more featureful and more performant as native than in the browser.

Web based CAD is a joke.

Almost every major application is inferior as a web app. Gmail on desktop is about the only thing that's better than the native experience, at least that I can think of.

Imagine you’re a small business owner without an IT staff. Do you spend your time dealing with corrupted installations, malware, reinstalling after hardware fails, backup data and then verifying backups, or do you pay someone else a monthly fee to deal with all that and just worry about having an iPad with a working internet connection?

If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.

Of course, the downside is you have ceded some control over to someone else and are now paying them rent and possibly getting locked in, but you have limited resources to allocate, and you decide going to see your kids’ performance is more important.

- corrupted installs aren't really a thing any more

- hardware failures happen at about the same rate as hardware goes obsolete. If the hardware fails you're buying a new ipad anyways, and unlike a commodity windows PC the iPad can't be repaired.

- malware is still a threat if you have a spyware solution like O365

- as google demonstrates on a regular basis, you can't trust that you'll have access to your cloud backups. If you have data that you actually need, then you need to back it up yourself. Restoring backups takes maybe a few hours a year. Not an issue.

- an iPad is not a substitute for a desktop workstation

>If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.

Sure until google locks you out of your account for no reason or you realize you're paying insanely high fees per year when your strategy could be to buy a prebuilt system from Dell once or twice a year and copy your backup data from a USB hard drive. For a business of 30 people or so this is perfectly viable.

Instead of having an onsite server running property management system software that has to synchronize inventory with the central reservation system, a web based property management system you can access via a browser has the following benefits for the hotel owner:

1) Don't have to worry about server HDD failures, or any other hardware failures.

2) If power goes out, just browse to the website with a mobile device.

3) Never any inventory issues since there is no synchronization that needs to be done.

4) Revolving door of minimum wage front desk workers who install malware on your Windows computers can't do that anymore if using an iPad or iPad like device, and if they do, it wouldn't result in liability due to theft of people's data. See Marriott/IHG data leaks a few years ago.

5) Lowers labor costs since you don't need someone to troubleshoot technical stuff, other than get a device with an internet connection and a browser.

6) Can move towards a self check in check out system where the guest can basically do it all via an app or the hotel's website, further reducing labor costs.

7) Features can be updated and implemented far more easily when hardware features don't have to be worried about.

I stand by my earlier point that few applications are actually superior on web compared to native.

Edit: autocorrect

I dunno, number of clicks seems like a weak argument in favour of web to me.

Start -> type "f-i-r-e" -> click Firefox -> click bookmark in the menubar

That's still 3 clicks. Doublclicking the icon on the desktop maybe but that's 3 as well. Launching a native app would be no different.

codesandbox.io is actually very good for web development. If I didn't have access to a native code editor I would be pretty content with just using codesandbox. I think it uses a modified version of VS Code.

Gnome is shit for sure.

And yet TFA's entire point seemed to apply equally to a self-built machine running any OS (including any Linux) that you could name. So this really seems to have almost nothing to do with Apple or MS.

However, I see this as something of a new development that didn't actually remove what was before. You can still run Linux if you like, just as you could 10-20 years ago. You don't have access to UHD Netflix, but... you never had. They didn't take this away, it was never given in the first place.

Granted, the fact that Apple goes downhill is, I think, a net negative for the computing world. Ditto for the tracking embedded in windows 10.

Regarding Linux, there's the UEFI / SecureBoot situation, but even on "enterprise" HP hardware this can not only be disabled but I can actually load my own keys, so I don't perceive this as a threat for the moment.

The deeper problem, to me, is that all this works because there are enough people who, for some reason, don't care. Maybe they're not educated enough / don't know better, maybe they actually want it, maybe they're not aware. But the fact remains that there are many, many people who buy the iPhone, who use windows 10, who use facebook, who buy echos, etc. So, aside from "doing the right thing", what incentives do these companies have to stop doing what they do?

[] I actually do own an iPhone but I treat it like an appliance. I install next to no apps, so I really don't care about who can install what on it. I do care that my 4 yo phone got the latest major upgrade and it works as well as the day I brought it home.

However, I am pissed that LittleSnitch is unable to filter all traffic on my Big Sur Mac. But I basically no longer use the Mac, so I'm doing something about it.

This hasn't been true for several years. Yes, distributing an app requires a paid membership, but you can build and run your app on your own device just fine.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/running_your...

> We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia.

Tell this to the young kids coming up - I'm in my mid-30's now - and explain that there existed a time when most sites were served over plain-old, unencrypted HTTP. They either won't believe you, will be horrified at the security hole here, or both.

> The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.

In retrospect, it isn't surprising that Google - a company that makes its real money off of ads - went down this road. It stinks, but I don't know if they had any better options to protect this revenue stream in the face of tech that lets people subvert it getting better all the time.

> And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.

In some ways, I do wish that Apple put more effort into the web app side of things, but the key victory of the App Store can't be ignored.

If you make software easier to acquire, install, and remove, people will use more of it. With few exceptions, I would posit that most people who aren't nerds didn't use much software because these guardrails weren't there, and that they might "screw up their phone/computer."

As a result of this progress, that fear has been largely eliminated, even if it means people give up some access to the nuts and bolts of how the software stack works.

Now "we" bloody haven't! You may have, I and others have not and will not. Decades ago people were literally fighting fascism and dying for it, these days whiners can't manage to install linux, VMs or blocklists.

You chose. You can unchoose.

HN is interesting sometimes. So many on here make a crap ton of money, way more than most other industries, and then go on to complain about FB, MSoft, Apple, Google, etc. But they all want their money and gladly take it, many working for these same companies.

No one wants to make decentralized software because there's no money in that, and no money means no fancy Tesla, or expensive restaurants, or nice condos.

Your way of thinking is the problem. You’re a minority of users and not entitled to mass production of goods that fit your intentions alone.

Reality moved on as physics obliges it to do.

Go buy a Dell and install Linux. Go buy an Rpi. When did MS or Apple ever cater to open source opinions on computing?

Did a golden age end or were you all distracted and simply forgot these companies were awful back then too?

Better juice those stocks gains though!

a) their updates require consent

b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things

c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917

d) generally add functionality

?

Apple won't approve software that uses non-apple-approved services, like payment providers. Apple won't approve software that dares to inform users of these limitations. Apple won't approve third party browsers. Apple demands payment in order for them to approve software. Etc.

Apple apparently has been silently and without permission or an off switch sending the name of the developer of literally every app you launch to Apple. This is far more invasive than anything I've heard of Google or Microsoft doing - not that I'm a fan of their telemetry either. Microsoft in particular also gives you tools to examine what they're sending in detail: https://www.howtogeek.com/348699/how-to-see-what-data-window...

On Apple devices which allow power user options (the minority of devices), they are still limited. For example Apple was (is?) making their own traffic bypass Little Snitch.

Apple generally seems to remove functionality in the name of "design" and "safety" as far as I can see... I'm not sure how you think they're generally adding functionality.

It's not like Apple forced you to buy a Mac or an iPhone. If anything you have to go out of your way to get one, because you see some appeal in them - as otherwise they're more expensive, with limited model choice, less bang for the buck, and a minority market share wise compared to most PC/Android stuff.

So, perhaps those buying them know what they're doing? Walled garden (aka "curation") for many is part of the appeal.

Who decides?

iDevices always worked like you're describing. You can get a dev cert and install whatever you like, but these devices are not general computing devices. They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.

You obviously didn't even read my link because there it says exactly how Apple offers a power user option which allows an older version of Little Snitch to capture that traffic.

I have a Windows machine and I've looked at how they behaved with their telemetry from the beginning. They were so secretive and malicious that it beggars belief. An EU government even had to reverse engineer their telemetry communication because they wouldn't say what's in it. You're coming after the dust has settled and draw conclusions from there.

Google... where to even begin. What a complete waste of time this was.

You mean $buy$ a dev cert, yearly.

> They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.

And if you want both, FUCK yourself right ?

I, a person with a modest net worth, am picking on trillion dollar Apple? That's so backwards it's funny.

This is a company that erodes computing freedom and ownership. They've co-opted the commons, and they built it all on the back of open source. And I'm picking on them?

Apple fans will say that Apple created billions of dollars of commerce opportunity. But it would have happened anyway without Apple.

We'd be in a better world if we had an open app standard that worked cross-device and consumers had choice in distribution channels.

We don't need to be "protected" by a company or big brother. Especially if such protection is just a cover story for controlling commerce.

That is exactly the point of permissive open source licenses. Freelancers and commercial companies can build stuff on top of it that makes them money and brings real benefits to paying users.

Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.

The open source part doesn't change anything. Windows has so many hooks that 1984 (the book, not the year) is now a reality in 2020 with DLP software watching employees. Apple's walled garden is not there to encourage growth inside the walls but to extract profit from those that flourish inside of it. And linux is so fragmented because everyone has a great new idea which requires a new X where X is a UI, library, window manager, etc.

Interesting that back in 1980's the Apple II line was frankly pretty darn well open. Sure Apple had copyrights on the assembly, but if you looked at the magazines at the time there were lots of articles giving annotated disassembly of Apple's object code. And yet, Apple sold a bunch of computers anyway. Wow. Fucking genius.

Sure Apple is fighting the Good Fight with privacy (and I've yet to see that it's anything different than pure marketing). But I ask why should Apple need to market "privacy first" when they can just open up their software and show us directly? Let's start by open sourcing any telemetry they send back to the mothership. Is that reasonable perhaps?

The Linux and *BSD communities wouldn't be where they are today without those contributions, no. But they would be somewhere else. Not as far down the road, but down a different road; who's to say that would've been worse?

Sure DOS was akin to open source and formed the basis of Windows way back when but the decades of development have left little left (except what exists to support backwards compatability)

And I do feel that we should focus on the biggest offenders (i.e. Google and Facebook) first, because if there's a precedent the others will get the message quite fast.

Apple is the worst of the lot, by far the most culpable, as they're directly attacking the notion of ownership and computing freedom. They're their own government that has somehow snuck under the radar of the DOJ. They behave like the mafia and offer "protection".

Google is next for the harm they've done to the web. I think we can agree how bad they've bloodied it up.

How can you put Facebook ahead of Apple? They're creepy and invasive, but they're not redefining what we can and cannot do, and they're the easiest to remove from our daily lives and industry.

I want to distribute software and I still have to pay the Apple tax and jump through their hoops, and I'm left without a relationship with my customers. On the other side of the coin, as an owner I can't repair my device or run my own software. Facebook has little impact on my life, meanwhile Apple is a gravitational distortion in our industry.

We should do the same to Apple, Google, and the others. It clearly doesn't erode stock value.

I wish people stopped buying phones with non-removable battery. I sure as hell will not buy a phone if I cannot replace its battery. On the other hand, I think it makes the device thinner, and weighs less, so some people prefers that over being able to replace the battery. Not sure what to do here than to accept their preference.

Key word is repairability here, not necessarily user swapable. You can go buy chunky construction worker edition if you want all the swapabillity if you want to.

How are they worse than Microsoft?

You complaining about paying 99 bucks per year and comparing it with the above is seriously mind-bending. No wonder our privacy's so fucked...

Apple is just as evil in tracking and even more evil in taking freedom away.

I didn't say Google was blameless. Google is horrifically evil. You're just mad I'm also implicating Apple.

You love Apple. And you love it enough to overlook the incredible harm they're doing.

Stop loving a company that doesn't give a shit about anything but profit. The feelings and pleasure you derive is just Apple fitting to the gradient slopes of profit maximization within the market they've carved out. It's engineered, and you're falling for it.

Use your device for what it is, and be happy in the capabilities it gives you, but be a good citizen to your fellow persons. Not a company. Don't overlook their grievances. Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive.

Edit: Downvotes from Apple fans making it further in the thread than those that overwhelmingly agree with my parent comments.

Downvotes from those that disagree with "Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive."

Astonishing.

Also don't pretend to know what people feel just because they buy products from a company. It's ridiculous how you're claiming what I love when you don't even know me.

The argument is not “did Apple create a walled garden and rule it like the actual Chinese Communist Party” because yes it did. The question is, are they alone in doing it, or just successful?

I think the latter, you think the former it seems.

So i can either install any app i want into my factory installed spyware ridden forced updating android phone and windows desktop machine, or give up the ability to control what software I can install my machine in order to gain privacy by switching to apple.

We want both damn it.

And in my case I'll begrudgingly take windows and android over apple, but I don't like it.

Whenever I hear all this lamenting about Apple this, Microsoft that, Google rablerablerable ... we have been told about all of this sine at least 1989! I'm full-time, work and private, on a Free desktop OS since 10 years +. Just put your money and effort into the Free alternative.

It still can't make phone calls without cycling airplane mode between calls.

The one before that would crash if I paired a bluetooth device while connected to one already.

Both of them bootloop at the power off battery charge screen, which basically means i couldn't turn my phone on while plugged in, and unless its a fast charger, the act of repeatedly booting up keeping the phone screen on ends up draining power faster then it can charge.

So. Tell me again about these free and open options.

On the whole I have been very happy with LineageOS as it has allowed me to continue to use my phone for years longer than I would have with the simply bad manufacturer updates that almost completely filled the internal disk space and stopped updating something like 2015 with Android 5. Less unnecessary expense, less eWaste, thumbs up.

For me, I would definitely go with a phone manufacturer that supports rooting their device and put LineageOS on it if I think I need it. I may not install it, but the option for the future is the main thing.

It is interesting how it works for some people, and for other people their device literally explodes.

There are occasional issues, but nothing showstopping for me.

Wasn't the problem originaly that Android phones didn't have any updates?

However, that's still not something being common among Android phones; if the original poster pointed out specific vendors, that would be OK. But saying that it is a common trait shared by all Androids is incorrect.

But it's easier to just think of iThings as appliances with lots of cool use cases instead of general computing machines.

I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm).

My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine.

I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me?

I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart.

NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.

I'm with you on this. And not just because of the reasons you listed. Everything surrounding computers has become so focused on making money that it really, really bothers me. There isn't a single thing on my computer anymore that hasn't been optimized to the n'th degree either to weasel more money out of me (F' you, Apple TV, Apple Music), or built in a way which optimized as much money out of the process as possible (F' you, Mozilla, every single one of you Electron apps out there).

We've become so utterly focused on money and optimizations that the fun and value has been sucked right out of the software - both front and back.

They were business tools! Omgurd! You’re just trying to get kids addicted to media!

It’s pretty fascinating being older and watching these arguments repeat themselves.

In case you haven’t noticed, political life is all about ownership. You’re sold disposable garbage on a cadence by people that own the machines that make it.

Your agency was sold to suppliers. Computing as a system of doing has matured.

And purchasing, well, it's the lesser of evils these days. Purchasing at least gave you vitually cart blanche access to software on your computer with time limits imposed only by processing architectures.

Now, in contrast, everything is moving towards subscriptions. 1Password. Microsoft Office. Photoshop. Sublime Text (professional). Apple Music (or Spotify, et.al.). Apple TV (or Netflix, et.al.). Novlr (a word processor).

All expect me to shell out anything from $1 to upwards of $50 a month in perpetuity for the right to borrow their software. And that's not even mentioning microtransactions, for things like alternate brushes in PS.

I found this article on Stallman's website and it was enlightening for me:

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/

> This approach leads to some great products on screen and IRL, but alienates as well.

> Robotics doesn’t give us a chance to fall in love with the computer if it is not anthropomorphic. Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces.

> It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and — going to a more pragmatic level — we are not able to use personal computers anymore.

> For government agencies, the destruction of hardware is a routine procedure. From their perspective, the case of deletion is thoroughly dealt with when the media holding the data is physically gone. They are smart enough to not trust the “empty trash” function.

> Of course the destruction made no sense in this case, since copies of the files in question were located elsewhere, but it is a great symbol for what is left for users to do, what is the last power users have over their systems: They can only access them on the hardware level, destroy them.

> Since there is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software, you’ll tend to destroy your hard drive voluntarily every time you want to really delete something.

> Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer.

> The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”

Jeus Fcking Ch*ist THIS.

Especially with trivial things like a lite-mode vs this strange fad of dark-mode by default. Dark mode was created to save energy in CRTs. And anyways it gives some people headaches, like me.

I think apple started the trend because their devices were going OLED to improve battery life. I think dark and light mode are good and basically all apps should have both. That way if you hate one or the other you can always turn on the mode you like.

I think the dark mode theming capacity will probably be more permanent this time through, but it could still fizzle out within ten years.

It's one possible use. But the recent trend is about esthetics / usability, not energy savings. Some people prefer light some dark. It probably mostly depends on their work desk environment/lighting. Ideally apps should support both and take the cue from the system settings - we've got proper APIs for that.

Video editing, music creation tools almost never used "the standard platform GUI toolkit" (even Apple has/had their own internal kit used for apps like Logic).

It also stopped being true (or became less true) when cross-platform development became important to some developers and some users, meaning that deeply integrating your application with whatever system a particular platform had was less important than making sure it ran reasonably consistently across platforms.

It's about whether or not the application uses custom elements (or even just puts everything in a Canvas and draws everything itself).

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9...

What people asked for: choose between black on white or white on black.

What people got: dark gray on off color gray mode, or light gray on off color gray mode.

Simply having + honoring a system color scheme is a 100% solution, but then the designers and marketing folks wouldn’t have anything to focus on while they avoid improving the actual product.

In a way, Pangaea has split. Massively profitable giants have emerged as the foundations of the industry have hardened. The industry is mature, but the amount of truly exciting work has dwindled. Microsoft at it’s peak never felt as well-entrenched as today’s tech giants.

I briefly came out of retirement a few years ago to work on a blockchain-related company, which presented an energy akin to the Macintosh or Java, but ultimately it was clear that the industry as a whole has shifted priorities by so much - beyond the point of no return- for better or for worse.

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre...

They have a killer feature: infrared send and receive. Making a network of weird flashy lights is all the joy of computing without any of the “this feels like my job” crap[8].

Press a button and the device appears as a USB drive. You build your project at https://makecode.adafruit.com/ into a firmware file ending in .UF2 and upload it the device.

[1] ...and some battery packs, cable ties, USB A to micro B leads if you don’t have twelve billion already.

[8] You might be tempted by the third party firmware/UF2 called “Circuit Python”, which lets you then code on the device directly in a cutdown version of Python3. For me, that felt too much like my day job :)

99.9% of what you use the computer for is online and websites work great on Linux. Seriously, it's one of the best times in my life to have a computer in my control.

I've never had to make fewer sacrifices to run what I like than today.

Even the phone scene is starting to look like it's going to be opening up in the next few years.

I've gone back to running OpenBSD/FreeBSD on the hardware and relegating Linux to VMs only, with all the hardware pains that used to plague Linux 15 years ago. But at least my OS is predictable and reliable again, and doesn't patronize me.

When I am on Windows or Mac, both of which I loved for a long time, and still do in certain versions, I feel like I never know what's coming next.

One moment you like me, next time you don't. One day you want to be the quiet nerdy kid who's always got my back, that's really nice. But the next day you want to please everyone, rearrange all my shit, and gossip about me to all your MLM friends.

One moment you want to be predictable, dependable, usable. Then the next day you want to interrupt my work while you do your hair.

And I get it, you're trying to figure yourself out, you've got bills to pay, that's totally fine. However, I just won't be able to spend as much time with you anymore, because I'm trying to get some work done. It's not you, it's me.

Maybe we can still hang out sometimes? I'll make some space for you in a VM.

Maybe you need to change OS.

This is not true. You explicitly consented to it by voluntarily installing software that has this (horrific) feature.

In my younger days I had the patience to install Ubuntu over and over again. In my 30s I simply no longer have the heart for it. My M1 mac just works out the box and I can spend more time working on my games and music.

I still enjoy building PCs from time to time, but even then I just install Windows and move on with my day

For many peoples workflows including my own, Windows would pose a far greater headache to get to a productive state. macOS works great, up to the point where you want to enjoy freedom to use your computer as you see fit, certainly less hassle for development (in general) than Windows though imo :)

It’s hardware that does the real work. The software fetish of tricking a limited machine into variety is now full of variety by default as the hardware is much less limited.

No matter the language it’s physics.

Unix is still there. You’re acting entitled to have others sell only what you want.

Just like an old person. Let’s bring back pagan gods and horse and buggy, too, eh? There’s freedoms being trampled somewhere because those aren’t being fetishized at scale.

It’s the arithmetic of a society.