What a strange selection of censored words… “fail to comply”, “The billionaire owner…”, “would strenghten the Australian”, “has yet to be passed”

E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.

Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.

I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.

“Some firefox users like firefox” vs “many chrome users enjoy what they have” sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.

• Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.

Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?

IT guys will stop using it…

No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.

The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.

They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.

They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.

But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.

So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.

Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!

That is how capitalism works, privatize earning and nationalize losses.

Capitalism needs the deep pockets of the government to not collapse into itself.

But to install from local storage, you first download or fetch a storage medium from a remote location with the file on it. There isn’t that much of a difference IMO.

I would not call it side-loading when I download a file and then install it on the same device. Because that is how it has always worked. I never before heard people describing downloading and executing a setup.exe as “side-loading”.

Until some time ago, I always though that “side-loading” is something different. Since I first saw “side-loading” used in ADB, so I thought that it means using another system on the side to load and install software onto a target system.

So to me that seems fitting, but now it seems to be used differently. How is installing software using just one device “side-loading”. What side do they mean?

I don’t agree with the generalization here. Sure, it is generally advisable not to rely on security through obscurity, but depending on the use-cases and purpose it can be effective.

I dislike DRM systems with a passion, but they, especially those for video games like denuvo, can be quite effective, if the purpose is to protect against copying something for a short time until it gets cracked.

Otherwise I agree that software developed in the open is intrinsically more secure, because it can be verified by everyone.

However, many business and governments like to have support contracts so want to be able to sue and blame someone else than themselves if something goes wrong. This is in most cases easier with closed source products with a specific legal entity behind it, not a vague and loose developer community or even just a single developer.

Why would Disney demand that?

Why would they choose slack if they want to host, maintain and be responsible for the internal chat themselves?

They choose slack because they do it for them so that they don’t have to do it themselves. That is the selling point for them.

Businesses buy cloud services, because they do not want to manage stuff themselves.

Protects against what?

What I read here is just a vague critic from him of the relation between hard- and software developer. Which will not change just because the ISA is open source. It will take some iterations until this is figured out, this is inevevable.

Soft- and hardware developers are experts in their individual fields, there are not many with enough know-how of both fields to be effective.

Linus also points out, that because of ARM before, RISC-V might have a easier time, on the software side, but mistakes will still happen.

IMO, this article doesn’t go into enough depths of the RISC-V specific issues, that it warrants RISC-V in the title, it would apply to any up and coming new ISA.

My point is there never will be enough people to leave. Consumer boycotts do not work.

Between thousands of different factors to consider wherever to buy a product from a certain producer or not, child labor, environmental waste, political attitude of the CEO, etc… it isn’t possible to make any decision on what product to consume.

It isn’t about 'unless enough people leave" it is about “unless enough people protest to the government for market regulation” and “unless enough law makers care”.

The free market is not self regulating, at least not with a long term positive effect.

This is the “consumer choice” argument.

The problem is that consumers likely don’t have that choice. The “free market” is really bad in incentivising good long term behavior, they favor short term gains for their stockholders. Thus they likely all switch to practices that seemingly lower cost or raise short term profits. If they can fire employees and replace them with AI, they will do so.

If they would think long term, they would prefer to hire humans instead of AI, because that way they would give their future customers money to buy their stuff. AI will not be their customer. They would pay them enough money to be a happy and good consumer.

Customer choice doesn’t matter here, they either just have to buy whatever is cheapest, or die, because their employers (if they even have one) don’t pay they enough for them to have choice, because short term profits.

“Copying is theft” is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.

If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.

They got themselves into quite a contradiction.

Generally, I tend to think more in the direction of that there is some misunderstanding happening, then people being stupid. Maybe that is just the optimist in me.

What exactly is meant when people say they don’t know git. Do they mean the repository data format? Do they mean the network protocol? Do they mean the command line utility? Or just how to work with git as a developer, which is similar to other vcs?

I think if you use some git gui, you can get very far, without needing to understand “git”, which I would argue most people, that use it daily, don’t, at least not fully.

It also means that anyone can make their own instruction set extensions or just some custom modifications, which would make software much more difficult to port. You would have to patch your compiler for every individual chip, if you even figure out what those instructions are, and what they do. Backwards, forwards or sideway (to other cpus from other vendors) compatibility takes effort, and not everyone will try to have that, and instead add their own individual secret sauce to their instruction set.

IMO, I am excited about RISC-V, but if the license doesn’t force adopters to open their designs under an open source license as well, I do expect even more portability issues as we already have with ARM socs.

“you” as in person with required skills, resources and access to a chip fabrication facility. For many others they can just buy something designed and produced by others, or play around a bit on FPGAs.

We will also see how much variation with RISC-V will actually happen, because if every processor is a unique piece of engineering, it is really hard to write software, that works on every one.

Even with ARM there are arguable too many designs out there, which currently take a lot of effort to integrate.

Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn’t make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.

For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.