namingthingsiseasy

If you want to see what the world would look like without the GPL, just look at how the BSDs are getting shanked by Apple (and many other companies too, but they're the biggest).

If it weren't for him, I have no idea what Linux would be today. No doubt in my mind, RMS is #1 on my list of most important software developers to have ever lived.

Software engineer here. There are so many projects that I'd love to contribute to, but can't because my regular job gets me so mentally exhausted and I can only switch context so much. My job is fulfilling, don't get me wrong, but there are so many other projects that are desperately in need of help but can't get any because it's not profitable.

I'm looking forward to the day that I switch to a more relaxing job so I can do some more side projects. I know exactly what my retirement is going to look like. Fuck the economists for telling us what's important and what isn't. They only think about one thing: money. And as long as it makes money, it has purpose in the world. They can't possibly fathom that there are important things in the world that don't fit into their one dimensional economic view of the world. Fuck them so hard!

Impossible fucking language though, isn't it? One of my colleagues is natively Hungarian and even he says he doesn't like speaking his language because of how hard it is.

I probably shouldn't extrapolate from a single data point, but that's all that I know about it

There are terrible people everywhere. California and New York have 10s of millions of residents - there are bound to be some that are shitstains. The problem is that money = power and when it's possible for one individual to have too much money, it inevitably means that terrible people will be able to amass this kind of power.

This is why wealth (in)equality is important - it's what determines how much powerful individuals are able to become. If it's too easy for a single person to amass too much power, inevitably, the wrong person will be able to gain it.

Same here. Sure, KDE and Gnome may have great Wayland support by now, but what about other DEs? The situation in XFCE seems to be pretty grim:

It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).

MATE seems to have piecemeal support. No idea what the status of LXDE/LXQT are. And there are plenty of other window managers that don't have the manpower to support wayland either.

The deprecation of X is going to leave a lot of dead software in its wake.

You say that today. Give it a couple years. I'm pretty sure that by 2030, the cost will be ~100 dollars/euros/whatever per month and you'll see 2 minutes of ads for every single minute of content you watch. (Okay, maybe the number of ads is an exaggeration, but I don't think the monthly cost is.)

Don't pay the Danegeld. It never makes them go away.

when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities

The problem is that this will never happen. That boat has sailed - companies will never give up on their existing revenue streams. They may say that paying today will exempt you from the ads, but it's only a matter of time before they ramp up the cost and start showing ads anyway. That's how cable television started, and it's how internet streaming will end as well. And as for the not selling data/controlling the algorithm, well you have no way of proving that they don't do that so they'll do it no matter what they say.

There's no reason for google to do this whatsoever. They have their business model - any new revenue streams will 100% definitely not reduce the other ones at all. It's just gonna be another giant dump into the pile of enshittification.

Thanks for explaining. That's insane. I guess the only real solution is to unionize. If there's no legal protection, then I suppose a union is the only thing you can rely on to prevent yourself from getting fucked over like this.

I sincerely hope people take their experiences from this dark period of history and learn from them.

The reason why American tech workers haven't unionized is because when times are good, they think they don't need a union, and when times are bad, it's far too late.

Source: reading too many of hopeless comments like this on hacker news

Speaking of labour protections, is this even legal? Or is it a case of illegal, but good luck with the courts? I would think that at least California would have protections against something like this.

For example, let's just consider housing: imagine you bought a house when interest rates were 3% - now they can just force you to sell it and buy a new one with a 9% rate (or force you to rent)?

But I guess they can just call it a layoff instead so they can get away with it or something

At least Lemmy data is public for anyone to read. I don't care that much if random groups are sucking up all this data for themselves - it's worth it in my opinion because it means good actors can use it for good too. If it were all going to one company, I would be less happy about the fact that they could just black hole it all for nobody's benefit but their own.