Once a company becomes publicly traded it always gets worse. Once the shareholders are closer to the executive compensation packages than the customers/users it is all downhill. It is like clockwork.

Might take a year, might take 10, but the result is inevitable.

Did you read the article?

To be fair the only reason he actually went through with buying Twitter was because he was forced to.

It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.

Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.

He might need everyone working 60 hour work weeks. But that doesn’t mean anyone should do it.

This whole thing is a textbook example of how bad shady marketing today and can really cause you a lot of pain tomorrow. If Apple had not been so quick to let PR write checks their ass was not ready to cash the conversation around Siri would still just be the casual jokes about it sucking, and not more serious public blackeyes.

As someone in and from the US, good. Private companies are far to prevalent in public institutions all over the world. Something as basic and fundamental as word processing should not be controlled by a small select few huge international companies.

Sounds like another way of saying “there actually isn’t a profitable business in this.”

But since we live in crazy world, once he gets his exemption to copyright laws for AI, someone needs to come up with a good self hosted AI toolset that makes it legal for the average person to pirate stuff at scale as well.

No, I don’t think that is where the cuts will be. But it should be.

It would hurt badly at the beginning, but it would be better in the long run if Mozilla were to lose that Google search payment. Take some of the financial hit out of the c-suite comp package. Let those more interested in tech industry CEO money go work for the likes of Google, etc. Mozilla should be looking to attract someone whose singular motivation is not money.

I week long boycott will do nothing. If that is the most you are prepared to inconvenience yourself to send a message, then just give up now.

While this is nice, I would really like to see more fully independent options that are not just a proxy for Google/Bing. I realize that is a lot easier said than done, but this kind of solution is not providing a real alternative in anything but name only. Google/Microsoft fully control the APIs being used. so this only exists so long as those they are trying to provide an alternative for allow them to exist. Which will not scale if they are anything but a blip on the radar.

Oh I don’t disagree, it is worth it. I ended up paying for it myself before I switched to Joplin. I just went down a rabbit hole of realizing I technically could self host the backend and stubbornly tried to make it work well beyond what was good sense at the time. 😅

Sounds to me like Amazon is reducing the value proposition of their product. For me, additional roadblocks to being able to enjoy something they way I want when I have paid for it reduces the value of the product itself.

For example, if a DRM free book in an standards compatible format costs $20, then the DRM version I can still download for offline viewing is worth $10. The DRM version I can’t download is now worth more like $1-$5 depending on how badly I would want to read it while still supporting the author.

And yes, ebooks from the major sellers aren’t worth much to me and I rarely rent (because you’re not really buying) them.

It is a really good app. But was a pain in the ass to keep the archive in sync using multiple different platforms without paying for their sync addon in my experience. You can roll your own sync with stuff like Syncthing, cloud storage, etc. But the archive had a bad habit of seemingly finding ways to get out of sync.

Because X is owned by a pro-hitler probably Holocaust-denying shit heal.

How quickly most companies have walked back all of the “moral” stances they have taken over the last few years, all within just a few weeks of the political winds changing, should be a lesson to everyone that there is no such thing as an ethical publicly traded company.

They will do what they think will make the most money for the shareholders, no matter what. If you want them too “pay”, the only choice is to stop giving them money.

There is a better chance that user reporting for this will be disabled more so than it is that this would make a difference. You know that right?

If this latest drama with Apple Maps (and Google Maps) is what pushes someone over the edge to looking for more user respecting options then the people further gone than I would really be comfortable getting used to. Both companies regularly do much more than should do more to turn you off.

There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something “good enough” that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.

Isn’t a single teacher or statement. But how I was generally treated by the institution.

I am somewhere on the spectrum and/or have some kind of learning disability that makes the formal learning environment very hard for me.

I was tested as a kid back in the 80’s, but they said I didn’t score bad enough to be diagnosed and that I was just slow essentially.

So the school system stuck me at a desk in the back corner of the classrooms with a divider between me and the the rest of the room and more or less treated me like a leper.

Whatever the official diagnosis, I ended up getting into computers and turns out I am really good at it. So now I make a six figure income doing something I am interested in.

The experience ingrained in me a deep hatred for formalized education, especially when it comes to my son (who is officially diagnosed as autistic). I have a very hard time taking anything my kids teachers say seriously and as anything more than the rantings of a narrow minded fool. Thankfully, my wife being the wonderful person that she is keeps me in check with that. And reminds me not to think my experience at my backwater school was the norm. And I think she has been right this far thankfully.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.