“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.

No, publicly traded. One of the first steps to enshittyfication.

Depends on how you use it.

I use youtube without login to see videos of specific creators or to search for specific videos.

I have no use for the recommending system.

Yeah, but we are talking 2000-2005 or so.

I wasn’t that much a fan of the skins and found the interface of winamp very small and fiddly.

The milkdrop plugin however was rather nice though.

Maybe someone can explain to me why Winamp is still so popular?

I have used Winamp 2, 3 and 5 around 2000ish, and it was a fine player, but nothing really special. After Winamp I think I switched to MediaMonkey, which IMO was easier to manage my music collection. Then I used VirtualDJ, which supported cross fading between music with synchronized beats. I think I also used foobar2000 a bit.

Winamp was an okayish player, but there was much more powerful software around at that time. It this just nostalgics or is there really something that people miss today that Winamp provided or still provides?

There is a different term for that:source-available

So you can play a racing game in your car, while letting the autopilot kill you.

And so that the manufacturer can sell you a new car, so that you can play newer games.

What I meant is that is caches the password database for offline use.

There is not much difference between having two apps (password manager and authenticator app) or one app, that does both on the same device.

So, if you want more security, then you have to deal with a hardware token and never with a authenticator app. But then if you loose your token, then you have trouble.

I used to use Aegis, but after setting up my own vaultwarden, I use the normal bitwarden app/plugin on all my systems for passwords and TOTP.

The advantages are that I don’t need my phone to login, the keys are synced and backuped in the encrypted vaultwarden database, which I can then handle with normal server backup tools. It still works offline, because bitwarden app caches the password.

This is IMO much more convenient and secure (in a way that loosing access to a device doesn’t shut you out, and you don’t need to trust third parties) then most other solutions.

A customer wanted to used Teams couple of days ago, I couldn’t make it work on my companies laptop, trying three different browers. I just loaded an empty white page.

I had to use a laptop from another customer, that also use Teams, to do so, which worked, but gave me toothache, in terms of security.

Both laptops where on the same network and both ran Debian and I tried the same browsers, without any plugins and jitsi-meet works fine on my companies laptop. So apparently the system need to be specially configured for Teams to work.

I am staying with jitsi-meet, thank you very much.

The customer, I got the laptop from, knew what they did and provided managed Linux Systems for people to be able to use Teams.

Here is the problem: Even paying will not get you out of ads any longer. You bought a TV, well the manufacturer will show additional ads on it. You paid for Windows or a Mac, well Apple or Microsoft will advertise additional services on it, same with Android (Google services) or IPhone.

Just spending money to be ad free is no longer enough, because companies try to find ways to extract even more money (or information to sell others) from you, now that you have proven to have some. Either be it additional subscriptions or vendor lock in. They never have enough money, they just want all of it.

So to live ad free, you have to avoid using any product with profit interest or research every company you deal with on what its incentives are, which is very hard or impossible for many people.

Here is a tip though, try to find hardware that comes without bundled software, and find open source software to use it with.

No idea.

I don’t have access to any CRT TV. I also don’t remember ever hearing it on CRT PC monitors as a child, only on the TV. If I did, then it was just much quieter than the TV.

What I found fascinating at that time was, that it was so noticeable to me, but my parents didn’t believe me at first, when I mentioned it. I had to prove it to them. To me, that was just a normal noise.

Like growing up with an additional sense, and assuming that everyone else has it too.

I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.

“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers. Most projects are from single developers that just throw their project on github et al. and release it from there.