2,549 karma · joined June 8, 2016
> And also more likely, someone they talk to will forget to switch it on and just blab everything into cleartext anyway.
I expect that if you enable a Telegram Secret Chat with Bob, Bob cannot unilaterally un-secret it. I would be very surprised if that was the case.
Of course Bob can then share the contents with Carol via an un-encrypted channel. But every encrypted channel has that weakness.
Let's discriminate more.
Their first project, smoothing out and equalizing the process of creating a new legal entity, seems like an unqualified good thing. Nobody likes notaries, outside of notaries and aspiring notaries. Having Estonia's level of simplicity in business creation would be a good thing for reckless 'disruptive' startups, but it would be a good thing for small brick-and-mortar artisans and shops too.
If one of their subsequent projects is going to be 'let's make tax laws nicer for billionaires', then yeah, screw those guys. But the first one is already a tall order and I frankly think they're unlikely to get political momentum (see: first paragraph.)
If you use KDE, your default icon theme will be KDE's breeze-icon, not Gnome's adwaita-icon-theme, and the problem won't appear.
> *Grant of copyright license*. You give HashiCorp permission to use your copyrighted work in commercial products.
Unless that text was recently changed, or unless Hashicorp went out of its way to verbally reassure people that they didn't intend to ever exercise that option, I feel very little sympathy for any open source contributor who clicked that link and then was dismayed to find Hashicorp using his work in a commercial product.
Read what you sign, and take responsibility.
> I've considered selling exceptions acceptable since the 1990s, and on occasion I've suggested it to companies. Sometimes this approach has made it possible for important programs to become free software.
> [..] [S]elling exceptions permits limited embedding of the code in proprietary software, but the [non-copyleft] X11 license goes even further, permitting unlimited use of the code (and modified versions of it) in proprietary software. If this doesn't make the X11 license unacceptable, it doesn't make selling exceptions unacceptable.
> I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed.
I don't understand how this is a sidestep: could you expand?
https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/categories/headphone-amplif...
They range from desktop-sized, to dongle-sized, e.g.: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/penon-os133-type-c-to-3-5mm...
(I know the head-fi forums have a certain... reputation, but I'd rather link them than one of the SEO spam lists)
Isn't that exactly why audiophiles - in the broadest sense, not just the golden cable types - stick with jack headphones? The DACs and amps built into headphones, or even earbuds, being very likely subpar compared to the one they can pick separately.
Headphone DACs/amps have been a thing forever and they're typically the size of a pack of cigarettes.
(Disclaimer: I made peace with BT since getting the Sony WH-1000XM4 earbuds, and later WH-1000HM4 headphones. I got them originally for the noise cancelling and LDAC support, but they're good enough that I don't hear a major difference with my friend's fancy Audio Technica)
Pharmacies in Italy work much like notaries, although they obviously provide a much more useful service. My understanding is that in part of the US taxis work the same way, with limited # of "medallions" being treated as an investment.
To veer a little off-topic, this is why my biggest economic policy dream would be banning or severely restricting ads and marketing.
The fees you describe are a few percent points. The average B2C company spends 10-15% of their budget on what is, for the most part, a zero-sum game with their competitors. Even ignoring all the aesthetics and societal benefits, imagine the boon to overall productivity.
obviously gradually, and over many years, to make the transition manageable. e.g. increase taxation on marketing expenses by a few % a year so it is less and less financially viable.
It's not quite _spam_ but I think it's fair to say it's much more left-leaning than mainstream Reddit.
Some of the biggest communities, even non-political ones, are on instances such as Blåhaj (LGBTQ-oriented), Lemmy.ML (Marxist-oriented), Hexbear (Marxists on meth).
Short of subscribing to a defederated instance, you need to go out of your way to avoid left-wing content on Lemmy. Whereas on Reddit you could get rid of most of it by unsubscribing from the top 100 subreddits - which is something you wanted to do anyway for the sake of quality, even if you were the world's biggest leftist.
You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but the human aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin forums rolled into one.
Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama - but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on Youtube/Spotify links from it.
Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar company.
This might be me living in a bubble, but OS packages for this kind of server software really feel like a relic the past.
Containers have been around for a decade and we now have tools like podman that run without privileges or daemons. I run my freakin' Raspberry Pi 4GB as a pure container host, just because it makes the system cleaner and more reliable at almost no cost.
Now I'm sure some people still want to `apt install redis`, for example to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of hardware, and more power to them if that's what gives them the best results.
But Debian maintainers have to do a lot of dull, unfun work to update, test, and bugfix native packages for Redis and Mongo and RabbitMQ and... is that really a good use of their precious, unpaid time? To make the UX and performance only slightly better than 'podman run redis'?
Even that is a somewhat temporary hack. The SSPL spreads to:
> "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available"
and sure, AWS and Azure definitely don't want to open source all of that stuff now, or for the next decade or two.
But that's not their competitive advantage; that's their datacentres and their sheer gigantic size and deep pockets, making them a "safer" partner for enterprises. National governments won't run a critical service on Redis Cloud when Azure Redis is available, even if the software stacks were 100% identical.
It's quite possible to imagine a cloud provider in 2040 that does run a fully OSS stack and is able to sell SSPL software on a massive scale without paying a cent to the original developers. Doesn't even have to be a new actor, Amazon could spin-off a separate experimental organization for that purpose.
If that were to happen, could another license solve the problem?
A lot of users, including myself - though definitely still a small minority - quit Reddit over the increasingly aggressive monetisation attempts; some of us used automated history editors to prevent our posts from being scraped or searched (though it almost certainly will not remove them from back end databases).
We didn't know that this was the specific way our content was going to be used, but we knew it was probably going to be something we wouldn't like.
We have now been proved right, and if you decided, back then, to stay and keep contributing to the multi-billion-dollar site for free, now you know why the Cassandras were raising such a fuss.
Gonna drop a wild take - if it's such a problem, have you thought about straight up merging the mini-app store and sandboxed GPS package from the GrapheneOS codebase? I know that they focus on Pixels only due to a lot of low-level security features, but I don't think the GPS sandboxing relies on that.
Obviously it would take a lot of work but it seems that the solution ought to work just as well for any other Android replacement.
Or, to throw another wild guess, are you perhaps concerned that the "blind eye" only extends to Graphene, since they target Google's own devices only (and are lower profile in general, and also apparently contribute a lot of upstream code), while Lineage is much more widespread and well-known so it wouldn't get treated as nicely?
Big fan of Lineage, btw. Before getting a Pixel, Lineage (and its innumerable spinoffs) allowed me to use the excellent hardware of Xiaomi phones without their godawful software.
Ignoring for a second both the human factor and the Sun having gone red giant much earlier... I wonder what kind of ecosystem that would create. If the Earth were tidally locked to the Sun (which is what I was picturing in my confusion), it would clearly end up as two deserts with a tiny strip of life along the twilight circle. But how would complex life evolve to adapt to a 28*24h day/night cycle? We do have decently-sized ecosystems in caves so long nights aren't insurmountable, but being baked to really high temperatures for a month and then cooling down to freezing for another month sounds like quite a challenge.
As for the addition of energy (heat) to the planet, sure, but there's nothing specific about tidal energy here. All energy sources except solar (and wind/hydro which are direct solar derivatives) add heat to the planet that would otherwise have stayed sequestered. But it's many orders of magnitude less than the heating from solar energy, which is why increasing Earth's absorption factor by a few points is an infinitely bigger problem than all the energy we are directly producing or can hope to directly produce in the next few centuries.
> Movement of tides causes a loss of mechanical energy in the Earth-Moon system: this results from pumping of water through natural restrictions around coastlines and consequent viscous dissipation at the seabed and in turbulence. This loss of energy has caused the rotation of the Earth to slow in the 4.5 billion years since its formation. During the last 620 million years the period of rotation of the Earth (length of a day) has increased from 21.9 hours to 24 hours;[10] in this period the Earth-Moon system has lost 17% of its rotational energy. While tidal power will take additional energy from the system, the effect is negligible and would not be noticeable in the foreseeable future.
and there is some simple math in the [Tidal acceleration] page [0] that you may want to read. Basically, the tides slow the rotation of the Earth, with some of the energy being transferred to the Moon but most of it going into friction. The natural friction is estimated at a (surprisingly low, IMO) 3.64 TW, and at this rate the Earth will stop rotating in 50 billion years, long after the Sun has blown up.
So if we want to keep the Earth spinning (albeit slowly) until the Sun goes red giant, we can afford to cut that time down to a tenth, meaning we can produce 36 TW (before conversion to electricity, i.e. ignoring efficiency).
If we are being reckless and just want to use power until we figure out nuclear fusion or something better, let's say a million years or so, we can make some 180 PW from tides. But since it would almost all turn to heat, and since that is more energy than the Earth gets from the Sun, that would probably be unwise unless we find a way to get it off-planet with very high efficiency.
(Global electrical energy production is currectly about 28 PWh per year, equivalent to a constant 3TW or so.)
Instead you'll find it's full of lazy KISS clones that brag about the "minimalism" and "productivity" of search-based launchers... I'm sure that has nothing to do with those being much, much easier to code than ordinary graphical launchers :/
Kvaesitso is the exception, and the one I currently use - it's technically search-based, but it can add enough icons and widgets to the homepage so that during everyday use you don't actually need to type the names of your apps like a caveman.
GUI applications work fine from a distrobox and it makes the integration very painless (eg. VSCodium extensions). You can export them with a built-in command and it will even create a regular desktop entry for them.