Just had a chat with friends about the possibility and how it would likely be introduced.

Paraphrased into the following;

2.99$/Month
OEM installs have a 2 year license
Upgrades are free for the first year (from 11 to the new)
Comes with Office 365 and AI functionality to soften the blow

What are your thoughts on this?

I'm talking about those who host their blogs statically on Github Pages and elsewhere, the small peasants of the Interwebs who collectively make up the biggest portion of it and make its wheels churn with their content and toil.

All that negativity I'm seeing towards Disqus is baseless. They criticize it for showing ads and being less privacy friendly but then which technology today isn't? Name me one company from Big Tech or Silicon Valley which actually respects their user's privacy in practice, not just words. You'll be left scratching your heads for a long time but no name will come out.

And I also keep hearing about these "self hosted" alternatives like Commento but none of them have gained any traction. Building and implementing a commenting system isn't easy even though CMS like Wordpress try their best. Unless you implement social OAuth logins like Github or Google, not many folks will like to interact on your site by singing up for a whole new site account, especially true if you're a small blogger who has just started. And managing all the data communication between the frontend and backend isn't easy.

With Disqus, we get this whole setup and workflow readymade with nice looking dashboard and all, and that too for gratis, not a dime to pay! Then why shouldn't a blogger use it, I'm yet to hear any justifiable answer to this question.

If we talk about the world of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), two popular but conflicting methodologies tried to battle it out in the early to mid 90s - the GPL and Free Software Movement propounded by Richard Stallman, and secondly, the more "liberal" and commerce friendly Open Source Movement propounded by Eric Raymond (ESR).

Because the West is predominantly a Capitalist System, it's the ESR's movement that ultimately won the industrial battle. Most software projects in the FOSS world today are licensed under the liberal or "open source" licenses such as Apache and MIT, not the commons or free software license i.e. GPL.

But on the other hand, the idea of GPL isn't without merits, it was an ingenious attempt by RMS to use the copyright law itself in order to ensure that software freedom and its control stays in the hands of the people who use it (Commons) and not the proprietary companies who are essentially driven by a profit motive and nothing else. RMS foresaw decades ago that when software controls the user and developer controls the software, it opens whole new flood gates of authoritarianism in terms of how the software works and what it does. To a great extent, this is exactly what is happening today with most of the software (especially popular browsers and operating systems), they are controlled by this small group of conglomerates which we call "Big Tech".

Because of how things work in the tech industry, I don't think this situation will change much in the near term unless lot's of folks somehow realize the importance of Free Software and Commons meritocracy, and how "open source" is destroying its interest. Little peasants like us can do our bit by releasing all software under GPL but even that is getting difficult day by day. The more libraries, frameworks or other components your software uses, you must agree to their own license depending on how tight the integration is - which in all likelihood will be an Apache or MIT, not a GPL.

Going forward, I hope more and more software will be written in GPL, especially the infrastructure software like coding languages, frameworks, libraries, IDE, etc. which is used to create application software. But way things are going presently, I'm more pessimistic than optimistic. I have very little faith in GenZ. But eventually, at some point, GPL and Free Software should win because it's a better methodology and has merit.

I just don't get what is so revolutionary about it. It seems like nobody actually wants it in the ecosystem if you look at all the social media, as if it's being shoved upon as an add-on package along with Github, upcoming Windows versions, etc.

CoPilot is becoming Microsoft's next Nokia Lumia moment but they haven't learned from the past experience, they are still pushing and pushing. The only reason this could still be happening is that their enterprise customers may be wanting it? But that doesn't make sense as enterprise users typically still use WinForms apps and Acccess databases on Windows 7 as part of their stacks. They will be the last ones bubbling with joy for an upgrade.

Why are they doing it then?

Now that there are some specs, development news, and Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel benchmarks from the past couple days to discuss (with the exception noted below), I thought I'd put together a few links for people. I'm curious how people feel about this iteration of technology in an ARM package for development, tinkering, or edge AI applications. And are folks enthused by the possibilities (Windows or otherwise), dislike the price points, or tired of the AI/CoPilot buzz?

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows features Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC for AI PC application development

New Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks Show It's a Serious Contender

Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows is a tiny desktop PC with a focus on AI apps

Debian 12 and Linux upstreaming for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC (January, 2024)

Microsoft is already taking orders for both Surface Pro (11ᵗʰ Edition, $999+) and Surface Laptop (7ᵗʰ Edition, $999+)^[1] orders planned for shipping in June. Each can be bought in X Plus or X Elite flavors, though Wikipedia suggests there are several models of the X Elite so I'm curious which flavors we'll see in MS devices.

^[1] Note that I linked to the "business" versions of the MS Store listings because they get straight to the point with a tech overview, etc. The "business" versions are listed for $100 more than the consumer versions.

Sharing this in ~comp, but if there's a better place for this then I'm happy to see it moved to a more suitable location. Thanks!

I'm very sorry, but this is going to be rant. One that may seem to come up almost daily, but I still feel the need to vent.

Every day I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to keep a little bit of privacy and autonomy, without ever winning. DuckDuckGo is my search engine, use a paid mail provider, I try to stay away from anything Google and Meta, use only Signal, ad blocking everywhere, hosting most services locally, etc. It seems, however, to make no difference in the long run. The user-profile-building just seems to enter the home faster than I can mitigate it. Kids install some new app or new hardware ends up listening in, privacy infringement is there.

The reason I'm starting this post now is because I switched ISP and TV provider recently, but it has been on my mind for a long time. Finding one that isn't owned by one of huge 3 parent companies, is almost impossible here. After a year of deciding, I finally figured it was time to throw in the towel and just pick the least bad option. Yesterday was the day of switching and it has been such a frustrating process.

The provided router doesn't allow me to turn off its WLAN. I live in a city, so the airwaves are already crowded enough as it is. No need to keep that antenna on, but screw me, that's not possible. Opened up the device to just remove the card, but everything is soldered on the board and disconnecting the antennas didn't do shit.
It's possible to buy a modem/router myself, but it'll need to follow their requirements and will set me back $200. It would be okay if the rest of the service was great, but here comes the TV part!

The device they use for TV is apparently Android TV. I assumed it would be IPTV with this subscription, but Android TV isn't that. Booting the device makes it immediately clear they are here to harvest data. It makes me so unhappy that a service I'm paying for, is also making money on the side by collecting data. To get a quick idea of what's being done, I routed the box through wireshark to sniff DNS traffic. It's riddled with domains used for data collection and ads. That combined with the features this box wants me to agree to (location, using the mic, access local network, sign into PlayStore, make a profile including real life information) does not make me trust this device. So I've decided to not play and will be sending it back.

People around me are pretty conscious about what they do online, but compared to them I'm highly paranoid. Wherever I look, there are privacy issues. It seems impossible to escape from. How are other people dealing with this?

UPDATE: I don't know if anybody is really interested, but I thought I would update anyway. I decided to listen to my gut and I cancelled the subscription. It feels like the best decision I've made in a long time. It's nice to feel like I'm still a little bit in charge, even though I know that's also just a false sense of autonomy. Suck it, Google! You're not the boss of me :-)

So Slack has been in the news since last couple of days and after wondering what dastardly thing did they do this time to deserve the wrath of Internet Gods, I decided to Google and found that they used the folks' private chat data to train their AI models.

But when I went through the discussions, some folks don't think of this as a big deal at all, some are actually defending Slack. They say, "So what, others like Microsoft and Google and Apple do this all the time with your and my data?". Do you agree with this line of thinking?

At some point, I think this is going to be a privacy nightmare. Imagine Facebook doing something like this with WhatsApp chat data? I think there are some regulations in EU/US preventing Meta from combining the WhatsApp data with their other components but such regulations don't exist in all countries and nothing prevents Meta from exploiting data of users from those countries.

What do you think about this? I think Slack needs to be called out more, not less. And something needs to be done to prevent this situation from happening again.

For some reason, I had always hoped against hope that at least the old domain name will always be retained by Elon's X team, at least as a reminder of their revolutionary beginnings in the form of "setting the bird free" or "liberating the free speech" as it was often called. But today, even that last vestige called twitter, that domain name on the back of which some of us used to mentally stay in the nostalgia, has also been broken - twitter.com is no more :-(

As of now, the domain redirects to x.com, the new one.

However, in our hearts and minds, it will always be "twitter" and we shall call it "twitter"! And there is one more place where the name twitter shall always find a place - the twitter bootstrap open source project which will keep telling the story of where it all began!

I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion.

Personally I first noticed significant degradation of search functionality around 2018 or so, while specifically Google was mentioned at least as far back as 2016. But it is not simply Google or even just general search engines. Any random site specific search functionality or discoverability algorithms on various sites share these trends too.

It really seems that the focus is simply on delivering as many results as possible with actual quality or even relevance being somewhere on the tail end of priorities. It is not even just lack of(useful, consistent) search operators, lack of transparency, lack of structured search possibilities, lack of sorting options, lack of granularity - it is the simple disregard for the basic intent of the query with some implementations sometimes being actually more accurate with fewer keywords with no option to modify this behavior.

It is especially damaging for(at least my) ability to research a topic. A decade and half ago I could go in with a topic I had no idea about and emerge two hours later with a very basic but likely mostly accurate and slightly in-depth overview by refining my searches. Now I'm lucky to get one single thoughtful blog post or discussion among dozens or tutorials, 10-bests and ads with the query being almost completely disregarded and keywords being straight up ignored to deliver this deluge of both low quality and mostly completely irrelevant results.

Are there any projects, search engines or anything other that aim to deliver actually useful, steerable, user directed results?

Is anyone here using https://nebula.tv? Multiple creators I watch are on there, and I'm considering getting a subscription, but I'm just not sure if it's really worth it. Most channels on there don't seem to upload any exclusive content, so I'll basically just get the same videos but for $5/month instead of for free. I've also heard that the app and UX isn't that great.

People who use the service, what makes it worth it for you? Is it just a way to support the creators more?

Hello, every now and then I find myself looking for open-source "self-hosted" (VPS accepted) Google photos alternatives.

I have searched every now and then but I have never found something I felt that suits my needs.

I don't mind setting it up myself with command lines and stuff from an empty VPS as long as the monthly fees are pushed to a minimum.

I do have a certain set of constraints and I was wondering what would be the best app to do it. Any app that I end up trying fail one of these somehow. Or it is an app that I couldn't test adequately on my 2GB RAM VPS. Should I be upgrading first and then testing them?

Here are my constraints:

I would like to be able to share photos privately to friends and family. Like maybe a secret link to share photos or albums with friends.

I would like to be able to view photos on mobile, using Internet. I don't mind opening a mobile web app but I would like to be able to show it.

I would like to have some privacy-respecting face recognition. This also opens up the question of what RAM of VPS I should be using.

I would like to leave the file and folder structure untouched. I have already somehow arranged the files into albums by using folders so bonus points if the app figures that out. However, I would bite the bullet if there is a good solution that asks to "copy" the files into a new folder thereby doubling the storage needed. But I hope to avoid it.

Any help towards the right direction would be appreciated!