Didn’t see any mention of dungeon crawl stone soup so I’m adding it here

I like it

Some stuff won’t work such as android auto

Google hasn’t understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.

These days that’s not… Something they’re interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that’s just a hook to reel you in. They’ll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. “Ai” is hot right now so that’s the buzzword.

I don’t get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore…

There’s an issue at play here that I think we’re not confronting enough. America has been on a steady march of deregulating in the name of corporate greed. Some of the most functional countries in the world are also the ones with the strongest regulatory bodies (granted they’re also largely petrochemical profiteers, I do have criticisms even of countries that I think are doing better than the US) because there’s a presumption built into the system that if left unchecked, the forces of greed will violate the liberties of the populace. Its not a coincidence that the only countries that faced major Y2K bug issues were the UK and the US. Germany, Nordic countries, and Benelux countries all ALSO faced this bug, but in those countries the consequences for fucking up banking data was fines. In the US and UK, the consequences were someone might sue in civil court. Much less scary for banking institutions so they continuously acted like the problem was someone else’s problem until the last minute.

My point is this: regulations work. We have case studies in other countries that they work. We don’t implement them not because they don’t work but because they require long view systems change and the political system we live in doesn’t encourage thinking long term. Political funding efforts encourage thinking of policy in 2-6 year terms instead of the actual 30 year time frames it requires to plan them. Its much easier to pull a quick grift with political power weakening the overall system than it is to FIX the system. It incentivizes corruption. THAT is the issue that needs addressing and one we should really be trying to assess what the Benelux countries are doing so well

There’s a ton of far right wing privacy advocates. For me personally, a social libertarian / anarcho communist, it seems like theyre drawing the same conclusions about privacy advocacy and open source from a completely different set of premises. For me, I view privacy as a right that’s been eroded ever since the advent of the concept of total war, to the point now that capitalists engage in surveillance espionage casually to sell collected data not even to the highest bidder, but instead at commodity prices. What’s the inflection point of supply and demand, basically

Meanwhile a lot of people on the right wing don’t view open source as a great equalizer, benefiting all of society, but rather as a tool for themselves for personal benefit. I honestly never fully find myself understanding their premises to be honest. But I’ve for sure seen antisemitism and racism arguments bandied about, which is a Y I K E S.

As far as public perception goes, I don’t really know what to say there. Yeah, I guess, it is indeed frustrating to have your average John or Jane assuming anyone using an encrypted messenger is probably a terrorist. I don’t think the solution is give up, but instead explain your stance and premises

They hold back security patches. That’s a 1000% nope distro

Its not a privacy problem, its a software being up to date problem. Elementary is slow to be updated so you’re going to spend a lot of your time debugging and troubleshooting why your wifi isn’t working, what’s the deal with your font rendering, why is the login screen acting like that?

No more add blockers. No more accessibility tools. Only what google wants you to see.

We do to google what we should have done to Microsoft: we stop visiting those sights

We also need to raise awareness about what giving google hegemony over defining what the web will be means.

I’d be happy to hear that’s true. They were originally an aggregator until Google changed their api

I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.

• Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
• Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
• Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it

Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.

Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub