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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • This is what the American people voted for. They voted to give their money away to people who don’t need it.

    We’ve been warning people of this for more than 8 years now, trying to soften the blow. At some point we gotta realize that protecting these people might not actually be helping, it might just be enabling the grift by providing convenient cover.

    Maybe we ought to just step aside and let these voters suffer the full consequences of their actions. Democrats need to learn that unlike them, many people only learn about consequences by experiencing them.

    Sure, many others who voted against will suffer the consequences too. What are we going to do about it? This is how democracy is designed to work.


  • The point, in one sentence:

    If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

    Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

    Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.










  • I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).




  • Silly of you to assume that that is about end user’s free speech and not the “free speech” of a company to release a product to market.

    In all seriousness, I think hostile foreign governments have an interest in destabilizing the public discourse of other countries. I get the memes comparing data collection between TikTok and American tech firms. But the fact remains that the US government can reign in foreign influence of domestic social media, where as it has absolutely no control over foreign social media. The fact that border protection never extended to the digital space is in hindsight kind of strange. It’s also completely asinine to expect any sort of free speech on a platform subject to an authoritarian government.



  • The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

    https://opensource.org/osd/

    Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

    So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.