In this case, you should get a 3D printer.

The thing is, what use case can benefit from a blockchain?

Scamming, gambling, crime and speculation benefited from the lack of regulation, but barely cared about the underlying concept of a bitcoin.

But for anything real, much better solutions have existed for decades or centuries.

Blockchain is a solution without a problem and has been that for 25 years now.

If you have a solution that hasn’t found a problem in 25 years, chances are that there will never be an actual problem that solution would solve.

So the killer apps of blockchain remain scamming, gambling, speculation and crime. Until there are more stringent regulations, then they’ll go back to Western Union and Paysafe cards.

Happy to help!

Btw, check out Netguard (either the F-Droid version or the one from Github, since these two versions allow system-wide adblocking).

And Newpipe.

If you don’t know these apps yet, they will change how you use your Android device.

Your actions do nothing. You complain on the internet about some guy that said something you don’t like. Nobody from FSF is gonna read it. And neither will Stallman or anyone that matters.

I don’t see you boycotting software related to FSF. And even if you do, it doesn’t even matter, since the overwhelming majority of FOSS users never donate any money at all.

You are no customer of the FSF, you just enjoy their stuff for free.

So your actions amount to angry screaming into a box.

Apparently, Stallman is a net positive for them, so they keep him.

Doesn’t mean that they in any way endorse pedophilia.

And the freedom of association also doesn’t mean that a bunch of enraged people online have the freedom to decide whom they associate with.

And apparently, in the USA there is a whole party devoted to child marriage and other ways to have sex with minors. That might be the better point to start, because they actually have a say regarding laws on that matter.

I’m pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo’s personal views.

We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.

A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn’t matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn’t know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it’s not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.

I totally disagree with Stallman’s views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.

But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.

We have real courts and real police, we don’t need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.

If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.

I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.

As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple adb pm enable [packagename].

I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.

Regarding the launcher:

I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.

To override that, there are two options.

• Install the Automate app by Llamalab and make a small flow that detects when the stock launcher is the currently active app and then automatically launches the new launcher. This option is completely safe.
• Disable the stock launcher. If Android doesn’t find it’s set default launcher, it will instead open the first launcher it finds. Worked good on the Fire Tablet, but I can’t verify that this doesn’t cause issues on a Fire TV. So this might be a bit risky.

This here is the solution for what you want: https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/

You can disable whatever app you want until the system doesn’t work any more. Just install an alternative for what you want to disable (e.g. the launcher) and then disable the Amazon version.

I wasn’t specifically talking about this product alone, but about the general trend. I don’t own any Amazon hardware.

A few years ago, piracy was all but dead because or really good offers like Netflix. All the stuff you wanted was there and the price was ok.

Now to get the same that you got for a tenner a month on Netflix, you have to pay for half a dozen of streaming services.

Youtube forces you to watch more ads than actual content. All services are increasing prices while decreasing what you are getting for that money. And all sorts of products are retroactively introducing ads.

I mean seriously, if someone bought that stick, they paid for it. They shouldn’t have to worry about updates actively making the device worse.

It’s an industry-wide trend that sucks, and it’s one that creates resistance. People start pirating, use adblock and some hack their devices. Not because it’s impossible to have a situation that suits everyone, but because they purpously use enshittification to suck more money out of their customers.

That’s why piracy is back on the menu.

Like, literally. That’s their job description.

That is true, but then you probably are in trouble ;)

That’s definitely a healthy way of dealing with that.

But with this way, something like Linux, Distros, Firefox, Blender or LibreOffice would have never happened. There are those who want to build retail-level open source software, mostly out of idealism, and then you are stuck between a non-monetizable rock and a toxic hard place.

But I totally agree with you, unless you are super idealistic, your way of handling it is probably the most healthy one and the one that will cause you the least amount of trouble. And it’s also what I do, except when I sometimes do get idealistic.

That’s basically right. But it’s quite a difference what you have to do to scratch your itch, and what you need to do for it to be useful for others.

If you do it for yourself, there are no tests or documentation or even a GUI. It’s quick and dirty, all configuration is hardcoded. If you need a different config, you’ll just change the code.

All that doesn’t really fly if you expect someone else to use the project.

On the other side, especially if it’s too polished, idiots will perceive the project as being a commercial one and demand that you do what they want.

If you don’t know the stories, maybe read up on the maintainer of core-js or Marcel Bokhorst. These two people complained about how tough it is to make good open source software. Both talked specifically about their toxic audience. So in turn the audience ridiculed them and they even received death threats.

There’s a saying in German: “Konsequenz heißt auch Holzwege zu Ende gehen”.

Loosely translated, that means something like “Being consistent means also walking the wrong paths to the end”.

Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so “head of software development” meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.

I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don’t understand nerds or open source.

Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.

I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.

I was the head of software development at a 10 year old “startup” with ~50 employees.

The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don’t have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, “some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us”.

I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says “Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that.”

Needless to say, not a single “nerd” bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.

That device was a total flop.

But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.

I did maintain an opensource project for a while and that taught me how to do it correctly:

• Don’t. Just don’t.
• If you really, really want to, just do what you need to fulfill your needs, never do something for someone else.
• If someone is really insistent, say you’ll do it if that person pays for the implementation of the feature, and use your day job’s hourly rate for it.
• Then don’t implement anything you don’t want to, because nobody is going to pay for it anyway.

Or to put it differently: Never see your project or contribution as anything more than a hobby. You will never see an return on investment.