What if I say "I spent a lot of time on my appearance, if you look at me you should pay". Do I have the right to bill anybody making eye contact?
180 karma · joined July 12, 2021
You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.
It has already happened. Things you buy have an online/google advertisement markup whether you use youtube premium or not. You pay for the ads no matter if you watch them or not.
Free services aren't actually free, on a large scale they affect how much everything should cost.
> It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
This is because free services are a trap. People do not want to pay for search BECAUSE there are """free""" alternatives. If every services become paid people wouldn't be as reluctant.
Free services also create wrong expectations and change the way we should use the service. Take youtube, it is free so everybody expect everyone to be able to access the platform, and so people tend to only upload to youtube because "why would you be anywhere else". And now, when youtube obviously change its term you have a wave an angry people seeing youtube as a platform that must remain convenient or their world will collapse.
If video platforms were all paid, people wouldn't have the same expectations. Uploaded videos could only target users who also paid for the platform, and would instinctively understand that this is a temporary platform.
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.
I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
As you said culture is probably the best method of preservation. But still fallible, and this may be a good thing!
All humans are fallible, but it may be out of your control. There is no other human between you and your device.
> Yes. Because some apps do more than they claim to do, and users are unaware, and thinking that all citizens can be perfectly informed and thus do not need to put guardrails on app permissions is foolish.
Why do you even have to trust what apps say? That's my problem with this reasoning, we are under the assumption that programs control your device and that nothing can be done about it except adding warnings. Why do programs need instructions to access data? How about forcing the user to plug any environment access into the app? Anything that isn't plugged cannot be accessed, no trust required.
> The lack of control over the data that can be extracted by bad actors that seem like good actors.
The solution is to give control over the data, not with protection, but understanding. You are transforming this tech problem into a human problem.
> The real cause is that humans can be malicious, others can be fooled, and the first goes after the second.
Again no human between you and your device/program. We however decided that software can be malicious.
Making software stable (including for example the web spec) would go a long way improving efficiency.
How many instructions do you need in assembly to compute `1+1`? How many instructions do you need to open your search bar, get the calculator and do the calculation?
We also make software responsible for way too much. Cross-platform is a joke. How can we expect developers to consider every platform? Obviously they will switch to some other magical solutions that promise support (and deliver overhead)
Software lacking composability also mean that if the developer doesn't provide a feature, users will most likely never have it. It is therefore encouraged to over-feature everything in case somebody somewhere want it.
Now, making the base process manual doesn't mean that the user will need to do the same thing over and over. I am not against automation, but I believe that it should come from the user, not a fancy system that some external entity decided is the best way to handle permission.
By outsourcing the responsibility to your data, you are effectively giving up on understanding it.
Ideally, I believe that consumer computers should become interactive/programmable systems where the OS is responsible for exposing all the environment calls, and the apps all stateless functions. The process of mapping environment access to app is manual, but create consent AND customizability. Plus additional benefits like easing the development of cross-platform applications and maintainability.
The online data privacy crisis isn't really about data or the bad actors, but the lack of understandability and control over our own electronics.
To solve the problem you need to make users more involved, remove automation in favor of manual processes but simplified as much as possible. "Protections" are mostly band-aid hiding the real cause.
By "involving" I do not necessarily mean harder, the goal isn't to make computers less accessible, but if we give users the ability to control whatever go in and out their devices maybe that making them a bit more interactive so instead of clicking "yes" to allow keyboard access you could drag a keyboard icon to the app or any other device you want to use as input instead.
Consent doesn't need to be presented as yes/no, there are multiple ways to make users understand what is being accessed.
I am not saying that automation shouldn't be possible at all, but that platforms shouldn't be designed this way.
If users had to consent to contact access, socket connection, and every single packet sent (obviously they would need to become readable to layman) there would be way less demand for data privacy laws.
We need to stop automating everything and then complain that companies aren't putting optional banners everywhere. This is beyond stupid.
The problem is that we first design platforms/APIs to automate everything, and secondly try to make it secure/explicit. We need the opposite.
Why do nobody question the fact that it is possible for an application to access data without user consent to begin with? Why are we transforming it into a human problem? The tech is to blame.
No standard last forever, your bytecode will ultimately deprecate and this is not a "developers should stop being lazy" situation.
Why do projects dump compatibility? Because this is extra work. And no project can receive indefinite support. Simple formats do not depend on maintenance.
So instead of having a binary that contain some syscall to access a key state, provide it the function on startup (or the key state value directly if programs become stateless functions)
As for the simple format, this is IMO the only way to guarantee accessibility as the alternative is having people constantly working on porting software over preferably with source access.
Now perhaps that our software model doesn't make it very convenient, but blaming Apple is completely honest and understandable.
We should stop seeing our computers as uncontrollable machines that must leak data, they are human made
Instead of trying to synchronize humanity against a single enemy, we should try to encourage each of them individually to improve their life by being simple and make them want to switch and notice a clear immediate change.
Climate change has never been the battle to fight, nobody care. If you live anywhere close to a city you definitely don't, you may believe in it, but you do not care. And we should stop pretending that it can change.
To be clear, not because the developer is bad (I did not try it outside of the website demo), but because of the state of software development imposing pointless complexity.
How hard do you believe it should be to play a sound on keystroke?
In an ideal world, this app should be programmable in the same time it takes to read the website and buy it.
Not questioning the reasons why such app need to be paid seems even stranger to me.
As for licensing I agree that it can be seen as a step in the right direction, but at the same time it seems like we absolutely refuse to learn.
All standards inevitably deprecate, I'd prefer every hardware manufacturers to come up with their own one-off ISA and an easy way to run/interpret existing applications.
Software ecosystems are more about locking you to a specific vendor/standard, they prevent the emergence of better systems.
I do not know about Gemini but the problem with current minimal formats is that they cannot evolve without change to the spec, they lack emergence. And therefore when you want to expand on it, you need to add complexity to the spec, not your code.
One of the idea I had was to make all websites provide natural language text, without any standardization (send whatever text you want).
Which would have these benefits:
- Ease website development, your goal is to make the text as simple as possible to understand for a human.
- (also means that website won't have the luxury to send unnecessary data anymore)
- More performant.
- Literally cannot break as it does not depend on any standard. Text will remain understandable forever.
- You can have an infinite amount of browsers, some may only render the raw text, some may render the text and give you very fast tips as to how you should render it, and others dedicated to specific disabilities.
- You can have a working browser in a matter of hours. And the way you expand on it is independent from how the server operates.
- No fancy standard can appear to break this simplicity, as many people would depend on the text being unopinionated.
- Can still support anything the web currently does, but tracking without contentment will become harder. As users would have a deeper understanding of what the website actually is, its text is on plain sight.
However, I do believe the same for operating systems and application binary in general. Nobody would ever complain about X or Y operating system if writing your own was sufficiently easy.
Not saying that we can simplify operating systems the same way we can browser, but we can make it easier to start from a clean base and quickly support Windows, Linux, macOS, Android & iOS app binaries. As an example, how hard is it to interpret an android app binary? Is this complexity really necessary? Couldn't we depend on languages with more emergent behaviors to ease the implementation of VM/interpreters?
Just to be clear, I am NOT and have never said that we should all write our own browser or OS, but that simplifying them would result in more choice and no more begging from users to support X or Y features (which happen in every single standardized/monopoly situation)
> which makes no sense and it's not how anybody does anything in the real world.
In the real world you have people begging everywhere for features to be implemented in software they have no control on. Software standards have never solved any issue, they increase the barrier of entry and make users powerless.
We have no reason to indefinitely use our web.