poisonborz

The situation is of your own making. You can change/get out any time.

I didn't, but guess: a lot of happy-babbly words without much substance or stark opinion. What's the summary? "I love this job, there are challenges, but I can master it well". Well..ok, thanks?

> probably 50 cents to cover it's costs

Right now it costs absolutely more than the subscription price

> it's lack of personal capacity, either skill or time wise. some people simply can't do that

That's just an usability issue that needs to be solved. In 2002 nobody could believe that even elderly and children could use smartphones 20 years later.

A server could be a $30 silent soap-sized box hanging on the router consuming 5 watts, you plug it in and it sets up services and domains ready to access. Why would this be a nightmare? It is already feasible on all levels. Assuming the house has fiber, reliability shouldn't be much of an issue.

> each of us should self-host their stuff when we could perfectly well just share one machine?

Actually yes. The golden rule of selfhosting is that you don't host for others. Then you are just hosting, with all the annoyance that comes with it. Also I might have different needs than my siblings, different software, settings and so on. Extreme example: police warrant for a sibling, and they take the family server away? Who is legally responsible for what is hosted there? Families could share a single car, or a single bathroom, realistically multiple families even - yet anyone who can afford it will opt to avoid that.

So along with sovereignty I will always opt for the most independence and freedom. The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

The base premise was already bent: sell access to community-uploaded material. I know Google Maps does this on a much grander scale but at least the data is more or less accessible for everyone.

I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.

> There are no incentives for the major vendors to implement protocols that will threaten their massive advertising revenues.

In 1996 there were especially no incentives from corporations for a free operating system to exists, yet Linux was born on the back of a few hard working engineers and the whole industry catched up, it created a lot (if not the majority) of business. You can engineer ~free and easy self-hosting.

I agree it needs to be personal, there are no appealing middle-man options.

Deeply disagree.

Looking at the current selfhosted landscape and saying "nice but nobody will want to do this" is like looking around in 1970 and saying "nobody will want to own computers, you just rent them for tasks".

I say this after copious amounts of invested time over a timespan of 15 years to selfhost. The software landscape changed immensely. Especially now with AI, the software output and ability to learn is night and day. Software projects specifically targeting selfhosting as a mission is a somewhat new phenomena, before we had small business/enterprise tools that just happened to be down-scaleable for personal needs. We're not very far off to have great - and not just okay - click-to-install solutions.

If you don't own your infra, you are dependent. "Community hosting" is just hosting with a less reliable and more finicky admin. E2E on corporate cloud is nice but the price and terms may change any day. E2E in cloud itself is under scrutiny. A for-profit will bow to whatever legal framework they operate in. They will always want to increase those profits, easiest way for that is at the cost of what they own: the userbase and their data.

Selfhosted security is an issue, but individual users are harder to scrape/target and offer less of a bounty beyond basic/defeatable script attacks.

Instead of a defeatist attitude why not just solve the issues, they're not that hard.

That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.

Wondering about the consequences to the Hungarian government, which is by far the largest spender on Meta political advertisement in the EU (yes, bigger than Germany or the EU Parliament itself). I only have last year's data (per capita), since then the spending grew significantly.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/BFvCl/2/

The comment above was describing in great detail how this is not the case and after some initial effort should prove no difference at all.

I can attest that this is the case, worked in a number of countries there.

Free open source alternative: https://pairdrop.net

First rule of Firefoxing: use a fork instead

This "simplicity" the author strives for is a fallacy. Simplicity means something different for everyone.

I reflect on this as a user: I've been a Windows user since around 1996, and most of my workflow is unchanged, I still use the ~same software (new versions of course, but those old versions would mostly still run). This could be even more true for Linux. Apple had a wilder ride, but you can always emulate. This isn't about user experience, more about a mindset, that newer generation seems to tragically forget. Once you buy a service, you give up control and ownership. Same way how artists, works and prices constantly change on streaming platforms. On the surface it seems easier, but...

For your example, Microsoft can alter that price any time it sees fit, discontinue platforms you use, alter the interface drastically or cut a crucial feature in tomorrow's update... I wouldn't cope with such, and am sorry for those who must.

Software is and ideally must always be a hammer. It is only since the last 15 years that monopolist platforms try to trick us believing they are not.

Use the least amount of dependencies, only old mature stable APIs, obviously offline only. This way you can be pretty sure the environment can be easily emulated.

How incredibly and criminally maliciously vague is such a legal paragraph for an app written for their own OS.

It's not a casual comment in the sense that I have genuine concern every day that the current world we are living in is enabled by common employees. I'm not saying everyone should solve world hunger, "NGO or bust" - and yes, the job market is tough - but especially for software engineers, there are literally hundreds of thousands of companies requiring software work and who do net good or at least "plausible" harm, and pay an above average salary.

Also I only read the comment above, it's you who can judge what you contribute to and what you find fair. I just wish there were a mandatory "code of conduct" for engineers. The way AI is reshaping the field, I could imagine this becoming more like a medical/law field where this would be possible.

I work in IoT telemetrics. The company is rumored to partake in military contracts at a future point, that would be my exit then.

Based on what you listed I would seriously consider the broader societal value of your work.

The problem is not the technical reliance, EU is relying on the US, full stop. This isn't a question of making a new EU cloud hosting provider (already hard). This turn of events was completely unexpected and decades of strategizing crumbled.

Watch them not enforce this at all whenever they need something from the US, like how they delayed (and afaik still do) heavy Google/Meta/Apple fines for DMA. Laws don't matter, only enforcement. See TikTok ban.

MAC is easily spoofed, most smartphones do it already by default - although only per session

I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.

It is only enforceable since a few months. Group chat comes in 2026 and voice/video in 2028. This is still a developing story. One of the problem is that the developers need to explicitly ask for interop and they are seemingly not doing it.

Or just have governments enforce iteroperability which the EU is doing. This will invalidate e2ee to those parties initially but makes the eventual switch 100% easier.

Don't expect these companies to be interested in the actual browser / DOM rendering technologies and the betterment of standards. They'll be run of the mill Chromium forks.

Eg. when you live in a premium apartment. For even moderately nice houses 20 years of rent would pay a third of the home's value at the start of the renting period. And rent will never increase as much as the property value, no taxes and maintenance. It's much cheaper AND simpler, especially if you are unsure how long you stay.