tigroferoce

Do you think that software comes out of thin air? It takes time and effort to develop and maintain software. The fact that it doesn't cost to reproduce it doesn't mean it doesn't cost to create it in the first place.

Absolutely incredible indeed! People asking money in change of their work, how dare they? /s

All these years where megacorps gave people stuff for free have tainted the minds of many.

If you questioned the subscription model over the perpetual license, that would be somehow acceptable, but assuming everything must be free is just non sense.

Great article. I'd be interested with something similar for industrial and public transit cases.

I totally get that it's feasible to run a common household with 100% solar+batteries, but I'm less convinced a train or an hospital can be run during a winter evening with solar+batteries alone. Let alone one of those new fancy AI datacenter.

Italy (and others) could (and should) do both.

Only thinking in terms of cost is short vision IMO. What happens if in 20/30 years you need to dramatically ramp up the energy generation (maybe everyone will drive electric, maybe house heating will be electric, maybe someone will come up with a new tech that requires a huge amount of energy, ...) and you already covered most of the roofs? or panels and batteries are at their end of life and you need massive investments just to keep up with the status quo?

I woulnd't go in a fight with a fist tied behing my back, and global warming is one of the biggest fights we must face.

On one hand I agree, on the other hand, their claim that they are too small to support a large community of developers is not wrong.

Also, they claim "zero telemetry", so I don't really know what's going on, I know it's not leaving my computer.

I find that currently even if it's far from perfection, Orion is the lesser evil in the browser scenario.

It's not just that. It's that the rest of the world is moving at light speed compared with EU. If people in EU want this project to survive, they need to change attitude, a lot.

If they are OK to let the EU project fail, they need to consider what the world will be. Europe has never been composed of dwarfs, but that's what every single EU country has become in the past 50 years.

Without US influence, away from big players, with less and less performant economies and industries, without a plan, with a difficult neighbour to address... it's going to be extremely difficult for Europe.

You are right for sure saying to wait for the actual repos.

But on the other hand, compare this announcement in a README.md file in a GitHub repo with this slideware approach of EU https://openeurollm.eu/

If I had to bet on someone providing some value, unfortunately I wouldn't bet on Europe.

I'm saying this as a European, deeply convinced that Europe is a good place to live. I've also worked for a couple of EU funded research projects, so I have some background experience on the outcome of these projects.

Then thank you for the service. I'm using Kagi since a few months and I love you guys!

OK, but what about the rest of the world that doesn't get to vote for this?

I'm adding onto this: I think that the whole SPA concept is wrong most of the time. You want most of the time some sort of state persistence in the url, so that you can bookmark/pass around something that is meaningful, not something that is always the starting point of everything.

If I'm seeing a list of todos and I've filter actives there's really no benefit into not having the filters reflected in the url. The same goes if I'm navigating some data in the form of some table and I'm, let's say, at page 2.

100% agree with this. And I’d put most of the software into this category.

Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.

Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?

Ok, but think what would happen if you made a subscription and the provider went bankruptcy. Or was acquired by someone who shuts down the service? You would have payed for something that all of a sudden disappears and you have nothing, not even an old unsupported version fir the time you need to find alternatives.

I strongly believe that Google Video would have been killed by Google long ago. They bought YouTube because they couldn't create it themselves. And they never managed to turn that into a real product, IMO.

But there are just my opinions, of course.

It's not that it's not big. It's that it's not as big as it could be. It's not gmail-big or maps-big, at least for me. It is outclassed by many other, in their respective niches (video streaming, music, and social networking), and despite the huge efforts, Google never managed to turn it into a subscription-based service.

It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.

I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days.

One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).

And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.

This is not necessarily true. For instance someone coming from Linux might be uncomfortable installing non open source source from not trusted origin (I.e. not the distribution package manager).

Also, installing anything anywhere is potentially a huge security risk, so I see why people use browsers as convenient sandboxes for trying out software.

I (and I think many people here) would be more than happy to pay a reasonable price for a reasonable product (haven’t tried yet this, but I think anything between 2$ and 10$ would be fine).

I know that software is not free to build, so I don’t expect it’s free to use. If you want to keep the product free, you can always add a Donate me button, to let people show their appreciation.

Kudos to you for letting us know what is the way you expect to make money. I try to never use software or services where the “making money” part is not clear.

I wouldn’t probably pay for a service, but I might be happy to pay a one time fee for a function that dumps the todo file (I understand it’s a csv) every time there is an update so I can integrate that on some other workflow (like committing to git, or importing into obsidian).

Another thing I might pay for is a iPhone app so I can mark todos completed on the go, but it’s probably very difficult to to a always on window there.

I also do that sometimes. Like when they put you on hold when you need them? I put them on hold when they need me. I go like "sure, I'm very interested.. can you just wait one second?" and then I put the mic on mute and go on with my life. Some of them are desperate enough to call back.

What I usually do is keeping them on the phone as long as possible with questions and then tell them I don't want what they are selling.

I worked in a place that had call centres as part of their business and I know that they classify calls into hit or miss. Miss calls must finish as quickly as possible and they know that if they keep miss calls under a given duration they are gaining money.

I want to be the person that makes them lose money.

I’m curious about your region and your social circle (genuine question, not provocative).

Absolutely zero of my contacts use signal. Some use element. Zero use iMessage. Almost 100% use WhatsApp.

I’m in Europe, middle class, family with kids, both parents working here.

The current scenario is so broken. You have multiple different platforms that do not interoperate with each other.

Different platforms have become the standard de facto in different regions of the world (iMessage in us, WhatsApp in Europe, WeChat in china, ..).

All of these platforms belong to private companies.

A sane landscape would be having platform interoperability, at least for the most common features and then let companies compete on features, not on user networks.

In Europe it is virtually impossible no to use WhatsApp, especially if you have kids. I don’t like it, but it’s one of the service I use the most, because I’m forced to.

Also, this dream ends the very moment you need an hospital. Hospitals are complex structures that require immense amount of resources to operate. Not not mention the resources needed to develop drugs, train doctors and so on.

Maybe you could live a solitary life, on your own, using only what your land provides you, but there's no way you could access modern health care, then.

Same goes for Internet access (all those subway cables were laid by somebody, probably subsidised by some government, at least partially).

Same goes for roads, and so on.

This is a myth very few people could live because the others don't and one way or another support them.

I have to say that in Italy (and Europe) in general they are not that bad. Still way behind google maps. Like anything else unfortunately.

Anyway my point stands: if something doesn't have a clear business model, I'm not happy using it. If the business model is ads I'm very unhappy using it.

Fun. I get your point, but I, on the other hand, can't happily commit to a service that is "free".

The real problem of Apple Maps is that outside of the US it's quite poor, so one is forced to use google maps quite frequently.

I might agree, but my experience with this brand in particular is that I buy much less devices, and I pay them more. All in all I think that the money I spend is similar, but the quantity of devices is lower.

Again, this is MY experience, in MY context, with MY use case. I believe that my use case is pretty common, but I might be wrong, of course.

My point is that if there is a market for devices that can be easily repaired, then there will be devices that can be easily repaired. If there is no such a market, then there will be no such devices.

If the second case is true, we can clearly mandate this by law, but then we must explain the reasons behind it, and we must also search for alternative ways of enforcing such reasons.

IMO the modern devices are way too complex to service on your own for most of the people. And those who might be able to technically do that often times are not interested into actually doing it. Also, the tradeoff that such a serviceability would imply might be not interesting (e.g. bulkier device, more complex waterproofing, less sturdy chassis, ...).

Again, it's my personal opinion, based on personal experience, but since we do have alternatives (e.g. the fair phone) and since these devices are not that widespread, I'm afraid my opinion is more common that you'd think.

> Its a phone for christ sake, they only last a few years, where have you seen this issue even come up On this point I don't agree. My iPhone is about to be 5 years old, it's fully functioning and I'm about to pass it to my daughter. The only repair I did was changing the battery at an Apple Store, which cost around 100$ and took a couple of hours.

For me this is a decent service and a decent device lifetime (provided it will stay in my kid's hands for a few years more).

In the past I had to deal with non original repairs (in specific batteries for HP laptop) and my experience was truly truly bad. True, it was 15 years ago, so battery technology might have changed.

I don't really care for self repairing. I understand that there are people that care for that and I respect that; for them Apple probably is not the right brand. For me, personally, a phone or a laptop must work as expected, have a decade of lifetime, and might require servicing a couple of time during its lifetime max, for a reasonable price.

So far, my experience with Apple tic these boxes.

I second you word by word.

Years ago I was brought to twitter compared to Facebook exactly because you could read without being logged in. After a few years it had become a hellish place with lots of flames and arguments, but it still had some value. It became clear that my engagement was mainly to discuss with random people about things knowing they would never change their minds (neither would I) on things like Covid vaccines. It was a huge waste of time, but I found it out that surfing it as non logged would amore allow me to read without being able to reply to the most stupid comments. Some sort of read only Twitter. Now that it has gone, Twitter has irrelevant.

Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part.

A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs.

And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement).

Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?

Or git push if you are using GitHub pages?