HidyBush

Nazi warcrimes were punished retroactively for a number or reasons, political and not. One of the most important ones was that what the Nazis did was blatanly wrong. You can't seriously claim that killing millions of people can be justified simply because there isn't a law about it, it's something so intrinsically evil that you can't rely on pure formality.

Arguably, refusing to publish literally every single document pertaining to proprietary hardware is not on the same level of obivous malpractice as a genocide, so I think you could have proposed a milder example to argue your point.

I don't think you've read my reply correctly. If a law were to come out that said "you can't sell any more X unless it complies with Y" we would still have billions of devices that don't comply with Y. So even if a law about open hardware/firmware were to pass in the next few years, we would still need a huge reverse engineering effort to open up all the older devices. Unless you want to argue that, yes, we should forget about those older devices and all jump on the new compliant platform, I think pushing hard for good reverse engineers is a very implortant priority

What's the point of that? One of the benefit of having a FOSS platform is that you can keep supporting and updating hardware and software that in the normal proprietary economy would have been abandoned a mere few years after entering the market. If instead of pushing for reverse engineering we simply made more and more people buy Linux-compatible devices (which still doesn't mean they'd run FOSS) we would have a humongous amount of perfectly fine hardware locked down and unable to be properly used.

Are all laws retroactive? The EU has now mandated the use of USB-C, does that mean I can bring my iPhone 4 to Apple and have them solder the new port?

What is done is done. Even if some piece of legislation were to come out tomorrow all the older devices would still be completely closed off. Would we have to collectively just push to move to the new open-by-default devices or should we persist in reverse engineering the older stuff?

It seems to me that what the FOSS world needs in order to succeed is an extreme push towards forming a class of programmers specialized in reverse engineering. We already have plenty of capable coders who have written so much useful software, but does is matter if we can't use all the hardware at our disposal? Our devices are filled to the brim with accelerators, sensors and assorted specialized hardware that we could be taking advantage of, but they are all buried behind proprietary drivers or just plain inaccessible firmware.

Are you seriously telling me you expect an ARM board running mainline Linux to play virtualized Android games? This is beyond beyond disingenuous, is somebody paying you to write this or what?

It can play 4k videos and it can play games, but expecting it to play 4k videos through an unoptimized browser with DRM and play virtualized games is extremely disingenuous.

Don't you think there's a difference between "it's annoying I can't watch full blown movies on this experimental phone" and "it's garbage because no Netflix"?

So you backed a developer-oriented project all about open source software and your test to see if it was garbage or not is to consume proprietary video content and play video games through virtualization?

unproductive

tell me more about how updating your car's UI overnight can make you more productive

you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons

A car is a dependable tool. Changing the UI during a car's lifetime is dangerous and unprofessional. I'd say the same is true for smartphones and computers but I guess the majority of people think of them as simple "cool entertainment devices"

Where have I implied that "conservative" means "racist"? If they meant the same to me I could have just written "conservative" instead of specifying "racist"

How can a server know I'm using a different client if all the features are implemented? The condition that you may not use a third party client cannot be imposed by the API but is stipulated externally.

The moment you have a publicly facing API you are saying "these are the rules to talk to us". It doesn't matter what the client is, if it follows the rules then it should work.

A website is a publicly facing API and if two different browsers can talk the HTTP protocol and implement all the other APIs the website requires then you shouldn't be blocked from accessing the website through one of them

Discord clients can't magically implement features that the Discord API doesn't have. The only thing they can do is personalize the experience locally, maybe by changing the interface or implementing more comfortable defaults and shortcuts. This is not a case of a Discord client offering Nitro (i.e. paid) features for free, to get the paid features you have to authenticate yourself through the API meaning Discord still gets the money and everyone's happy.

I was at a phone repair shop and a guy came in saying he got hacked because when he did "something" a new thing popped up that was different from the one he wanted.

Turned out he just upgraded Android to the next version and when swiping down the top bar all the icons were completely different (I imagine it's Android 12?). Can't wait for him to upgrade to 13 or 14 and see what else they can uselessly rework

We still don't have a free software feature phone that has the same polish as bottom of the barrel flip phones from 20 years ago. I have a PinePhone and I'm seriously asking myself how much time it will take to get an experience remotely comparable with even the first iPhone, both in terms of ease of use and features. I believe people are rushing down this road with no real vision of what such a device needs to feel useable. I am planning to start developing something for the PinePhone in foreseeable the future, but just the difficulty in retrieving resources about understanding how the Linux kernel is patched to run on that ARM board, the necessary drivers and how all the various sensors and interfaces communicate really lets me down

It's such a bummer that they use a convoluted platform such as fandom.com to host their stuff. It's borderline unsearchable

the benefits of writing it have to be elsewhere. In the satisfaction of a job done well. In the beauty and elegance of the code. The timeless perfection.

or, more realistically and less rose tintedly, people want to implement a functionality for their personal use case and hack together some code and libraries to get it done as quickly as possible

Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible

I started reading the article and was bored out of my mind. But then the author told me these weren't simple cutting techniques I have already used over and over for decades, but japanese cutting techniques. Naturally this gave it a mysterious and exotic flavor I had never experienced before and now I feel like a medieval ninja when I slice my pretend-japanese carrots! /s

You replied to a "what" question with "yes", it seems to me you haven't actually understood neither the point I was making in my first post nor my question.

You are strawmanning an opinion about a single metric.

Sure, molds are great for the environment! Molds in your lunchbox? not so much. You have built a whole narrative out of sparsely collected news pieces on a single issue.

Buddy, what has that got to do with my reply? lol

Yes, you are very lucky to live unbothered in a nice farm in an ideal place that with warmer climates will become even better agriculturally.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is not entirely made up if rural Sweden

Now add a political researcher to the group and see that percentage drop rapidly

You have no way of knowing. It's a useless thing to discuss.

There is a minimal set of data that your browser (unfortunately) has to communicate to any website.

Duckduckgo or any other search engine cannot simply ignore your IP address so they might as well do something useful with it. If you don't care about search results influenced by your rough IP geolocation you can always manually choose the region you prefer. In any case, unless you are using a VPN or tor, DDG will always have access to your IP. If you don't want someone to use your data in any capacity you should not provide it or there should be a legally binding contract to discourage improper usage by the company, simple as.

we are offering this for free as a community. no guarantees

we are offering this for free as a company. no guarantees

if you think one's criticizable and the other one isn't I don't know what to tell you