HN user
www.davisr.me
Your language is far too kind for the invasion of privacy and our human expectations of what ought to be permissible. It's not just about being "recorded" in public. It's about having all public excursions recorded, cataloged, and analyzed. What this panopticon of private surveillance is, is way more similar to "stalking" than "recording".
So all I gotta do is eat some poop and it will save me from becoming a handsome, funny, unique genius?
Are you AI? You joined HN 5 years ago, dawg.
That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices.
To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU) is a desktop client for managing the device offline, licensed AGPLv3 but sold for $12. Be aware, it is my software.
What an absolute failure of their management. I've been using and developing for reMarkable since 2018 and the writing was on the wall back in 2021 when they moved their focus from making a useful, durable product (the RM1) to flashy marketing and poorly designed hardware. The company I originally liked died when their original CTO, Martin Sandsmark, left.
They had so many opportunities for growth. They could have written more useful software. They double-downed on a bad file format, their program data should be natively represented in PDF objects, not JSON+binary with extra rendering required. They didn't engage with the developer community hardly at all, who literally does free work/evangelism for the brand, and knows their product better than their own employees. They can, and still should, make their software as open-source as possible, and take the best community improvements back into their mainline. They need to fire their "UX" people and put someone in charge who knows what good software should be (hint: it's not putting commonly-used buttons behind another button, just to make way for your brand's logo at the top of the screen).
I don't even want to know what their cloud spend is, but they are absolutely getting ripped off there. They need to get on owned infrastructure, and second they need to move off all of it as quickly as possible and give people the means to host data on their own network storage. It should not cost users over $40/year to host <8 GB of files. They need to give users a native option for self-hosted cloud sync and stop trying to lock customers in to their crappy SaaS-ware.
IMO if the company goes under, it will be a boon for RCU, rmfakecloud, and reManager, but ultimately after enough people pull away (and it's already started, no one can afford luxury goods, 50% of consumer spending is by 10% of the population), none of it will matter much in two years.
There is also discussion about this happening in /r/RemarkableTablet:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1ssquyu/r...
Hey mods/dang, can you put this back on the front page please? No reason to bounce it. Important licensing discussion and relevant!
[flagged]
It's not revisionist. The entire NeXT codebase was literally compiled with GCC.
Just browse with JavaScript off, or with NoScript. People think it's inconvenient, but it's really not.
I love what Microsoft is doing. Keep it up!
Not a single mention of General Magic or Magic Cap, the software running on the tablet? Smh.
Copyright licenses are not one word. They are written with intent, and usually at minimum that intent is to credit the original author.
CALEA has given the FBI backdoor access to all telecom traffic for the past 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
No, Microsoft is staffed by over-educated conformists who were specifically hired to maintain that empire.
If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. You can't be mad at the lawnmower that cut your foot off, it's just doing what it does.
Because the World Economic Forum, where our political and corporate leaders meet and groom each other, point-blank advertised "you will own nothing and be happy."
"Fauxpensource", if you will.
No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.
You can use CSS for interactive-esque things like that. Use JS for all I care, just don't make it mandatory. You /could/ refresh the page with new values. You /could/ paginate your flow. You won't, because you'd rather spend 50 hours getting your JS to work right, than 5 hours writing some PHP.
Pity.
Yeah... or...... maybe they should just build websites the proper way the first time around, returning plain HTML, perhaps with some JS extras. Any user-entered input needs to be validated again on the backend anyway, so client-side JS is often a waste.
I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
I use KDE Marble (OpenStreetMap) and Invidious. They work fine.
Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
And that's why webshit is webshit.
I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
I can, and besides the point, why should anyone run random desktop apps? (Rhetorical question, they shouldn't.) I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
Did I say abandon? No. I said it should not be required. JavaScript should be supplementary to a page, but not necessary to view it. This was its original intent.
JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Horribly at that, with poorer accessibility features, worse latency, abused visual style that doesn't match the host operating system, unusable during times of net outages, etc, etc.
I'm hearing you say, "don't waste your breath because change is not possible." And there you have your self-fulfilling prophecy.
To quote someone who lived before me: don't accept the things you cannot change. Change the things you cannot accept.
And the no-JS ship has not sailed. Government websites require accessibility, and at least in the UK, do not rely on JS.
I block JS, too. And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website. It makes web browsing more insecure and less private, makes page load times slower, and wastes energy.
Only took 1 second for me.
I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!
What's fascinating is that you just described every employee, ever. At this point, I'm giving up on you. Consumers are price sensitive? Please, they buy Funko Pops and Frappachinos by the millions. It's not about cost, it's about convenience and authenticity. People will pay for convenience, for software that does what they want, from its official source.
It's cheap to sling bullshit like yours and costly to refute it. It's costlier to build a cash-positive business selling copies of free software, in the face of that code, and binary builds, being available -- by others, for no cost -- in various package mangers and popular source repositories.
You're just wrong, dude. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm tired, and done, arguing with you.
And the very freedom they got with free software let them change it to suit their fit, which would have been impossible with proprietary or otherwise restricted software.
That's the entire point of copyright.
And the entire point of copy/left/ is to make the code a public good, a commodity. Everyone owns the code I write, and everyone is entitled to make a business from it.
If they have better marketing than me, earning a lot more money than me with the verbatim program, that sounds like my software was priced wrong and I should set the price higher. How high -- $50,000/copy? Who knows. If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.
That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.
Another example is with my program itself. It's a desktop application, a local management client for a tablet that otherwise must use its manufacturer's cloud service. I am directly competing with the manufacturer. When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year. BUT -- many, and I mean MANY of my customers told me they would have returned their $500 tablet were it not for my software, after using which, made them keep the hardware. I estimate that my software has saved the manufacturer over $500,000 in returns.
That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.
And if a distributor of the verbatim program wants to expand /my/ market, I'm all for that. But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing. They need to add something of value. Sometimes, marketing can be value, sure. More value is derived from the program itself -- that's why people buy it in the first place. Not because of its marketing, but because of its function.
And if they improve my program, the function, they MUST release the complete corresponding source code, and they MUST do so granting forwards the same copyleft privileges I gave them. And that means I can, and will, take their improvements and merge them back into my original product. And since I have the first mover advantage, the reputation, the search engine hits, the community engagement, I will probably win.
And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer. It's the kind of software I use myself, so I elect to write it, too. It's the world I want to live in.
You have an obsolete understanding of the world, a misunderstanding of the motivations of free software, and are totally wrong about the dynamics of selling free software.