fwygon

fwygon , 22 days ago to Free and Open Source Software in [ANNOUNCEMENT] Response Regarding Google PlayStore App Updates · termux/termux-app · Discussion #4000 · GitHub

I'm not being harsh; they bungled that initial transition badly too; despite it being a Google action.

Unfortunately they left a lot of users in the lurch when they left the Play Store as well and that too left a bad taste. It's not exactly easy to migrate across versions and packages and software differ wildly as they allowed both versions to do their own thing without relabeling them so you could run them side-by-side.

I don't blame them for Google's actions; but I do blame them for how they handled it.

You might be confusing my transition into a rant against Google as blaming Termux.

fwygon , 22 days ago to Technology in Spotify Premium User Slams App Over Audiobook Feature

They could certainly "clearly pass the cost" of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn't pay for the "+ # of Audiobooks" tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that's it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)

It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn't have offered it nicely, they could've just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.

fwygon , 22 days ago to Free and Open Source Software in [ANNOUNCEMENT] Response Regarding Google PlayStore App Updates · termux/termux-app · Discussion #4000 · GitHub

I stopped using Termux in general because of this inanity where they moved off and stopped supporting the Play Store Version; now this happens where they're unable to keep things from conflicting across the different APK sources?

Yikes. Seems like a good time to continue staying away from Termux and not recommending it.

It's a shame since I really love the concept of the app; but each increment of Android has been rough on it and I can't imagine it being useful with Google being stupid about their policies.

...Unfortunately they're often quick to blame apps they dislike for problems in the ecosystem, and they often directly attack them through nerfing APIs and system calls that the apps tend to use; which I think is absolutely a dogshit thing to do.

Please, stop enshittifying our phones Google.

fwygon , 26 days ago to Technology in OpenAI Insider Estimates 70 Percent Chance That AI Will Destroy or Catastrophically Harm Humanity

It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.

It's not that we didn't provide the AI with rules. It's not that the AI isn't trying not to harm people. It's that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.

...Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn't as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a "Minimally Viable Product" they're hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.

Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations...but they've done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.

fwygon , 26 days ago to Technology in Google must face £13bn advertising lawsuit - UK court - BBC News

13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?

That's pocket change to Google.

Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Technology in Rabbit Gaslit Me, So I Dug Deeper | Coffeezilla

This is pretty clearly a company practiced at "riding the waves" of what's popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it's development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn't surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of 'scam and run' operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a 'minimally viable product' that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they're in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets 'caught' intentionally and then fired...or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they 'negotiated' when they were 'hired'.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Technology in Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’ while the gap between the country's rich and poor widens

The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.

If '1984' alarms you; so too should current works like 'Ready, Player One' or 'Ender's Game' and it's associated sequels.

Extremism in general tends to not work. I don't pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Technology in Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’ while the gap between the country's rich and poor widens

Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Technology in New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Technology in Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress

This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person's post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that "Following" induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.

The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess "like" the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Free and Open Source Software in Winamp is going open source

Even a progression from "Closed Source" to "Source Available" is nice progress I think.

If we assume that the License is not restrictive we may be able to fork Winamp into a codebase that might actually be Fully Open Source Software and track changes of the upstream as we need.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Free and Open Source Software in what happened to VLC for Android ?

Minimum SDK also does get bumped in Android in general at a snails pace. Given that we're basically coming up on Android 15; it's not unfair to assume that, eventually, we will simply see Android intentionally and permanently REFUSE to run the app because it's Minimum SDK value is considered to be too low and thus Android must assume that the application is completely insecure.

fwygon , 1 month ago to Free and Open Source Software in What details/tools have you found help people transition to similar, open software from closed software, or think could help?

The largest barrier for me in FLOSS and FOSS applications is simply a lack of GUI tools for what is considered to be "Advanced" functions.

Just because I can do it on linux doesn't mean it's easy or intuitive. Unfortunately a lot of FOSS and FLOSS applications are, of necessity, extremely limited in what tasks they are targeting. Frequently you cannot rely on the "alternative" to have a relied upon function or feature until deep in it's lifecycle; when finally enough people have complained and the feature is implemented.

Sometimes a feature is never implemented due to an entirely shifted paradigm in the way the program is implemented and the feature is "impossible" or "inconsistent with xyz".

One example of this is the number of GUIs and frontends written for ffmpeg; many of which simply are lazy GUI implementations of what the ffmpeg CLI binary itself will helpfully print out in the console when you ask it for help with the correct switch(es). Many are even less thought out than this and will often unhelpfully provide an obtuse box at the bottom for custom commands you wish to feed to the program....which is great if you know the command(s); but make using the GUI unhelpful when compared to just firing up a CLI and reading the output and figuring out the correct command for exactly what you want it to do.

Keep in mind; I am not at all uncomfortable with using CLI interfaces; I just expect that a GUI doesn't force me to fallback, or become so unusable that I am forced to fall back on an original CLI tool because I cannot possibly discern why it failed to work

Frequently things that would be simply be an option buried deeply in the GUI menus only and are otherwise fairly simple are relegated as being only possible within a CLI interface; and I find that reality quite infuriating most often...as the limitations of a CLI oftentimes make the task I am trying to complete far less simple than it really should have been.

fwygon , 2 months ago to Technology in "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again."

SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.

fwygon , 2 months ago to Technology in "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again."

You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you've not tried this, please do not write it off.

If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there's several guides and videos out there that might help you if you're inclined to learn.

If not; you're also free to continue consuming as you do.