I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.
Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.
Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.
How did we get here?
We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.
Yes you can. I often ignore copyright with impunity. I’ve been doing it since the days of home-taping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YejbpHA9Yo
2:37
EMI refused to promote the cassingle due to lyrics (“Off the radio I get constant flow/Hit it, pause it, record and play/Turn it, rewind and rub it away”) that promoted home taping[7] during an era when music piracy was a hot-button issue.[8]
Not an issue when you pirate 🤔
100% capitalism is part of the blame, why isnt there a public option for music? Promoting local artists that are in the public domain and can tour and make a living in public venues. Instead we have ticket master and other such big music. Companies, now this is applied to music but really can be applied to every sector.
Elect local politicians who can make change for the people on the local level.
They didn’t say copyright, they said patent.
I think AAC is the only major music codec that’s still patent encumbered though
#NO
We stop the acquisitions. We work out ways to foster innovation and protect patents only in the short term.
We need more than a couple phone manufacturers, we need more than a couple of food producers. All of these monolith mega corporations keep smaller upstarts from coming up and competing.
And it’s hard for anyone to say no to multi-millions that will change your family’s life by selling when it’s not even 1% of the corporations profit. Can’t blame them for selling out really. I’d do the same thing and so would you.
We can at least stop crap like this
They actually said in their review of the sale that they’ll be able to do better price fixing even if grocery stores demand price cuts.
Don’t buy Pringles.
Or
Kellogg’s, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Frosties, Coco Pops, Special K, Krave, Miel Pops, Crunchy Nut, Pringles, Cheez-It, Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies Treats, Nutri-Grain, RXBAR, Eggo, MorningStar Farms, Mars bars, 3 Musketeers, Milky Way bars, M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers, Twix, Bounty , PEDIGREE, WHISKAS, ROYAL CANIN, AniCura, WISDOM PANEL, VCA, Ben’s Original, Dolmio, Tasty Bite, Seeds of change
I could boycott all of them easily: most I haven’t had, and the rest I have very rarely.
And more than a couple operating systems. We get a lot of horrifyingly bad compatibility issues from Apple, and to a lesser degree, Google.
Unfortunately some things will IMO always remain a natural monopoly. For example good luck trying to convince developers to write their apps for all those different operating systems.
Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.
Doesn’t have to be that way
They could still be compatible, though. it’s possible even today, to some degree
Yeah, Java slogan was code once, run everywhere for a reason.
I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I’ve replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it’s me who holds the keys.
What TV box would you recommend?
Personally I replaced my TV Box with a Intel N100 Mini-PC (specifically a GMTek G3) running Lubuntu and Kodi, though it’s used for a lot more than just being my TV box. I also got one of these remotes so I control it just like I would a dedicate TV Box (even though it has a mini-keyboard on the back and airmouse functionality, I almost never use it).
I use IPTV with it to watch just the free TV Channels, though there are providers out there who carry over 1000 channels for 5 bucks a month.
If you want something to just use as TV Box, start by checking Libreelec which is a Linux distro with Kodi configured to just work as a TV Box. It has builds for a whole lot of single board computers, which generally are cheaper than Mini-PCs (for example you can get a Banana Pi M5 - one of the supported SBCs - plus box, powersource and even the SD card for about half the price of the Mini-PC I got). The same remote I use should work fine with Libreelect on any platform which has at least one USB connector (not tested it myself but it makes sense since it uses the same kind of protocol and dongle as a wireless keyboard + mouse with pressing the “normal” remote buttons just generating keypresses according to some kind of standard of shortcut keys for media players)
Had I’ve been aiming for just a TV Box replacement I would’ve probably gone via checking which hardware Libreelec is compatible with and then chosen one of those and used the Libreelec since it’s a Linux distro already preconfigures for acting as a proper TV Box (whilst with Lubuntu with Kodi on top I had to go around figuring out and changing the configuration for auto-login, auto-starting Kodi on startup and so on)
Cool! Thanks a lot for the thorough answer!
When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I’ll have optimism about it.
Opensource (specifically Libre)
Worker and community cooperatives.
Right to repair.
Public money, public goods.
Privacy by default.
Decentralization > Federation > Disconnected > Centralized
Treating addiction as a disease and people intentionally seeking to exploit it at a mass scale should be charged for harm.
Organizations should be held liable for user data exposed to malicious actors both intentionally and through neglect of security.
Get rot economists out of tech companies and return to private ownership.
Stop tariffs on new technologies
I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.
When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.
Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.
Steve Jobs said taking a calligraphy class was the reason that having a wide variety of attractive fonts was important to him when designing the Mac.
If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it
“People” is a great word. Who do you mean exactly for these roles? Who’s doing what here?
As usual, most people who have control of how technology is used on a broad scale are in positions of power suitable for exploitation. That is, the people I’m talking about are business owners and high-level executives (and the government) using technology to exploit workers. To be fair, that’s not always the dynamic-- “normal” people can exploit each other too, and businesses and the government can as well. But it is the most pressing issue imo, because of the power imbalance. See also rent comtrol algorithms, automated insurance claim denials, etc.
Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb “Let’s make everything family friendly!” (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going … elsewhere.
Source: my tinfoil hat
No, you don’t understand. The tin foil hat protects me from the government brainwashing 5g cell towers.
Those things are useful as fuck. At first they blocked mind controlling aliens. Then it also worked against mind-reading NSA. And now it blocks brainwashing 5G. The DoD must be spending trillions to bypass tinfoil technology.
Producing products that the users wants, and that solves tje users real problems. And not trying to make products as addictive as possible, to harvest as much user data as possible to sell.
For that we need technical means ready which allow the platform itself to be untrusted. Signal claims to be that and apparently is. Sadly there are no such things for social media (Nostr maybe, but it’s very raw now), personal webpages, so on so forth
Well first we kill all they
lawyersInvestment Bankers.Then all the lawyers.
In Minecraft of course…
Any time anyone is able to claw back some scraps of justice or get some kind of recompense for wrongs or - here’s a big one - change the law: that’s lawyers too. The characterization of all lawyers as sharks and assholes has done more to exacerbate the justice gap then help.
Yes! The whole “lawyers are evil money grabbers” is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it’s unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation’s actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.
They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.
or Perry Mason.
Loved those books. Maybe he’s too perfect a character morally, but still.
Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?
No: the bad guys will build another one.
However if 250 million Americans each spent 400 hours less on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next 12 months, the shareholders might have the heads of many members of those corporate boards on pikes.
That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after
Ugh I hate that you’re right. Until we figure out capitalism we’re fucked.
I think you wanted to write “democratic communism” 😏😂
Don’t need to take things further than market socialism to fix the problems with capitalism.
That is the best step towards communism we, in the west, can do right now, in my opinion. Slowly add more and more socialism and democratic laws until we all can be happy together 😁
