• 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 7th, 2023

  • Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

    Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.


  • This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

    This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

    Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.


  • Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he’s shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

    At this point, it’s hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

    But for him, it’s much easier to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he’s paid to do.





  • What annoys me most is typical liberals like this talk about “the economy” in a singular sense, and whether something can be simply “good” or “bad” for the economy as a whole. To them, “good for the economy” is a translation for the ultra-wealthy getting even wealthier (because they are the ones most invested in it). No consideration of whether this is beneficial for average people or not. I suppose we’re supposed to be happy that our overlords are padding their accounts with even more zeroes? Hooray…

    I really hope that we can try to change the dialogue around what the economy really is and how its effects are not uniform across the entire human population.









  • I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?

    This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover…


  • The intent is to allow companies time to implement the change. But if you’ll pardon my cynicism, in practice, what ends up happening is companies just use it as a tactic to delay the implementation and continue recording the revenue.

    At the very least they should forfeit the revenue that they earn during the period for this. I’m not sure exactly how the fines work and whether they take this into account, but I doubt Apple is seriously going to use the 12-month period to actually come clean and change their ways. I think they’ll just use it as more time to come up with some new bullshit form of non-compliance.


  • Excellent news:

    At the heart of Monday’s findings are three elements of Apple’s practices, including fees charged to app developers for every purchase made within seven days of linking out to the commercial app.

    source

    This is, in my opinion, the most egregious non-compliant practice from Apple. They have no reason whatsoever to entitle themselves to purchases made outside their repository just because the software runs on their hardware. It’s also the most asinine set of rules that they established to pretend that they were complying with the DMA.

    It’s a bit disappointing that it will take so long before the fines can be enforced, but I really hope that they get the maximum penalty over this because it’s really the most shockingly brazen breach of the DMA’s terms. In fact, I hope that they get imposed the maximum penalty multiple times - the same article I linked mentions that there are two other DMA investigations being launched into Apple, though I don’t know what grounds those other investigations are looking into.

    And I really hope Apple gets the message loud and clear: they’re gonna start making less money. And this is a good thing. They don’t deserve it, and they were never entitled to it in the first place. This is what happens when you invent new revenue streams that are criminally worthless.