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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 27th, 2024

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  • Oh sure. They could do this. But they don’t.

    But there is absolutely no way to verify what they are doing, no fear of getting caught and thus there is no incentive to behave with integrity.

    At least my state of knowledge is that this: https://reproducible-builds.org/ isn’t fully functional and even if it were what HP does on their machines is closed source stuff.

    And even if there were companies or organizations that are big enough to enforce transparency, like a big multinational or a government, there will be plenty of cases where smaller companies with sensitive data can’t, like doctors offices or independent lawyers.

    It is way easier to charge for a “data privacy” subscription tier and then still just not honoring the wording of that, than to actually put in the effort.







  • The game Mindustry is one example.

    Yes. And as you can see it has 14k reviews on steam while factorio has 141k reviews.

    It’s also a game, so there is no productivity gain or loss associated with it. There is no on call IT support, but you also don’t need any and if something breaks, you lose nothing except the ability to play THIS game for a short while. It’s not a… webserver you run your online shop through where every hour of downtime costs you X hundreds of euros or dollars.

    The game was also made by what looks like one guy. It’s not, you know libre office. With hundreds and thousands of contributors and a huge problem of how to distribute the money.

    Of course you’re allowed to distribute it. And of course you’re allowed to charge for it. But realistically, nearly nobody would use it.


  • The cost of switching to an unfamiliar Interface and workflow is high enough, charging money to do it will further increase the barrier to entry.

    Paying for open source software sounds good on paper, but if it is required, the software will never accumulate the users to make the development have any meaning.

    There has to be a “try it before you buy it” too. Otherwise the permutations of scams are obvious and nobody will fall for that. Idk how you would prove that the software works, without giving an actual copy of the software.

    Also, legalities between different countries. You will just not get your money back from “trustworthy nigerian software dev who just needs 50$ to give you some software”.

    So no.

    Do donate if you can though. If you value the software you use, you will pretty obviously recognize the utility and the cost to you, should it go away.




  • Eh. It’s a bit more handwavey than that. It’s whatever you want it to be.

    Virtual reality was supposed to be simulated, but “actual still science fiction” levels of simulated. seamless 3d environment, intercepting nerve signals to look and intuitively control an avatar or ready player one had a haptic suit.

    AR stems from that and was supposed to be “the real world, but cyber”. Or “VR, but with real world elements”. In the novel “virtual light”, it’s supposed to overlay that “datasturce of cyberspace” on the real world. Even then it was never really clear what purpose cyberspace as a 3d world would have, what data looks like or should look like, and what the advantage of that visualization would be. Or why would rather see that than what the world looks like.

    Mixed reality is also that. Imo. It sounds the same to me too.

    The whole thing is like hand gesture control. It looked great in minority report, but we had it since one of the 2010s xboxs and it went absolutely nowhere.