this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Any purism product, overpriced, outdated and their hardware basically breaks when connecting it to external devices.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Don't ever buy Sony wireless buds. They stop working right around the one year mark. Customer service is horrible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Any "Gaming" headphones they are all such trash. Buy a nice pair of headphones with a quality metal headband and get an audio cable with a built in mic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Anything from any company large enough that the obvious business decision is the screw over the end user to generate additional profit. That excludes basically everything, so instead it's easier to give recommendations for what I would buy/use instead:

  • Open hardware products
    • Framework laptop with RISC-V hardware
      • not released yet
    • Purism
      • Maybe not fully open, but at least they have schematics
    • Pine64
      • Caveat emptor, software controlled charging circuits, be wary of bomb
    • RaptorCS
    • Wikipedia has an okay list
  • Open source software
    • Operating systems
      • *BSD
      • Some Linux distributions
      • Plan9, Haiku, Illumos, etc
    • Web browsers
      • qtwebkit based
        • qutebrowser
      • gtkwebkit based
        • luakit
      • Textmode/Terminal browsers
        • w3m
        • lynx
        • links
      • Other graphical browsers
        • netsurf
        • links graphical mode
        • ladybird
          • Apparently the developer is an asshole
    • Other userspace software
      • Video
        • ffmpeg
      • Graphics
        • Krita
        • Blender
        • GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick
        • ffmpeg
      • Audio
        • LMMS
        • ffmpeg
      • PDF
        • xpdf
        • mupdf
      • IRC
        • Hexchat
          • Feature Complete ( dead :'( )
        • EPIC5
      • This list could go on forever, consult your repository instead of me

Everything sucks, avoid car brands that sell your driving data (AKA buy an old car or figure out how to permanently disconnect your car from the internet), and avoid smart home and llm garbage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

are you aware that the vast majority of people can't relate at all with the way you assign value? Or that they cannot afford the cognitive and temporal cost to adopt the technologies you mentioned? This kind of reasoning is what killed FOSS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

are you aware that the vast majority of people can’t relate at all with the way you assign value?

Clarify?

Or that they cannot afford the cognitive and temporal cost to adopt the technologies you mentioned?

People can learn entire, sometimes multiple languages, but learning some FOSS tools that are much more limited in scope is too difficult I guess. Relevant reading.

This kind of reasoning is what killed FOSS.

FOSS is dead? (and we killed it?)

FOSS is more popular than ever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Clarify?

The vast majority of people do not care at all for technological autonomy, either because they don't know about the implications or because they know and don't care because it has very intangible effects over their life. Therefore they don't make decisions taking into account technological autonomy or privacy.

People can learn entire, sometimes multiple languages, but learning some FOSS tools that are much more limited in scope is too difficult I guess. People who learn new languages during adulthood while working are a small minority. I speak as an immigrant who after 7 years barely speak the local language, like pretty much all my peers who didn't take a whole year off to study. People with a job, social life, healthy relationships have very little time to focus on learning and very little incentive to do so.

FOSS is dead? (and we killed it?)

FOSS, on a political level, as a movement, it is dead. What we observe is the corpse, being a resource for value extraction processes by corporate and military organizations. The space of conflict over technology today is somewhere else: tech unionization, the post-FOSS movement, tech cooperativism, direct sabotage, public regulation. FOSS has been subsumed by the system.

https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The vast majority of people do not care at all for technological autonomy, either because they don’t know about the implications or because they know and don’t care because it has very intangible effects over their life. Therefore they don’t make decisions taking into account technological autonomy or privacy.

Oh I am well aware convincing the average person that privacy is important is as impossible as trying to argue for the validity of the second amendment with soccer moms in the US. That's why I posted this in a privacy community, with privacy-conscious individuals.

FOSS, on a political level, as a movement, it is dead. What we observe is the corpse, being a resource for value extraction processes by corporate and military organizations. The space of conflict over technology today is somewhere else: tech unionization, the post-FOSS movement, tech cooperativism, direct sabotage, public regulation. FOSS has been subsumed by the system.

The whole open source vs foss thing is just beurocracy by the FSF and the OSI as I see it, both run by ideologically obsessed fools. Each has their own specific definition of what is free, when in actuality licenses are merely a tool, and nothing more. Sometimes an anti-commercial license is useful for large projects like games, sometimes permissive licenses are good for highly-portable libraries and the like. I don't know what usecase the GPL would be useful for, but maybe you can figure that out, and then ask Stallman if it's cool that the GPL is used to platform the largest proprietary OS on the planet (proprietary vendor android distributions) and ask how that helps promote software freedom. Open source is still open source, regardless of if it's made by a corporation, and if a corporation wants to footgun themselves so hard to release their code under MIT, that's a win as I see it. I'm sure FOSS is dying in the same way Netcraft confirmed BSD has been dying for the past several decades. FUD.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Adobe Creative Cloud. It's really expensive, and once you stop paying, you lose everything.

No wonder why it's some of the most pirated software in the world.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Losing access to a work I put hours and days, sometimes months of my life was the main reason I now absolutely refuse any non-open source products. My advisor/colleagues sometimes say "university gives it for free", or "we pay all that money for this softwares", but I am not going to use them even if they are slightly better than open source.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

You're making great progress.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Same. I use an MX Master all day every day and they last for years. No Linux support though. I might try a Corsair mouse next time

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Roku anything

I have a tv from them and one day the PBS kids app just stopped working. I contacted customer support and they just told me it was the app developer’s fault, nothing to be done. Waited months thinking it would eventually resolve but never did.

And recently where they:

  1. Blocked people from using their tvs until they accepted a new agreement and
  2. Filed for a patent that defines how they can start overlaying ads on top of other connected devices over hdmi

Glad I shut off wifi to my tv years ago and plugged in a separate smart tv hdmi dongle. And not getting anywhere near anything that says Roku on the packaging again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've never had a Roku TV, but I've been using two of their HDMI connected devices for years.

I've never had an issue, but one is too old and needs replacing. What alternatives would you suggest I have a look at?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

We’ve used the Amazon firestick before and it worked well. Currently we use the google chromecast/tv dongle for both ours tvs.

Nice thing about the google one is that it makes any Google movie/tv show purchases available, and Amazon movie purchases are still available through the Amazon video app.

But they’re pretty comparable. Depends mostly on what ecosystem you’re in or would prefer to be in.

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