Sure does give a different perspective! It's not entirely clear to me if this is satire, or serious (leaning towards the former). In either case, I don't think it's fair to call Harris' rise to power a coup, and equate it as part of a dilemma with Trump's election denialism.

the ethnostates of sub-Scandinavian Europe

Never heard that expression before. Good point though that strife in Europe was a major contributor to the world wars.

Wild!

Ouch, scathing. I can't claim to know better, but the sentiment seems overly pessimistic.

Discourse is an amazing success story for open-source! I hope the $20M Series A, and perhaps later investments, will not eventually make them less open.

If they host 3,000 of the total 20,000 communities themselves, it shows how much more impact they have through open-source. Of course, that only works if they get enough value back from the entire ecosystem. Here's one hoping!

A detailed post a little outside of my niche, but this resonates:

Manageable and Scalable Goals: Custom-built solutions are tricky and take some time to get right. A progressive transition to more open source software might be better than trying to engineer an all in one solution.

Dramatic rewrites/reforms are hard to pull off. Progressive transitions are much more likely to succeed. Sonos’ botched new app is one recent example of that.

💔

Neat concept!

(Plus I still miss my circa-2010, 10-inch netbook from college, may it rest in peace.)

Relatable. I used a 2014 Acer C720P 11” Chromebook with various Linux distros as a daily driver during my first four college years. It was great.

I dusted it off last year to use as a x86 testing machine, since most of my other devices are ARM-based. It has aged in terms of speed and battery, but it still works!

What a story! Incredible determination, and a sliver or luck, too. The challenges just multiplied. It also illuminates what some people have to go through when trying to get kids; I had no idea IVF was this expensive, and this much tied to variable insurance coverage.

Cool! I made one today. I’ve been enjoying Now pages on the web.

Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well.

This alternative approach to creating big tech is remarkable. No investors, non-profit, but also not relying on volunteers, and paying big salaries.

She talks repeatedly about her main job being establishing long-term sustainability through endowments. I know Signal asks users for donations, but I can hardly believe that is their main source of funding (I have to look it up). It probably consists of huge philanthropic donations from very wealthy foundations or people. This isn’t an unicum in tech. Maybe it is at its scale, but foundations like FUTO and projects like Ladybird also exist.

I appreciate Greenberg’s incredulity on whether this model can be extrapolated to other organizations. In a way, living on huge donations, which were somehow originally gained through capitalistic activity, is still being part of a capitalistic system.

I also wonder: is Signal taking any money from governmental institutions? It’s remarkable that the EU Commission is recommending the service to its members. Do they give back in any way?

And, comparing with the current Telegram situation, does Signal cooperate with authorities which point out specific illegal activity by certain users/groups? Or is it really not able to do anything considering that everything is maximally encrypted?

I didn’t get these answers from the interview.

What a sad way to burn a huge pile of cash and human effort.

It also doesn’t help that Concord released on August 23, 2024, just three days after Black Myth: Wukong.

I’ve been hearing about games being postponed to avoid overcrowded release periods, like Avowed by Xbox. Seem like a wise move given this example.

According to our data, only about 16% of the total revenue of the games market now comes from traditional full-game sales. Publishers are going to keep chasing that 84%.

I didn’t imagine the situation to be this extreme!

This, and the recent Pavel Durov arrest, are current talking points regarding free speech and the extent of government control. It's probably worth reading up more on the actual events.

All things I would like to believe! I’m not an American, but I’ve been pretty obsessed by this race. Having Trump back would be bad for much of the world, including my little Europe.

Guilty as charged! I've been rolling Google Chrome for the past few years, and didn't give Quantum a second look. I've been bolstered in this position by various annoyances as a web developer where Firefox had a bug, or required a workaround. Of course, as the article says, that sometimes depends on the point of view.

Most recently, users of Firefox for Android couldn't sign in to our website welcometomygarden.org anymore, because Firefox' Enhanced Tracking Protection blocked the Google Recaptcha 3 requests that verify whether visits are from legitimate clients. This probably is a form of Google tracking, but it's also required for our site to function. We didn't have it enabled before, and only included it because we noticed someone had built an unapproved front-end to our backend, essentially stealing our data.

The risk of stolen data versus perfect compatibility with Firefox for Android (used by 2% of our visitors) was clear to us. For now, we ask these users to switch off tracking protection on our site. Sometimes, despite best intentions, your hands are tied.

Oh, and did you know that Google paid Apple 20 billion dollars in 2022 to be the default search engine on Safari?

That's a crazy number. But Safari is also bringing a lot of traffic and revenue to Google. This payment represented 20/394.328 = 5% of Apple's revenue in 2022.

Mentioning that, we should also mention that Google pays Mozilla too to keep Google as the default search engine:

Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.

The mind-boggling part here is 83%. Google is basically keeping Mozilla afloat! This is a pretty transparent smoke screen to prevent regulatory pressure towards Google's near-monopolistic control over the web, through delivering the most-used engine and browser. Google is already facing regulatory pressure on its search engine dominance and ad empire from both the US government and the EU. This feels like a perverse incentive that enables Firefox to exist, not at all aligned with the open web and privacy, which what most Firefox proponents care about.

Regardless, it shouldn't be an excuse to keep strengthening Google's hand directly and personally. I've been hanging out on Mastodon a lot recently, and the prevailing opinion there is that people should use Firefox to save the open web. It's probably the lesser evil. Maybe today is a good day to try switching, and also to Vivaldi if I happen to need an environment for Blink/Chromium, still.

I this respect, I also think it's a little unfortunate that the same Mastodon/fediverse community went berzerk against Ladybird, a budding independent browser that also avowed to not get into search engine deals. With other words, a real potential ally for the open web, just like Servo. The main reason for this backlash was one instance of documented, anti-inclusive, gender-regressive behavior from the project's founder some years ago that he wasn't apologetic towards. A non-negotiable for many Firefox proponents, it seems. I personally still want to give the project and its leader the benefit of the doubt. As this article brings across, there is much at stake.

I understand why I hadn't heard of this forum yet, I'm far away from the target audience. It looks really fascinating and successful, in its own way.

While Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have sought to frame their networks as forums for free speech, Wood-Lewis said he thinks of Front Porch Forum more like a corner pub. If a patron starts making a ruckus, moderators ask him to tone it down — then toss him out if he doesn’t comply.

Hear, hear! The John o' Groats Trail looks rugged and beautiful!

Good insights for backup systems if you do any kind of self-hosting. I've thanked the writer on Mastodon and mentioned my planned use-cases there.

Yuck. No human should experience this!

Having eaten almost exclusively plant-based for the last 8 years or so, I can't stomach the thought of this for myself (pun intended). Granted, veganism is an extreme in the other direction, but if done right, I think it is at least more aligned with scientific consensus on what is long-term healthy.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these "meatfluencers" are sponsored by animal agriculture lobbying groups, covertly or not, to counter the scientific health consensus that is moving against their interests. I wouldn't equate meat to tobacco, but big corporations are definitely capable of intentionally sowing doubt on scientific consensus when they can benefit from it.

Cleaning 15 mins every day. Interesting idea! By necessity, we already do basic cleaning multiple times per week (to be able to cook and eat), which already takes more than 15 minutes per day on average. But taking some extra time daily to “go find something to clean” sounds smart; cupboard and shelf handles rarely get cleaned, for example. Continuous maintenance is probably the only thing that leads to a clean home.

But the fact is: I’m just not good enough to take advantage of most of this stuff, despite what the ads may tell me.

The best thing I can do to make my game better is ignore analyzing all the data and ignore the feeling that if I just bought one more thing…

Yup. You just need something that works to get 90% of the experience. Not the best or newest gear.

Decent list of some hot open-source software! Some of these were new to me (Cal.com, Screenity, AppFlowy & Dub.co), some of these I'm already self-hosting, on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Nextcloud, PhotoPrism & Bitwarden).

If we're mentioning business-focused software like Chatwoot, these analytics providers are also worth a mention: Plausible and Umami; offering privacy-friendly web analytics, and PostHog. We're happily using the community edition of Plausible at Slowby.

There might be any number of reasons why an individual or business might prefer to journey down the open source route: Maybe it’s the added transparency and security compared to the proprietary players or the customizability it offers. Or some might just like to support a software development ethos that favors freedom and collaboration over walled gardens and vendor lock-in.

Let's be real. It also helps that (F)OSS is often gratis, at least when self-hosted.

There are potential downsides to open source software, such as a lack of formal customer support, limited features, or technical hurdles around deployment.

Buying support, cloud-hosting, and extra features from the makers is the often the main model through which (F)OSS SaasS can operate.

Concessions on fracking to get to a win are reasonable, given that the alternative is total climate change denialism 🤷‍♂️

even Google can’t just make a change which might allow web users to get slightly more privacy. Because in flicking such levers the knock-on impact on other businesses that are dependent on its adtech infrastructure risks being a competition harm in itself.

I’m not sure if I’m getting this right: the publishing industry currently “profits” from Google’s ad empire in 2 ways: 1) by displaying Google-auctioned ads, 2) by collecting behavioral data on visitors and sending that to Google.

By switching to the “privacy sandbox” data collection, Google can use its dominance with Chrome to gather the behavioral data without the publishers cooperation (they don’t need to have the scripts and cookies tracking anymore, Chrome holds all required info!). Hence, it’s one less reason for Google to pay publishers. Conclusion: publishers will lose revenue, and protest.

I might be missing the point entirely here.

Anyway: breaking up Google is an interesting thought experiment.

9th August 2004 is OpenStreetMap’s official birthday, but 0-year olds don’t do very much. It took a few years before we learned how to walk.

This is good to remember. Still, 3 years to get to a rough outline of what exists today, with volunteers, is pretty quick!

The assessment of the internet status quo is overly bleak, IMO. I don’t believe open innovation at the scale of OSM is impossible today (looking at ActivityPub, for example).

I only really ever used the service as a way for logging what I had read. The other social aspects didn’t keep me coming back and I personally didn’t find the home feed interesting.

Right! Readup auto-logging what I read has been such a major pull factor for me, that it has kept me coming back, even if I’m (temporarily) not interested in the rest.

Re: Goodreads & BookWyrm. I also mostly used Goodreads to track reads, and even that very intermittently. I’ve migrated my library BookWyrm a few weeks ago. Mostly because if I spent time tracking and socializing around books, it might as well be on a grassroots, open-source and federated platform, rather than a platform owned and mined by a trillion dollar company.

I’ve been guilty of calling Sketch ”dead”, I believe specifically after Figma’s Config 2023 conference when they launched Dev Mode.

I bought a single Sketch license for my first MacBook in 2017, and used that one happily for a few years. I can stil use it today to open my old Sketch files (how cool is that?! local-first software). I worked with Invision prototypes in a startup in 2017, too, and they were great. During my design studies in 18-20; we were already using Figma for some projects, because of its collaboration capabilities (and student benefits). Since then the tool has been polished, and Sketch seemed to lag hopelessly behind, or so I thought.

I am changing my mind on this, and this post helped. Sketch has a different model in several ways, and might be a sustainable market for that. Similarly, the model of Penpot, a newer open-source competitor, may also appeal to another part of the market.

Product isn’t always everything.

It would be very interesting to see both Figma’s and Sketch’ relative market share, absolute sales, and profit figures over the last years.

Daring!

I'm not sure if I had read this before on Readup, or another mid-sized article about Hof, but this was a blast to read!

I've tried consistent cold showering years ago, and will hop in cold water when convenient opportunities present themselves. Mostly when visiting sea/lakeside saunas in Finland (it's a common thing here). Without a sauna nearby, I've only dipped under slight peer pressure.

Cold water exposure does have immediate positive effects. But starting is so unappealing, that I haven't been sticking to this.

The article is glowingly positive across the board. I'm a little allergic to improvised counterculture rambling and messiah vibes, as well as organisations monetizing this. It's the only thing that irks a bit. Still, I admire the simplicity and actionability of the Hof's message, and his openness and persistence.

“We have to change our beliefs about what’s possible for the human body,” Hof explains. “You are your own doctor. You’ve got your own power. And because people think that’s hippie bullshit, that’s why I go through science.”

Compelling

Interesting plot twist in the machinery of globalization!