Relevant for me; i nearly changed careers out of tech entirely – being fed up with the state of the industry – but found some great folks in worker cooperative spaces. Here’s what’s kept me optimistic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dSe3n0
Plucked a vid off this channel and let it be known the idea of the channel name is to “reject isms/be your own ism”
Solarpunk has replaced, for me, the plasteel+glass greenhouse skyscraper skylines. Afrofuturism offers a much better preconfiguration than anything of capitalist and anglo origins. Importantly, the dismantling of unjust heirarchies.
I never lost the optimism, i just recognized that the root cause of our pain is not going to be addressed by technnlology (new invention) without an equal-or-greater effort into decolonizing and unlearning on the part of those building, using and promoting a given technology.
“reject isms/be your own ism”
Autism
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]
I think AAC is the only major music codec that’s still patent encumbered though
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’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.
Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am
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.
Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.
Regard today’s billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.
Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.
Don’t pay by credit card.
My almost six year old 9900k machine is still playing everything amazingly, with a video card update being my only change. I love it so much.
My iPhone is also six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this month is to get 120hz, USB-C, and a better low light camera for cat pictures. A terabyte would be nice, too.
Don’t pay by credit card.
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits. A credit card with rewards is just free money if you’re responsible with it. I haven’t paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
Yep, the rich are rich because they borrow other peoples money. 0% free interest lines are about the best discount you can get on anything. I get to make the interest while you hold the loan? Sign me up! Siri, remind me in 11 months to pay off the X loan.
Surely you know that’s too good to be true. The card issuer charges fees to the merchant and then throws a portion of the money you just gave them back to you. But the prices of products are being driven up and the merchants aren’t eating them.
Depends on the situation honestly. We offer financing through my work for our clients and the 0% option is still a good deal. Not all of them are designed to screw people.
No, but they do need to be profitable 🤷
I haven’t paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
I’m not too familiar with credit cards, do you mean this in a literal money sense or something more complex, i.e. the value of rewards & money?
One of the better credit card rewards is a small percentage cash back, so literally free money. Money is fungible though, so any discounts on things you were going to buy anyway are effectively the same thing.
We pay for EVERYTHING on our credit card, shared account with my partner. 2% money back. Pay it off in full every month. Zero interest paid, thousands of monies back.
You pay with your data lol
The reason why corpos been able to price gouge the peasants is particulaly to tp them having access to data this granular. Same reason why they want dynamic pricing schemes.
There are no free money. These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders. 95% of the time you don’t need to borrow money from the bank, unless you are in emergency or you are to invest these to achieve some payback (e.g. a loan to open your business).
These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders
I am aware, which is why I specifically said
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits.
For people who aren’t irresponsible spenders, it’s a bad financial decision not to take the short term bank loan. Sure, I don’t need to spend the banks money because I have enough in my checking account to cover it. But by not doing so, I lose money on any transactions that don’t charge me a fee to run my card.
If you’re not responsible enough to use a credit card and not destroy your finances, absolutely do not use them. But for those of us who are, it’s a dumb idea to eschew it just because you have the money on hand. Like I said, I haven’t paid interest in a decade and have made thousands from my normal spending habits.
If I followed your advice, I would be objectively worse off, because I’d be losing money from my rewards for no benefit whatsoever. And I can guarantee I’d be materially worse off, since my credit card is the reason my credit is as good as it is, and that bullshit has a pervasive and perverse effect on your life. It’s not only loans that are impacted, but insurance, housing and employment can be as well. So maybe I should have left good credit off, since responsible spending will build your credit up even if it is bad currently.
TL;DR - responsible credit card use is a good thing, and foregoing it just because you have money on hand is a bad financial decision. Pay that shit off immediately and there’s no material downside and you still get all the benefits.
Irresponsible vs responsible is how the credit card companies frame it, but I think most of the time it’s about luck. The kind of luck where the primary income gets hit by a car or someone in the family gets cancer.
Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn’t able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you’ll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.
Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that’s one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.
Fair enough, but they know what you bought.
Yes, but you can also do a chargeback if the company you purchased from sold you a lousy product and isn’t being reasonable about returning it. If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
Each method has its pros and cons.
And? How has that harmed you overall?
Not saying I like that they track everything but I’ve yet to see it impact me personally.
“AI will make all of your work obsolete, there’s nothing we can do about it. Shame…”
I’m fine with losing my job, it’s tedious anyway. I’m not with losing my income though. Let automation and programs do the work and share the fruit of their labor to the people. Get rid of CEOs.
Then we can talk about optimism.
AI-CEOs should be a thing to work towards.
Who decides their programming? Are they bound to ethics or shareholder wealth? Better get rid of shareholders as well.
Ah yes, like a CEO but for the workers.
I can live with that
#NO
Reduce tech bro and VC headcount via analog French method.
Is this the same method the guy who discovered Oxygen was subjected to? If yes, I’d smash the “Oui” button.
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.
All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.
That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.
The users already have a lot of control; many just don’t use it.
Can any of you live without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for one calendar month? 25 years ago, millions of Americans did, and their lives were hardly the poorer for it. 25 years before that it was over 150 million Americans, including the 12 who walked the Moon.
The kind of control we are talking about are different. You look at the law, in which I have only little trust, while I look at the ability to manipulate the hardware.
So no, they do not have control over the hardware, they just don’t care that much. They do care if they are inconvenienced in any way, say by a service that disallows some parts that were previously offered. They don’t understand and don’t care, but they do win from some more control over their stuff.
I already live without any of the services you mentioned, I suspect most of Lemmy do. Well, not without YouTube (for me), I guess, but that gets more and more replaced by stuff like peertube.
Millions of Americans would still only occasionally visit those things if they had more options to plan their recreational time. Those options are mostly limited by less free time available while also having less money available. In that regard, and mostly limited to that regard, was then better than now.
If we are going to wait for the right legislation, then we are probably going to wait a very long time.
You’re not on Facebook and Twitter? Good. It’s entry-level stance, but nonetheless a good one, particularly if you are under 40 years of age.
YouTube is more difficult as it is, for me at least, mostly a replacement for television, videotape, and DVDs. My search for alternatives haven’t been too fruitful, but I often go to Vimeo, Archives, niconoco (they’re back in service starting early August), occasionally RuTube and vk (I support Ukraine in the war, but I’m not going to hate Russia), for a while the Chinese sites (though there seems to be less selection these days, too many ads, and some of it is YouTube embeds), Jamendo, and WikiCommons, and yes PeerTube (I suppose searching in time will get easier). (I’m also thinking of going back to P2P a bit.)
FWIW, I have this https://lemmy.world/c/musicnoytnosnofbnoff on Lemmy, and so far I might be the only contributor. The one I have on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/musicNoYTNoSNoFBNoFF/ I can no longer access as the account I used to create it has been suspended (and yes, suspended for no good reason). I could be the sole contributor for the next few years and I won’t give up.
Yes, many Americans, many people, are stuck in shitty jobs that take too much of their time, and a lot of it is nonessential. However, over a trillion hours (e.g. say over 250 million people x over 4000 hours in less than 10 years) have been spent on FB, Twitter, and YouTube. If 1% of that time was spent on alternatives, choices could improve dramatically. But they might not, it might be that they probably won’t, at least not for most of the Fox and CNN viewership. No matter: the search for alternatives continue and if people like us remain a small minority for years, maybe decades, to come, then we will nonetheless continue. We will be our own 1%ers.
I’ve been living without the first two for years now. I could live without youtube if I really needed to, though I do watch a lot of stuff about farming that is really helpful. Most of my youtube watching is educational with a slight smattering of games and entertainment and a tiny bit of news.
But that’s terrorism!
I am aware of this narrative. I don’t agree.
So you’re saying you side with the terrrists!
“I’m on my side.”
Fuck locked bootloaders.
You know something is wrong when Google is one of the most consumer friendly companies.
Yes, even if you try to use the controls we have left, you will discover that they always clip out one little obscure but critical detail that means you can’t actually use your device your way.
Example, starting ADB at boot in tcpip 5555 mode when your bootloader is locked
means you can’t actually use your device your way.
Then don’t use the device.
(I myself can wait longer than many of their shareholders.)
I don’t have the luxury of buying another.
I want legislative actions to make this illegal.
What do you need this device for?
Remotely operated wireless camera
I respect the sentiment, but most users neither know nor care about that. They want to take their new device out of it’s box, power it on, log in to whatever accounts they have, and carry on with their day.
The number of people who actually care about that is very small.
It doesn’t matter if they care about this. They are too dumb to do anything about it anyway. They still can get to take advantage of this. Most notable would be that stuff like “bank apps only through play/apple store” would be much harder to pull of.
You’re not wrong, but users should then be held accountable if they fuck up their device. For example, if you decide to force companies to allow unlocking of bootloaders, and the user decides to flash something that they shouldn’t, and the device bricks, whose fault is it?
Then they can just get it repaired, at a shop that has the flasher to re-flash the device. Cuz it’s open source
And pay a shop to do it? Do you realistically think the average person is gonna be willing to do that? I think it’s more likely they’ll complain to the phone company about their bricked phone.
I also don’t know enough, but is a bricked phone “fixable”? If it is, the person could do it themselves. But that’s just one example. Other examples include installing unsafe OSes because social media said so. I don’t think the average person is tech savvy enough to give them this kind of freedom.
This may be symptomatic of the issue being addressed. Would we be more willing to get the phone repaired if we felt more ownership of it? My hands are tied if the device was designed without repeatability in mind and the manufacturer has no intention of volunteering assistance - so I must complain. In our current system, we don’t have many options to choose from. I look forward to your thoughts.
Also I believe ‘bricked’ is a result of it becoming inoperable. Our devices aren’t easily repaired so they will become ‘bricked’ SOONER than if designed to run unlocked boot systems and OS’s. Feeling more ownership of your device may lead you to be more careful with it and only entrust it with reputable technicians.
This very much depends. Are there technical ways to restore this? Something like a jumper to make the flash storage writable. This would be possible with access to the firmware source code. So yeah, they can fix it themselves. Who is responsible? If the device is bricked after this: the company.
Build locked up products? Die.
Build in fuses? Better make those chips accessible by providing the plans to build them, otherwise refund your customers and die. Now everyone can build them, this won’t be a monopoly and everyone wins.
Open source.
Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via “free product” followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.
This would be a great start. Strong Antitrust = Competition.
Stop tariffs on new technologies
The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.
I’d go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc… Also it has severely disrupted teenagers’ social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.
