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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Put simply: yes

    The typing scheme is highly innovative and the code they used to do it is proprietary so its a little hard to get started replicating. Further, they have a design patent that means you need permission from the company and licensing to replicate that action. The way they do this licensing and permission means its FAR easier to get that permission and include the proprietary binary blob than to reinvent the mechanism. I'm sure there are extreme radical FOSS-heads interested in doing this with code they're working on, but any big project that wants to create a legitimate daily driver keyboard is going to be more focused on other problems surrounding ethical predictive text and the precision of screen taps. Like this is more a question of what problems are worth solving than anything. There's plenty of hard problems in the mobile keyboard space that don't involve lawyers, especially when getting access to the Swype lib to embed in keebs has thus far been pretty trivial and that lib has been found to be not gnarly in audits.

    Personally I do have worry about Swype doing a rugpull with this licensing to keyboards that are using it, since that's one of the paths of enshittification/rot-econony, but I also wouldn't choose not to use a keyboard without swipe gestures (in fact my current keyboard doesn't have them because I can type fine enough without them and its one less thing to install or worry about)

  • Short answer: No

    Long answer: Look into the phrase "rot economy." Basically, enshitification starts MUCH earlier in the process than an IPO or a major buy out. It happens because our financial markets value growth, not financial gain. We always here about how companies only worry about the bottom line, but they don't, actually. They care about demonstrating growth. How do you make growth happen while not worrying about the bottom line? Easy! Operate at a loss on purpose! That way you can capture more of the market in a fiscal year, and then the next year adjust your prices a little bit and operate at slightly less loss and show investors you've grown. Those adjustments? That's enshitification. It all happens from the very first moment when you decide, "We have to capture the market." That's not the IPO. That's the very founding of a business.

    We need to instead value sustainable businesses. Ones that have higher revenues than losses. And you'll notice something VERY interesting about sustainable businesses: They don't do MASSIVE 3rd quarter layoffs literally every year. Why? Because they don't have to show the investors that they've made a profit, they just need to show they captured more market and then reduced costs

  • The problem with that is that bad faith actors engage in bad faith arguments for a reason. They just want a few people to hear them. It doesn't matter that the majority of people who hear them see through their lies. It matters that they reach that small audience. To let that small audience know they're not alone. The goal is to activate, engage, and coalesce that small audience. This is what the alt-right does. This is what they've done since the 1920s. We have 100 years of evidence that you can't just "Hear out" the Nazis' opinions without harm coming to real, legitimate people. The best way to deal with bad faith actors is to deplatform them before they've achieved a platform

  • You're choosing from vendors to deal with the regional vendor. You're just paying someone to pay the company in your area. The company you pay in this scenario literally offers you zero value. They simply exist to extract money from you.

    Alternatively, these services could be provided to you at a lower cost as part of your annual tax bill under a collaborative cooperative.

  • You just described a Nissan XTerra

  • The hardware is expensive, the licensing is expensive, the hardware requires accessories you don't from other companies (dongles, so many dongles), and everything they do is hostile to repairs. Are there any aspects in which they offer a high value proposition?

  • Good ol' stop and frisk. It doesn't prevent crime and it let's bastard cops be bastards

  • Golf corses are the tumors of the cancer known as the bourgeoisie. They're a waste of space, water, and soil resources. They're damaging to local ecologies that we Terraform to make more like southern Scotland. The cost of participation is high before we even take into consideration that private golf courses have added cost and systemic racism built into their admissions system.

    If golf dies as the lower classes awaken to the realities of the ecological terror the bourgeoisie have waged against them, fucking good. There are other activities to do that are less resource intensive. Including disc golf if you absolutely must turn a casual stroll into an act of conquest

  • One of my favorite articles about that last part is "I am not a maker"

  • Google hasn't understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.

    These days that's not... Something they're interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that's just a hook to reel you in. They'll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. "Ai" is hot right now so that's the buzzword.

    I don't get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore...

  • That's new and well warranted from when I joined

  • KeePassDX. Uses the same KeePass 4 database format. You can keep your database synced between devices using any number of file syncing services, allowing you to choose one you feel matches your threat model

  • Gotta use the ssh kitten

  • Its for their cloud instances. Just like you wouldn't actually run Amazon Linux. If you're using their cloud platform it's absolutely the best option, but in all other scenarios you wouldn't think to touch it

  • Vote federation can be weird

  • There are benefits and costs. Cloudflare makes it easy to maintain high uptime as a small site sysadmin at the cost of free DDoS protection isn't actually free. Cloudflare turns all users of websites that employ it into the products of surveillance capitalism

  • How

    Jump
  • The unfortunate answer is that "it depends". Making Unix look a certain way will depend more on your workflows and preferred tools than any one particular singular grand unified guide

  • For casual players they hear about chess.com via a paid ad, try it out, enjoy it, and then stick around because that's where the other casual players are. Lichess is much more adept players making it much less fun for the casual player

  • Doesn't really matter between brands across OSes at this point. AMD offers better performance per dollar though