https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/12/05/your-intellectual-fly-is-open/

https://www.sensorwatch.net/

If it is the Android that comes with the phone, it comes with Google Play and Google Services libraries installed. It is tracking you already. If you use Duckduckgo at least they will not know what you search for (and you will get better search than AI-ridden Google search..).

If you want an Android that doesn't track you all the time, listens to you and those around you, etc etc, you need to use a vanilla android like https://lineageos.org as it comes, and not install the Google Services packages. This means that you may not be able to use some bank apps or popular apps such as Uber, etc that heavily depend on Google Services. Some chat apps may also have a delay in receiving messages.

Yes it sucks. It's doable though. Welcome to the future. If we do nothing it will get even worse.

Edit: some governments are pushing for apps to not depend on Google propietary libraries. For example in the EU transit apps (city, trains ticket planners etc) are being migrated away from using Google Maps and into OpenStreetmaps, and those apps run nicely with a vanilla LineageOS. We need to keep this momentum.

Tv oems are the ones that set up the hdmi club. They want the content encrypted with drm, from transit, to your pc, to your cable, to your screen. Look up the analog hole. This battle has been going on for 20 years. Share this with interested people.

Spanish here. We have an army emergency unit with 4000 people just for this.

One needs to know that Spain is more of a federation than Germany or USA, as silly as it sounds, with regions being Autonomies that have more freedom from the central government than other places. This is a result of the end of the dictatorship in the 70s.

Here, the regional government received alerts from the central weather agency (AEMET) at 7am. They ignored them, (they had already reduced the staff in the regional emergency department). The central weather agency kept sending them updates with record breaking numbers,and the regional government completely ignored them. The TV cameras started recording the tsunami disaster at ~7pm. The regional government sent the alarms at ~10pm, hours after people were already dead.

Then, the regional government blocked the central govenrment from sending help, and didn't ask themselves. By law, the regional government is the one that needs to make the decisions on how and when get the help and declare the emergency. They just didn't. They are unfit for governing. They should go to jail.

Since the regional government, corrupt, is from one side of the political spectrum, and the central one is from the other side of the spectrum, you get a lot of apologists saying that "is everyone's fault, miscommunication". Make no mistake. They are aware, and choose to misrepresent the issue.

You can't establish the precedent of breaking the law to bring out the army on the streets. Follow-up central governments may misuse it. Particularly in Spain, with all the history of terrorism, seccesionism, rising far-right, and a country divided by half politically that still hasn't healed the mess left over by the untouched fascist dictatorship we had in the past.

The end result is that in other countries the responsible people (the regional gov) would resign. Here, i doubt that will happen.. And rinse and repeat.

We are losing the class war.

The masks have come off.

As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.

That's quite demonstrably false. There's so many games that do this, and are and have been part of steam for decades. i can think of is IL-2 sturmovik Battle of X series. They have sales almost every month on il2sturmovik.com and the account there is linked to the steam one. Same for other sims like Microsoft etc, selling through the Microsoft store..

That license looks like Creative Commons Non-Comercial, which is not an open source license.

OK, now think how nontechnical people will not be able to do it. They will be tied to Google/X-corp for all credentials, even government ones. Waiting to be banned if their social credit is too low.

Artists are on a gift-based economy. They gain status by giving away works. If you are the best artist in the world but don't make an effort to share your works, you are irrelevant. The more they give away the more they are recognised. Even if they give them away via pirated works. See: movies, songs that everybody knows and resonates with. Status is their currency, not money.

The status then allows them to obtain more money than other people, incidentally.

CEOs are on a market-based economy, they sell goods and services for money. They don't sell their status. The goods and services they sell are not theirs, but created with the stolen sweat, blood and lives of the people that work for them, which get a minuscule share of the profit for the amount of life they put onto it.

In gift-based economies such as the ones of artists, open source developers, fashion, cultures without scarcities of the specific resource that makes the economy (such as small plentiful tropical tribes, communes, etc), the status is the currency.

Element. If you are missing something, talk to all those motivated people doing Discord bots or whatever, they can contribute to Element/Matrix. And it's actually open source, they keep their contributions, contrary to all the work they have done for Discord for free.

If you need to exercise your right to bear arms, you have already lost. The battle is won in education, critical skills, and mobilising together (unions, etc).

and then wiki.gg gets bought, as other wikis got. No thanks.

Write content in a community mediawiki maintained by the community instead.

Love that Newpipe actually allows me to deactivate the audio translation globally.

Not all AA are the same. The vaseline smear you complain about is just Temporal AA. See https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA for more info.

Not all game engines need to use TAA, and usually is just because the devs were cutting corners.

Edit: even the post mentions it, https://blog.frost.kiwi/analytical-anti-aliasing/#clarity-should-not-be-a-luxury

If you have an asshole that does a bad job for a handyman, you will learn to fear the fixes.

It's not the regularity that is the problem, is the people delivering the fixes. Change manufacturers and software providers. I promise you there is software that is reliable, doesn't get worse over time, respects your freedom, and treats you like a human being instead of a conduit from your bank account to theirs.

You can enjoy software and computers actually.

Mass strikes. Call your union, other unions, whatever union. Organise a mass strike day. Repeat it every week.

CC BY-NC-SA

Not open printer. Not open source. You will only be able to get replacements from them, worse than some other printer companies...