One answer to capitalist companies seeking to maximize profit at all costs are worker owned companies. When the workers are in control of the business decisions, they won’t vote for the decisions going against themselves.
Sadly, I don’t know that many worked owned tech companies. One example is https://www.igalia.com/
If more people would be willing to start work owned companies rather than your typical capitalist startup, we could have more options.
For macOS and iOS development I use Xcode (don’t really have another choice), but otherwise I am using Kate. Kate has support for macOS and Windows in addition to Linux.
I’m not touching VSCode, I don’t want to use an electron app as a code editor, nor want to use something with Microsoft spyware and propriety plugins.
Strange, Big Tech has no inherit right to operate in foreign markets. If they want to be in those markets, they need to pay their fair share. I would be glad to see them pull out of those markets, but that won’t easily happen.
While not open source, OldUnreal has taken over Unreal and Unreal Tournament with access to the source code and they release patches. The OldUnreal team has an agreement with Epic to do this.
I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify my claim, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. I’m not for sure whether uBlock blocks complete JavaScript libraries from loading by default or if it is only blocks the HTTP request like PiHole.
I did find this interesting project by DuckDuckGo which provides empty implementations of the JavaScript libraries when adblockers break the site. This seems to imply that some adblockers do prevent the JavaScript library from loading at all.
uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.
If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.
It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
With the forced return to office, your time is wasted on getting yourself presentable in the morning and then commuting to and from the office. This should be considered part of your working hours if being physically present adds so much value, employers would pay that cost. In reality no employers would do this, as they know being in the office isn’t worth 2 hours of your working hours.
This also impacts emulators and other re-implementations of proprietary systems. This allows Nintendo to threaten emulator devs and make it illegal to decrypt DRM encrypted games, media, or apps you legally purchased.
Proprietary software is also really dogmatic. Steve Jobs famously didn’t support flash on the iPhone, there also was no direct access to files/file system in the UI for a very long time. Tim Cook told someone’s Mom to just buy an iPhone to access iMessage. There’s too many user hostile dogmatic positions from Apple.
I think this has nothing to do with open source vs proprietary, but rather specific individuals having power/control over the software to force specific decisions.
Valve’s Steam Deck is the only piece of technology to come out over this past decade that is exciting. Desktops/laptops and smartphones have completely stagnated. Proprietary OSes with each release are introducing more user hostile features and spyware. The Steam Deck is a breath of fresh air with it not being locked down and you can install whatever you want, as it includes a full KDE desktop environment.
I’m using Feedly Classic on iOS. I would like to move off of it, but I have yet to find any other RSS client which presents the articles in a card like view which you can vertically swipe through to mark them as read.
Feedly themselves abandoned this UI for an infinite scrolling list on their main app. All other RSS clients I tried have this similar UI, which I feel is really poor.
Capitalism is more like a program causing resource exhaustion.
Typically new hardware is released at regular intervals so the poorly coded software can continue to function without bringing down the system, rather than addressing the root problem of always trying to grow the software.
The things is with the earth we don’t ever get any new hardware.
The root of the problem is growth and profit seeking is what is steering the tech research and production. Which just leads to an endless churn of useless software and hardware updates.
Desktop OSes peeked around Windows 7. macOS hasn’t had a useful feature since dark mode. The UIs have only gone down hill with trying to force them to be mobile friendly and flat.
The iPhone peeked around iPhone 8/iPhone X depending on if you liked the notch/FaceID or not. I’ve seen no useful features since.
Companies must make “progress” each year by releasing worse user hostile software updates and force device upgrades through planned obsolescence.
Sounds like Apple fucked over Imagination Technology by poaching their key employees and executives. Apple even opened a new office for chip development next to theirs.
The company was then doing poorly and got bought out by a Chinese company controlled by the Chinese government.
Pretty sad demise for the company. I remember working with their GPUs in the early 2010s.
I believe Valve just has a flat hierarchy, but not worker owned.