CEO will come out and say employees are more productive when forced to work 5 days a week. When asked to see the data, they will say trust me, I’ve seen the internal studies from a Big Tech company. Same exact playbook as work from home.

Most interesting would be a forced sell of Android. Would all of the Google spyware be stripped out of Google’s Android distribution? Would we see more official distributions of Android without any Google software?

I would say it is one sided in that the user gets the same treatment/experience from either platform even though they are consider rivals and each company would argue they are different.

I would say iOS and Android.

Originally they were pretty different in terms of functionality and appearance. Android has improved a lot in terms of the user experience and UI, but also has become more locked down and user hostile. I would say that iOS has actually gotten worse in terms of bugs/reliability, and now Apple is relying on services and ads for new revenue. The user experience has suffered.

If you want a mobile phone/OS that respects user freedoms, agency and privacy, there is no consumer option. Both are filled with spyware/data collection from both the OS vendor and third party apps.

I wonder if they will implement the same malicious compliance as they did in the EU with the junk core technology fees and notarization requirements.

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.

Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.

Not for sure exactly, maybe there are some details on the forums?

https://www.oldunreal.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4969

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.

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify the 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.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-surrogates

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.

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.

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.

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.

The remedies are damaging when you build your business on mafia money from Google to enforce their search monopoly.

This would apply to all consumer electronics besides smartphones, such as smart TVs, gaming consoles, etc.

Android has problems with how each device uses a forked kernel with vendor binary blobs only working for that specific forked kernel. PostmarketOS is trying to avoid these issues by upstreaming the drivers so they can be maintained normally when the kernel changes.

Yes having a trusted entity maintain the software is a big problem.

But giving the option to install your own software would be a big step in keeping the devices in use.