I vibe code Brainfuck using Eliza.

It’s way past time to get the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to 270.

Stratasys still has a patent on it

That’s putting it generously, isn’t it?

This video from a year ago goes into why the patent they have today isn’t valid. (Short answer: prior art. They patented it in 1995 and that expired in 2015 in the U.S. and 2016 in Europe. Then they re-patented it in 2020, which isn’t really something they can do, but the patent office granted it anyway, probably unaware of the prior patent. There’s kindof a “new claim” in the later patent, but there’s prior art for that as well in the form of a 2019 feature request on PrusaSlicer’s Github.)

I get that Stratasys has lawyers and money and might theoretically be able to win even a case with as little merit as a patent case regarding that 2020 patent would have. But I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say they have a (valid) patent.

Blockchain can’t do that. Blockchain can’t do anything that something else can’t do better.

Lemmy.

Nobody’s said “this is going to be my year” in many many years.

“This instance” being lemmy.world?

Mom wanted me to go into music performance. I went into computer science both because “holy shit how cool is that” and to get out of music performance.

My alma mater had three computer departments: CSC/CompSci, CIS/Computer Information Systems, and Graphic Design. I’ve never been artistic, really, so I didn’t have a lot of interest in Graphic Design. But I didn’t know the difference really between CIS and CSC going into college.

I went to the head of the CIS department to ask about the difference and he was like “CSC is about building the plane, CIS is about flying the plane.” Misinterpreting that to mean CSC was about hardware and CIS was about software, I thought I wanted CIS. When I met with the CSC head, he met with me in a little lab in the CSC department. And on the shelves on the walls, there were robotic coin sorters and Lego robots and stuff. And that’s basically when I realized the CSC department was my people.

Communication with others might be limited without proprietary messenger apps. It could be argued whether Signal counts as proprietary or not, but that’s probably the only option alongside with SMS.

Well, I use Lemmy and lurk Mastadon, but I don’t use Facebook or anything else like that. I use Google Chat on my computer. But honestly not having things that incessantly ding at me in my pocket is as much a feature as a limitation.

Camera quality likely suffers a lot, without proprietary camera drivers.

I did say “proprietary apps”. I’m sure I’m running some proprietary drivers and device firmwares and such. My camera quality is definitely dog shit, though.

Online banking is pretty much impossible without proprietary apps, since (at least here in Europe) every bank I know requires you to use their app for 2FA.

I haven’t had issues doing online banking on a desktop/laptop(/Raspberry Pi) with a browser. My bank’s 2FA just requires access to email. (So far.) I’m in the U.S., though.

Games will be severely limited, since there’s not a lot of non-proprietary apps.

Sure. But there are decent FOSS games like Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Mindustry. Plus I use Lemuroid (emulator suite) a fair amount.

Navigation will be severely limited

Not sure what you mean by this. Like, GPS? Yeah, I don’t use that.

In many cities public transport requires you to use their app for tickets

Yeah, no idea. I haven’t used public transit to speak of.

Also, I don’t use Android Auto. Or my work’s 2FA provider’s proprietary app, but I have a YubiKey for that. I don’t have any cloud backup to Google Drive or anything. Yeah, you’re not wrong that there’s a lot you can’t do on a phone under the restrictions I’ve placed on my phone, but I’d rather deal with those things than the enshittification I’d get with proprietary apps.

The famous violinist. Yes.

Honestly, still better than working sick with an office full of coworkers.

At least in my peer group, people hated Voyager when it was running too.

A song for you.

Two books I started reading knowing I’d disagree with the author:

• Introduction to Austrian Economics. That school of economics is helpful as a model for understanding economics, though only through the lens of an idealized system. The same way that understanding how a point-like mass moves helps you understand how a canon ball moves. But then it goes on to say that your inalienable/natural right to safety in your person is basically the fundamental property right from which all of what the anarcho-capitalists call “theory” directly derives. Which makes it rather circular. “Property rights ∴ property rights.”
• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I knew my reaction to it would be visceral, but defending DRM was the last straw. I finished the Austrian Economics book. But I didn’t get a quarter of the way into the Kurzweil book before rage quitting.

Paid for by Nvidia.

(Joke. Maybe.)

Finally I can get a leg up in Pass the Pigs.

Bacon, cheese, or peanut butter?

Why all the downvo- oh shit this is an AI-generated image, isn’t it?

(Seems like the shoelaces are fucked up, the buttons are kindof inconsistent, the eyes are a little weird.)

Yeah, in that case it gets a downvote from me as well.

Everything you’re saying is good and valid points. And yes, the future may be bleak for Linux like the present is for Android.

But at the same time, I’m tapping out this very comment on a rooted phone with an unlockable bootloader without any of the Google apps and in fact running zero proprietary apps.

I think the option to use Linux the unenshittified way in which it was always intended to be used will be there for the foreseeable future the way it, quite frankly, still is for Android despite Google’s best efforts at killing open mobile computing.

So, I’m not a recent convert to Linux. I’ve been using it pretty much exclusively for over 20 years now. And almost entirely Gentoo and Arch.

And I’ll tell you… the Gentoo community is hard core. The sort of hard core that will not tolerate any enshittification. They’ll make sure Gentoo stays pure.

And I’m not just talking about “free from corporate influence”. If Gentoo announced that moving forward, only SystemD would be supported as an init system (and I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), a big part of the community would fork Gentoo and declare they could take OpenRC (or runit or whatever) away when they could pry it from their cold dead hands.

No matter what enshittified Linux distros come to exist in the future, that lifeline of purists will always provide a way to buck enshittification. And that’s a lifeline that the Windows and Mac ecosystems don’t have.

So, while I have little doubt that enshittified Linux distros will exist (indeed already do exist – after all what is Android but enshittified Linux?), I think opting out of said enshittification will continue to be an option for the foreseeable future.

Two caveats:

• I do think the likelihood is that the opting-out-of-enshittification option will largely skew toward a more technical/hacker/power-user sort of user base.
• Some things that aren’t exactly “Linux” (or within the Linux ecosystem) may well enshittify in ways that negatively impact Linux users. For instance, I’d imagine web standards will get more and more captured by corporate interests. WEI will probably return as a web standard. That sort of thing. And while that’s not so much about Linux, it will affect Linux users.