Zune HD 🤝 Playdate
beautiful exposed screws

Thanks for the suggestions! There were a couple, but I went with Enhancer for YouTube (https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube) since it's actively security checked by Mozilla.

There's a lot of options and it took a long while to figure out what the right option was to get rid of those awful related video screens:

Appearance > Hide related videos

that feeling when you're just watching a tech review on YouTube and then it ends, and the suggestions come up, and it's a gallery of bunch of punchable-looking white guys going 🤨🤔 😱

is there an extension to block these suggestions? I'd really love one if there is

@Stoori I think it's important to say that it's not really de-privatisation so much as centralisation.

They are adopting the TfL model, so services may be contracted out to third parties, but the state will be doing all of the coordinating; including on ticketing and timetables.

The new body that will replace all this (and Network Rail) will be called Great British Railways. There's a detailed assessment/plan here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/great-british-railways-williams-shapps-plan-for-rail

well, I'll add that with iMessage, I don't think it's particularly unethical actually. While it is legitimate lock-in, it's also admitting business constraints - iPhone users only get the service because the purchase of the device subsidises the cost of the service, which is a pretty reasonable thing to do. Much better than providing a service you can't keep in the VC vein of business operations.

From seeing the broad overviews of EU's DMA, I think most of it is very well thought out and sound. The area I think it completely faceplants at is the requirements for messenger inter-operability.

This is a nice idea in theory but IMO chats are like railroads, they're naturally monopolistic. When you try to make chat systems interoperable, prepare for a bunch of messages saying 'this message type isn't compatible with your client'.

So, there's no reasonable way to increase 'market competition' while keeping the same level of user friendliness, there's no real business to compete in other than unethical ones, it's just all-round quite a useless bit of legislation IMO.

If chat messages stick to the standard laid out by their creators; then 95% of people are just gonna go for the default client. If they don't, it's gonna become the purview of the technically inclined and the philosophically motivated; see XMPP, IRC and Matrix.

Messengers also just don't make money like other services; WhatsApp, FBM and Google's shit are all garden walling and user tracking, iMessage is a value-add and lock-in, Telegram is a rich dude's money sink with a failed ICO.

I think this is a recurring thing where well-meaning EU legislation results in UX nightmares and a non-fix to a solution; see GDPR notices.

The way the UK's railway was run from the early 90's to now was a completely failed experimentation in bringing 'market competition' to a naturally monopolistic thing. It was fucking awful, and the UK is giving up on it next year.

@makeworld As I said in the thread, VCs arent a normal mode of investment - they are predicated on 1. creating monopolies, 2. luring a large base of users and then enclosing on them, 3. making extreme amounts of profit

I highly doubt that they will make the kinds of returns and situations VC investors want by just making some completely avoidable service thats nice to have.

"They're MIT licensed so if they're bad you can just leave"

VC funds would not have given Charm millions of US dollars if their business model involved "oh yeah, it'll be really easy for the vast majority of people to avoid our future monetisation channels".

One more note - I think it's important to stress how making your software open for anyone to use and modify is inherently at odds with capitalism, especially the kind of hypercapitalism that VC encapsulates.

At the end of the day, Charmbracelet, Inc's investors will want a shitload of profit from them, and being *that* profitable always necessitates creating some kind of financial gating or lock-in mechanism. They won't do it now, but they will in a few years once they've got you.

And I really do mean it about performing moderation actions on them.

They are in their infancy, and I think we can all do our part to let it die instead of letting it turn into a monster that will become another predatory company that aims to be - by design - hard to avoid.

I think a lot of people in open source circles say 'you can fork it' as a refrain without recognising that there's so much involved in such an undertaking, that just saying that is deeply simplistic.

And maybe the people at Charm are nice people and genuinely care about making the CLI nicer to use. That doesn't matter. They fucked that up as soon as they took VC money.

They (knowingly or unknowingly) set the rules for their business, there's no going back now.

I also think if your instance cares about the fundamental freedom of people and technology (as tenuous an as loaded as that term can be), you should probably perform some moderation action on @charm because at the heart of their organisation, they are trying to run a (social, not financial) scam on technologists.

Any commitment to Open Source Charm will have will be entirely secondary to what their investors want out of them, because that is essentially the law by which their business runs on that they decided on in advance. If they do not make good on those, they will cease to exist.

VC exists to trap people, so their commitment to Open Source and any other kind of PR - is inherently also a trap.

Charmbracelet Inc (who has a Mastodon, @charm btw fuck you) has VC funding because it's investors think Charm can commercialise and monopolise the CLI space. They can go to hell.