Proprietary / for-profit software is made that way, yes. There's no other way you can do it, given the incentive landscape. You take the huge base of FOSS code and spend as little effort as possible to build a thin little layer of moss on top. You respect the customers as little as possible to keep them around. You fix bugs as little as possible. You use other proprietary services that spy on your customers, like Sentry and Firebase, because privacy costs money.

Free / libre software has to compete on its merits. If a project isn't useful it doesn't grow. But not growing is okay. Some projects accrete over years, like a pile of stones forming a cairn. They don't need to squeeze money out of people to live because they aren't alive. They don't have to "eat".

I'm mixed on the Unix philosophy. It makes a lot of sense when you're building CLI tools that a hacker is going to plug together, because then your program is really a function in a programming environment that spans one or more entire computers. Tools like ripgrep, jq, curl, they're all great, I love them. A good function does one thing and does it well.

But just as often, I'm okay with huge software that does a lot. Web browser engines are evolving into universal GUI / IO frameworks and I'm trying to make peace with that. Systemd does a ton of stuff, but hell, so does the Linux kernel. I don't see an inherent problem with having an init system that acts like a monolith kernel for userspace. Microkernels are nifty but in the end we all ship our org charts. Maybe there's no need for microkernels if the real divide is between kernel programming and userspace programming. For the same reason, I haven't found any personal use for wasm, because wasm makes the most sense when you're connecting two pieces of code written by different teams at different times, like a GIMP plugin. I don't need wasm to plug my own code into my own code.

And for GUIs it's just been a fucking nightmare. 57 years since the Mother Of All Demos and it's still 10x easier to write `fn main()` and build a CLI program that runs on _every_ OS, rather than a GUI program that maybe runs on one OS, like it runs on Ubuntu 24.04 but not Ubuntu 22.04. What a fucking mess. GUIs don't compose, so every GUI project I've tried feels like I'm inventing the universe from scratch. It's fun but it's a stupid fucking waste of time.

Honestly browser engine frameworks like Electron and Tauri _are_ the Unix philosophy compromise. Making a GUI framework requires tens of thousands of lines of high-effort code made by experts. If a browser's one thing is "Be a GUI framework" then it allows your GUI app to just serve HTML and now it's a CLI app that runs anywhere without fucking with GTK 3 vs GTK 4 bullshit.

Sorry for the long rant. This stuff is all percolating in my head. I started with Visual Basic 6 and I still haven't seen GUIs improve since then. Phones have been a fucking step backwards, too. Everyone uses a phone but just like a mouse-and-keyboard player dominating gamepad players in a shooter game, I get a lot more done at a real desktop with a real pointing device.

Sometimes called "pink capitalism" or "rainbow capitalism", where a company will show the rainbow pride flag for Pride Month, but not put any more substantial effort towards diversity, plurality, LGBTQ rights, etc.

I expect nothing from companies, and it's nice to see that virtue signal. If they're signalling, it means they think we haven't been exterminated yet. But I don't expect good works from anything for-profit. It's just business.

Edit: The author using the phrase "surveillance capitalism" is generally a left wing thing. I don't hear right-wingers rallying against capitalism (let's not even get into the weeds of defining "capitalism" the word) even when they happen to oppose surveillance

So maybe the strong argument against NCII is the same - It doesn't matter how you got an image of someone, if it's non-consensual then it's wrong.

Hopefully cartoons can still be the exception since they're obviously not photographic in style. Political cartoons and satire would never be mistaken for photos.

Maybe the EU or China will crack down on it. A single company shouldn't decide who gets to talk to half the world. If that company is American they will not tolerate it for long.

Personally DeltaChat is my new favorite Thing but it falls afoul of Zooko's Triangle - A WhatsApp number or POTS number is short because it's centrally controlled and you have to pay for each one. DeltaChat has public keys, so I have 20 of them, and nobody can control who gets one, but they're incredibly long... the QR codes are nightmares.

At one point people moved from something else to Whatsapp, and that happened before Whatsapp had 3 billion people on it. If it's good, early adopters will adopt it and want others to adopt it too, then it snowballs from there.

It has happened before, and as long as new regulation doesn't solidify Whatsapp/FB in their position, it can happen again :)

WhatsApp allowed people to send SMS without paying, or rather, paying just once to buy the app, so it was instantly valuable if you just convinced your spouse or parents or a single friend to install it.

To overcome it now, you need a lot more effort (or rely on enshittification, which I'm sure will happen).

And no one was paying per SMS at the time we were using SMS for communication, almost everyone I know were on monthly plans that gave you N text messages and N minutes of calls for static sum each month.

The first people I saw who started using whatsapp, was people who were communicating across the border, because even if you had a monthly plan, those didn't include international messages. Eventually we all converged on whatsapp because that's what outside family and relatives used anyways.

> paying for “N text messages per month” is precisely what people refer to as paying per message

Maybe I said it wrong, "N text messages per month" for me means "Pay us 10 EUR per month, send up to 5000 messages" for example. Doesn't matter how many you send, you pay the same.

While "pay per message" is "Every text message you send, costs 0.01 EUR". Maybe I'm using the wrong words, but that's how I understand it.

Most of the people who were "texters" (in my circles) were on plans offering the first way of paying, while hardly anyone was doing it the second.

Another important part, was that most telecom's had free SMS and calls if you were with the same company (and still do, AFAIK), so constant bickering about what plan people are on and why they don't change so it's free and yadda yadda.

Many people were already mostly texting for free at this point.

The rates people were paying back then were extortionate - like 60-90% profit margin. When WhatsApp launched, plans were 5-15 euros/month for 100-500 messages with ~0.15 per message for overages. So you might not count the bundle as a per text message, but it really is which you can tell by what happens if you send more than your bundle allowed. Compare that with WhatsApp’s $1/year for unlimited messaging and you start to see the pricing disparity.

Many people were not mostly texting free in 2009. I think you’ve got the timelines mixed up. That started changing towards the mid to late 2010s precisely because of internet-based chat apps on the phone and plummeting data costs making the telco’s SMS pricing plans insane.

The initial claim of "WhatsApp happened at a time when, in Europe, you paid for SMS." maybe was true in parts of Europe, but clearly not everywhere. People were mostly using the Facebook chat (not Facebook Messenger/Chat) already before Whatsapp started being used, although Whatsapp in Sweden still isn't as popular as in other countries. In Spain, everyone uses Whatsapp, in Sweden, seemingly the people I talk to only have Whatsapp to communicate with me and others outside the country.

> Many people were not mostly texting free in 2009

Most people I knew definitively were mostly texting for free even before 2009, again, at least in Sweden.

I grew up in Canada so my knowledge is purely from talking with people in non-Swedish parts of Europe that I met and also reading contemporary articles analyzing the space as well as retrospective analysis of what led to WhatsApp’s popularity and dominance.

If we taxed land ownership a la Georgism and then taxed negative externalities like pollution, we could give everyone UBI and probably kick back and take it easy for a bit.

Of course this would require a global democratic mandate bigger than the world's ever seen, so I'm not waiting up on it.

In most countries the national government levies the most tax (usually as income and company taxes), and pays out the most in benefits, so they are the level that needs to change most. There are no global taxes that need to be replaced, just local, state, and national.

How about now?

The format used by `ar` is a quite simple, somewhat like tar, with files glued together, a short header in between and no index.

Early Unix eventually introduced a program called `ranlib` that generates and appends and index for libraries (also containing extracted symbols) to speed up linking. The index is simply embedded as a file with a special name.

The GNU version of `ar` as well as some later Unix descendants support doing that directly instead.