This is the problem with distilling any group of people into a monoculture. The only true fact you can get from grouping people into the collective term of "developers" is the fact that they write software. This occupation/hobby says nothing about the values that they hold. Developers make malware and also anti-malware. The group as a whole works both sides of all of these issues. I hope I'm not putting it too harshly but you're both wrong and you're both right.
Edit to add: you also don't need to be a developer to understand the issue and advocate for either side.
No worries, not too harsh. You are right in general, it's too huge a group. However, I still think it's right that the most poignant and relevant criticism comes from developers and people that work in the core of IT. The CCC was really a prime example of that, or just take Snowden.
To add to this, since the work I do at my job aligns very closely to my hobbies, I find that work saps my interest in putting time into said hobbies. If I were able to spend the entirety of my mental capacity on things I _want_ to do, I might do more. Who is to say. As a counterpoint, work can offer opportunities to work with technologies or concepts you might not think of or be able to afford while working on a personal project.
Your description reminded me a lot of TempleOS. Another project created from scratch by a single developer (possibly with mental illness) that is going nowhere.
I have this "fun" slider on my retirement account's website that shows different values for different retirement ages. In order to hit my minimum, I had to slide it all the way to age 85. "FUN"
I'd like to add just one more point. Getting the vaccine and reducing your personal communicability helps the people who are vulnerable and unable to get the vaccine. There will be a small percentage but large number of people that are unable to take the vaccine due to allergies or being immuno-compromised. Getting the vaccine helps them, too.
You just made me realize that this is implemented in Discord but very poorly. I have difficulty deciding where I should post a meme to get it to the people that will like it. Maybe I'm just on too many Discord servers...
Well, the other problem with Discord is that people have to opt-in to the groupings. Circles were publisher driven. If you were in my CS Friends circle, that was just where I categorized you. It was not akin to a FB group or a Discord server. In those, you have to accept some kind of invitation into the grouping, and you're made to communicate with everyone in the group/server. Circles were one way, from me to the circle. For a circle member to publish to all the same people they'd need to be connected to all of them directly in G+ and create an identical circle.
This is the same issue as group messaging in most instant message type systems (including SMS/MMS). It's forcing a full connection between all participants, when really we may only want a fan-out structure.
I haven't used it much (not as many people on it in my social circles) but WhatsApp's broadcast lists are like G+ circles in this regard.
I would love this if I trusted any online service to maintain the paid option as truly ad-free over time but I've been burned by the TV industry too many times. Ad creep ruins every paid service and ultimately just drives the price up.
While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.
I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise
I wanted to set up a Pi-hole and even bought a Raspberry Pi, but then I realized that :
- It didn't really support IPv6.
- Neither did my ISP.
- It was hosted on Github.
So I gave up on the idea...
just beware that pi-hole and nextdns are not the same thing, albeit they maybe solve the same problem on the user end.
but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)
Thanks yeah it's a fair point, but at my skill level I have to make trade-offs and in this case I hope that the increased attack attractiveness of NextDNS relative to just my one endpoint with pi-hole is still a better solution than me poorly managing that one pi-hole config
YouTube very recently (last 2 weeks?) updated their policy to where ads will be shown in front of videos that don't even qualify for monetization. So, the uploader is ineligible to collect money for "their" content but Google can...
I'll third this. I was so excited about the applications for speech/smart interfaces in the home a la Cherry 2000. But we got Alexa. A tool to buy stuff and spy. I won't denigrate the actual useful functions these devices have - I like to ask Alexa to tell me jokes when I'm at a friend's house that has one. However, it's all the things that come with it that turned me off.
I'm currently pursuing open-source tools to run home automation but it's slow-going. It's complex.
Edit to add: you also don't need to be a developer to understand the issue and advocate for either side.