And how do you verify the source of the “yes/no” signal is a valid ID card? How do you know it’s used by the person linked to it?
Either the yes/no is trivially faked (so you might as well skip the formality), or the user secretly does get ID’d.
One thing I really dislike about the Mobile ecosystem is how much different each device is to each other.
I thought you were sarcastic when I first read this part, since way back when phones used to be innovative in both hardware and software. The current market offerings are all carbon copies of eachother with a strong trend towards converging into the exact same lineup.
Multiple cameras, one in front, 2+ in back. A power button and two for volume. Reader apps may hijack it for scroll. Gesture movements. Fingerprint and face id. Less and less conusmer freedom in software choice. Irremovable battery. No removable back plate. A rectangular brick. A near-100% display area. No headphone jack or SD card, with SIM on the way out.
Covers the vast majority of offerings on the market, with a few slight adds/subtracts. Dumbphones are a rounding error.
This definition covers even tablets, and it isn’t even deliverately vague.
Without much experimentation and development on the hardware front, no wonder software’s behaving exactly the same.
There just isn’t enough interest for proper innovation and experimentation.
Honestly, as bad as it is, there might be one good effect: apps and software will get less bloated and spec-hungry.
It is like replacing an aggressive cancer with a congenital heart issue though. Both are terrible in their own and unique ways and choosing the worse option isn’t all that sensible of an ask.
That’s nice to have. For both GIMP and the industry’s sake, priorities should be:
GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop. It isn’t a psd reader.
Being the format jack of all trades yet master of none isn’t too great of an idea. It’ll just exacerbate GIMP’s main current problem: an ancient UI Photoshop enthusiasts dread. A lot might consider switching if the bad GIMP UX was better than the also-bad Photoshop UX.
If I had to say what my main design gripe with gimp is, that’d be modularity. Seperate the ui (skins) from the tools, effects and rendering (formats). The UI is especially egregious in its hard-codedness while effects are pretty well-supported.
A few more apis would go a long way. Hell, even the closed Photoshop has open(ish) apis, since even Adobe know the value of an ecosystem and not just their internal r&d department!
Maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward, as project putlooks anf goals change with time.
Also editing is quite a lot of more work to support than mere viewing. As all tools and actions need to behave correctly - not jusbt the renderer.
And something proprietary can hadly be a “industry standard”. It can be “most common” or a “de facto standard”. But all “industry standards” are by definition open as any industry worth its weight doesn’t rely on or include a single point of failure anywhere within itself.
So a post-apocalyptic fantasy rural frontier/urban civilization center split is fully within the realm of.possibility.
With US cities and states beibg pretty autonomous most things considered (for now at leas), it could easily happen without the US splitting as far as the world map goes.
Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.
Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.
A “10-month lead” less than a month ago at that
Not reached, but breached?
What is Linux, a virus?
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
Honestly - just uploading to archive.org or their spinoff of Google Books would be acceptable. At least the stuff out of copyright.
Not only that…
They use this fucking incredible argument:
“We destroy the book because when we scan it - that’s a new copy. If we destroy the oroginal - only one copy (the scan) remains”
As if the model doesn’t get copied over and rented out in bajillions of instances. Its product - by all AI service ToS’s made free to use and copy royalty free (unlike say, every single library in this world, which universally forbid the photocopying of lent out books). Meaning - copyright infringement of the worst kind in any sane interpretation. Shame this world is insane.
Such an incredible spin on the rules. Using them as the excuse to go against the core cultural, civilizational and moral imperative of archiving, while going against the spirit of the concept of what copyright was initially made to do - give authors the path to a livelihood from their work and denying it to parasites such as publishers.
Copyright truly is dead. Indeed - the global copyright rules were on their last legs before AI and used only as anti-consumer protection for publishers (not authors!), but now they’re a sinked ship - the mask is off. It’s all plainly visible what they’re here to do now.
Late to reply, but
Imagine if, like how app publishers can seemingly magically deploy arbitrary code and send data at a high speed to and from your devices, society and technology went in a similar way with appliances:
Due to the obvious fire risk, all appliances need to be recorded. The recordings: accessible real-time to the fire department and yore utility suppliers. Don’t worry, installation of the beeded equipment is covered by the Stop The Spread of Fire association. You only pay a symbolic part of the real cost.
Sounds dystopian, and it is.
Hell, with the way some cashier-free stores are using solely scale-equipped shelves (no camera needed), a conclusion of "Why don’t we do that in OUR fridges by Samsung isn’t impossible. Give an eextended warranty and some bonus functionality like expiry tracking if the user registers their produce in the device’s built-in display. Then sell the data and profit.
You don’t get it. It was never about past decisions guiding or restricting future ones.
What precedent is: a) to be used as an argument and b) a way for the high court to set rules for lower ones to abide by… Until the next recalibration.
They can: hire locally (not a bad thing), move out of overpriced areas (also not a bad thing), pay/find closer housing for employees and negotiate better prices (also not a bad thing) or just make remoteable jobs remote.
All positive consequences of… Having to pay your employeea for their time spent for the company.
Not only that. Travel time should count as work time, with full reimbursement of all travel costs: gas, tickets,…
If they really feel that added cost is worth it? Let them.
Takes you three hours of travel time to get to work and back? That counts into your 8h workday, so you’ll both be paid full salary for it and get to work “only” 5h at the office.
Most should quickly turn away from the idea.
Because a certain group of certain countries made the main comparison axis “capitalism - communism” instead of “totalitarianism - freedom”. I wonder why.
It’s as Tantacrul (the new head designer of the app) would put it
A lot of little things that all add up
The app was taken over by the Musescore team, owned (as in, paid a salary by) a Russian private enterprise called UltimateGuitar.
They’ve already made a lot of really, really bad decisions in regards to Musescore itself.
If you don’t know, Musescore is an app not too dissimilar to Audacity that UltimateGuitar took over some years before they did Audacity. And they did a bunch of moves the FOSS community dislikes.
They’re bound to do the same to Audacity. They just had a lot less time to do it and a lot more pushback from the much larger (and as such more healthy) Audacity community.
As for Audacity, they’ve added a bunch of features. They also fixed core faults with the app: included nondestructive editing and fixed some UX issues.
Which is great.
However, these positive things are just the tip of the “changes” iceberg. And the bottom gets dark, fast.
To start off at the tip with the most pet-peevy thing ever, the new team tends to make bloat. In Musescore’s case, Musescore 2 and 3 ran much faster than Musescore 4. It isn’t even comparable, and Audacity is bound to follow the same path.
Then the new Audacity UI looks great, but it introduces its own issues. Such as turning the app’s UI into a generic modern one, which some people dislike. With Musescore the changes were relatively contained, but Audacity’s UI, UX and workflow was changed as fundamentally as it could have. Old Audacity and New Audacity are pretty much different tools to learn because of it (Old was a simle editor as they were way back when, and New is a DAW - a fundamentally different workflow with a vastly different UX philosophy).
Aa such, the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users. Because Old Audacity was never a traditional DAW.
Then there’s the deeper layers: all the changes a for-profit overtake means for a FOSS project.
Still tame, but slightly underwater: Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem. Musescore (the UltimateGuitar brand) really wants you not to save your files to your computer, but to their online score sharing platform musescore.com.
They also added telemetry and tracking to Musescore.
They also did a logo redesign for Musescore. At first it was the old logo, objectively fixed.
But after not even five years of new management, the old Musescore logo was fully scrapped “to be moved in line with other UltimateGuitar products” (to paraphrase the lead designer). In other words, it was stripped of its personality.
All of the same is bound to happen to Audacity.
In fact, the logo thing already has. Audacity’s logo was also “brought in line.”
And this new Audacity logo is especially abhorrent. Tantacrul (aforementioned head designer) adressed it in a video, but the explanation is very shallow to the point of being downright insulting. The community hates it since it quite literally removed all elements of the original.
The only resemblance of an element retained is the general “headphone” concept. But that’s a very long strech. The new headphone looks more like a sperm than a headphone. If no one told you it was supposed to be one and not the other, you probably wouldn’t even know.
Not even the colors were spared. The old logo featured navy blue headphones worn by a waveform with an orange core and yellow outer parts, resembling a flame. It’s a genius concept for a logo (although the execution for the official renders of the logo was always admittedly very shabby).
The New Audacity logo is, again, a pinkish-purplish sperm. It’s supposed to be a pair of headphones, but it’s really not. It got rid of the genius concept combining three distinct elements: headphones (listening), a waveform (seeing) and flame (feeling). The new one posesses none. It’s pure corporate soullessness. And an insult to anyone having any feeling for Audacity.
Afterwards they did revise their new logo by adding back the waveform as well. The improvement is marginal, and an insult is still an insult. And this one especially is as painful as they get.
With Audacity being a very popular and a communaly dear FOSS project, there have been a lot of community renders on the original Audacity logo. No one would have faulted UltimateGuitar for taking one directly or using multiple as inspiration to make their own minimalist version in line with their current brand identity and style (if only their style wasn’t to kill the original that is).
It’s not an impossible ask to achieve. Retaining essence and soul while giving the logo a new spin and incorporating it into a few simple (yet flexible enough) design rules is an enjoyable professional challenge for most designers. But that’s most likely not the corporate goal and as such off-limits.
Instead the corporate goal is to throw everything out and replace it with a purple sperm. It wouldn’t have been much worse had they chosen a brown poop emoji instead. It really is (and was) that terrible. And the entire community feels the same.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to talk a bit about myself: Admittedly, I’m not too avid of an Audacity user. In fact, I learned of Tantacrul via Musescore and have seen the UltimateGuitar playbook play out on Musescore with my own eyes and felt its consequences on my own skin. It’s a terrible feeling.
I’ve seen Tantacrul’s Musescore video 2 weeks after it first aired. A few videos later, Tabtacrul announced that he’d become the head designer for the app. I was extatic and had high hopes for the app which were very much met. At first.
Things turned south quickly with new management. It’s a terrible feeling. In fact, Musescore is a large part of the reason why I became such a vocal FOSS advocate. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Musescore and its users to my worst enemies.
To move away from me and olback onto Audacity, there’s also the “CLA thing”. You can see the drama firsthand on GitHub (link). But what I’d specifically like to point out is not the main post (read the first paragraph and skim the rest, it isn’t worth reading), but rather the comments under it which do a good job at disspelling the talking points used in the post itself. The commenters over there are much more competent at linking good sources than me, so please feel free to click on some.
That being said, this entire situation with both Audacity and MuseScore is part of a larger trend of “corporate FOSS takeovers” where FOSS projects get taken over by new management, a bunch of work gets done in a few years and then the projects stop being FOSS via various nefarious means.
A nice example of past corporate FOSS takeovers is listed quite nicely here, but it doesn’t give any nuance nor list the common strategies used, or how both the app and its users are harmed by that.
There’s also a nice discussion over on lemmy.ca (this one), but it requires quite a bit of background in FOSS terminology to be fully graspable.
Some more info on the Audacity situation is also listed here, and a more lenghty discussion is available on the forum “Hacker News” (link).
Hope these links feed at least some inquisitive minds.
That’s putting it mildly.
It’s if they’d know the exact food in your fridge and where you got it from. Or the exact makeup of the clothes you buy. Oh, kid’s clothes? What a lovley daughter you have! Would you like some educational material targeted for 4-8 year-olds?
And aren’t you expecting another one?
Use a blender? What lovely strawberry milkshakes you like for breakfast. Why not tell the store most of your food comes from to raise their prices a bit, since it seems to be a trend in your city?
Do you have meds in the fridge? Well, these items are often sold together, have a look. Oh, and a price increase.
In other news:
Water tebds to be wet. Dehydrating it is hard as well.