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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven’t done any open source work on either of the two. I’d be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.

    Honestly my main examples I’d point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don’t get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to “default choice” psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that’s increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that’s why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.

    Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.

    There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I’m hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?

    I’d be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!


  • Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.

    I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.








  • Sorry, let me rephrase: while you can make a good approximation of the average person’s schedule in many places due to 9-5 culture, it will, at best, still be just that—an approximation and there will be a significant number of people who didn’t follow it. If you need to know a specific person’s availability, you will still have to remember details about their routine, and then also convert their time zone to your own or clarify “whose time” you’re talking in. That adds an extra burden on top of the whole AM/PM confusion that can occur as well.

    If Alice lives in a timezone 4 hours behind yours, and you both have work until 5pm in each respective timezone, you’ve probably already calculated that difference and just kind of know that she’s not off work until 9pm, and she’s doing the same mental calculation that you’re off work around the time her clock hits 1pm. This doesn’t even take into account other obligations or scheduling.

    Point is that there’s already lots of memorization going on. What difference is it if you wake up at t=2.25 global vs 8:00AM local if it’s light out and most others around you get up at the same time and work for a roughly equal interval to 9hrs including the unpaid lunch? Communicating with people further away requires figuring out schedules regardless.

    Of course, nobody is used to dealing with the time in this matter. Transition difficulties aside, however, it’s not objectively any more difficult than the juggling of coordination we already have to do. People just seem to have a weird attachment to everything having “normal” times even when it’s all quite relative in this case.

    Edit: grammar and stuff