I have an even more radical solution. The real root of the problem is that we use this "money" concept to represent value. If money didn't exist there wouldn't be any reason to steal, hack, or scam.
What do we replace it with? Haha, idk man. How about water? More difficult to hoard in ridiculous quantities, better spend it before it evaporates, and it occasionally falls from the sky (UBI). That's what I call a liquid asset!
There's a very simple solution to keeping podcasts free and open: don't buy paywalled content, and don't listen to shows that are "only available on [proprietary app x]!"
I'm going to continue supporting independent, freely-available RSS podcasts through Patreon/direct donation, and you should too. Nothing (short of ISP-level censorship) can make those hundreds of thousands of hours of decentralized, self-hosted content go away.
I'm not convinced that tightening up web development practices is what's going to solve climate change, but:
> When you push the CPU processing of the UX from the mobile device back down to the server, the energy consumption certainly moves. Does it decrease, though?
One could argue that developers/website owners might be more motivated to optimize their server code for performance, thereby decreasing their hosting bills, vs optimizing front-end code which they don't pay to run.
On all the pumps near me, the second from the top on the right side mutes the video. Some gas station attendants or kind customers thought to write "Mute" on the button in sharpie, and I encourage everyone to do the same.
Some podcasts I've listened to recently have had local ads injected into them at the start/end. I can tell it's happening because it takes a few seconds for a download to progress after I start it.
The other comments already gave you some great info, but I'll just link some good documentation for anyone looking to get started. I discovered Matrix the other day and decided to set up a toy matrix-synapse server, which took less than two days' worth of free time for someone with a programming background and no serious IT expertise.
I hope this project gets more traction because it's a fantastic, secure, self-hosted, full-featured, (inhales), open-source version of slack/telegram/kind of discord. Not perfect yet, but really great so far. Even pretty easy to set up e2e-encrypted voice and video calling through your server.
I don't think you're wrong, but I'd just add that social media platforms like Facebook are doing everything they can to keep a user's attention at the cost of closer IRL relationships or anything else in their lives. To them, the more time you spend on their platform, the more money they make.
So increased social media use is definitely a symptom of broader disconnection in our societies, but it's also helping that disconnection along quite happily.
I get notifications with the Riot iOS app. I did take a little extra time to set up my toy matrix server with LetsEncrypt certificates, not sure if that makes a difference.
I've been looking into telegram alternatives for a while. The best one I've found is the Matrix protocol (https://matrix.org), which is sort of like a cross between telegram and slack but it's open-source and you can self-host it. There are several app/webapp clients that you can use with your server, like https://riot.im.
It's got end-to-end encryption by default (although you need to manually enable it in some clients like Riot), Riot's mobile app works well, and supports audio and video calling through your server.
They'd just start tracking that info on the server side (while still requiring opt-out per-device), and then we'd have to make the extension copy your session cookie between opted-out devices, and then they'd come up with a way to counter that...
I don't disagree that it's moving fast, but my experience is that the thriving ecosystem makes JS apps nice to work on.
Every project has its own little tech stack, each part being filled a-la-carte by some JS framework/library/preprocessor. The server might use express or raw node or Koa, the web client might use React or Angular, styles might be done with SCSS or styled-components, etc. JavaScript might have a different syntax between projects if they're using typescript/babel. There are lots of choices to fit many needs and preferences, and that's a good thing™.
All of these technologies are built around the same language and syntax, which at its core is relatively simple to learn (aside from the occasional type coercion/prototypal inheritance weirdness). This makes learning new frameworks and tooling easy: does it need a config file? Chances are it's a raw .js or .json file with a similar format to webpack.config.js or package.json or .eslintrc.
It's not a huge ask, nor would it be terribly difficult, for one developer to become competent with both Angular and React, for example. And once you've made your choices for your project and installed all the npm packages you need, there's no need to keep all of them updated to the very latest, bleeding-edge releases at all times. Just install patch (0.0.x) updates and wait for npm to warn you about any security issues in your existing packages.
That's why I'm kind of surprised to see so many companies advertising JS jobs with requirements like "Must have 3 years experience with React." Any competent Angular developer should be able to pick up React and start being useful in a matter of weeks, not months or years. Just hire JavaScript Developers, IMO.
What are some potential solutions here? Some form of intervention by the US government? I think many of us will agree that the sort of behavior these employees are speaking out against is at least unethical, and it also seems this "profits-over-values" behavior is a common one for large tech companies to gradually start engaging in. To your point, corporations in all sectors always do what makes the most economic sense, even if it means building internet censorship tech, dumping hazardous chemicals into the water supply, etc.
As a society which (hopefully) would like to have some sort of moral compass, how do we prevent large companies from seeking profit even at the expense of our freedoms/health/planet? It seems to me that if the punishment for unethical behavior is economically "less" than the costs or potential losses associated with acting in a good, ethical way, companies will continue to do what we're seeing them do now. My intuition is that capitalism (in its current Western incarnation) can't function without some strict controls to protect what our societies value most.
Or do we simply value profit over everything else? If so, that's kind of depressing, but I get the sense that most people don't think this way.
I can also recommend the Sony WH-1000XM line. I have the XM2, though the model 3 is out now. Some of the only headphones out there that beat Bose in active noise-cancelling. The sound quality is top notch; the one complaint people tend to have when I show them off is that the earcups are on the small side and they touch some people's ears. Doesn't really bother me though.
They definitely changed something about how WiFi calling works, because with this update my carrier was finally able to support WiFi calling on iOS for the first time. For some reason, up until iOS 12 they couldn't do that or visual voicemail.
My carrier is a reseller (MVNO) on top of T-Mobile. Curious to know why they couldn't offer these features before.
What do we replace it with? Haha, idk man. How about water? More difficult to hoard in ridiculous quantities, better spend it before it evaporates, and it occasionally falls from the sky (UBI). That's what I call a liquid asset!