One the one hand, that many people on here are so opposed to this kind of thinking (your post was flagged) is no suprise, since this is in many parts more of business than a hacker forum, so profit trumps all other concerns.
Yet considering, that many people here are also often unhappy with wasteful and user hostile software, like windows, i think a look at this kind of thinking can be really beneficial.
Especially, since at least the actual programmers reading this site can easily have small impacts on these kind of problems, by just making sure, they craft their software with more care on such issues.
In light of the topic (and because of personal gripes), i think a link to the actual podcast, RSS feed and all, would be more appropiate than big techs radio-show version of it.
> Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
I think the better analogy here would be to tidy the public park for free.
It's about doing something for other people, being generous, making the world better with your genrousity.
I think that in itself is something worthwile to try.
I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience.
And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.
While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
The problem though is, using undocummented communication channels on private phones by people not technically inclined. That Signal is an american company and subject to NSA scrutiny while the users a politicians of a foreign goverment only makes this worse.
So, national messengers, controlled by experts, that archive communication and run on trusted hardware, would be the best solution for the work of democratic goverments I would think.
Of course, the possibility of software quality and security experts in service of the goverment is probably just wishful thinking.
I think the law is actually pretty clear on that front, that it is not ok, but in the meantime, all the big publishers do it and make so much money, they actually don't care much about fines, especially given the chance they might get levied against a competitor first, at which point they can quickly change that behaviour.
As so often, the biggest GDPR problem is missing enforcement.
The bundestags president, Julia Klöckner, was recently a victim of phishing on signal. While there could be different motives behind her suggestion, I think they are just another facet of her not really understanding technology and security practices.
She thinks she was "hacked" on signal, and now wants to switch to something which is clearly better! Let's wait where she will want to go once she gets "hacked" there too...
While there are valid reasons for germans not to want their politicians to use private messenger apps on their private phones for official business, and american ones at that, this switch would of course change nothing about all of these problems. But at least they can claim they did something, right?
I think Win2k already had that. As far as I remember, the explorer sidebar, the white box with the colored line under the heading, already being HTML.
I loved hacking on that back then to customize my windows experience.
I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app.
My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.
And the pandora took years to arrive, got constantly more expensive while waiting, while the hardware got pretty long in the tooth. Still, it was a greadt device! But when it arrived, it was already a curiosity from another time and I feel this even more so for the Pyra.
I had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to.
I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.
I think they just confused bavria with munich. It was the city who had their own linux distribution (LiMux) and the move of the headquarters where part of microsoft efforts to change that, because it means more tax income for the city (Munich is not part of the disctrict Landkreis München).
It's "Rattenfänger von Hameln" in german, so the literal translation would be "Rat-Catcher of Hamelin".
I do remember him wearing brightly colored patchwork clothing in the stories, but I could not say if that was an integral part of the original fable or just added in retellings to make the character stand out more as a mysterious stranger.
The question is of course always where someone draws the line, and thats part of the problem.
Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.
And while they might be right concerning small stuff, this often piles up and in the end, because you choose several times not to optimize, your technology choices and architecture decisions add up to a bloated mess anyway that can't be salvaged.
Like, when you choose a web framework for a desktop app, install size, memory footprint, slower performance etc. might not matter looked at individually, but in the end it all might easily add up and your solution might just suck without much benefit to you. Pragmatism seems to be the hardest to learn for most developers and so many solutions get blown out of proportion instantly.
And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people.
No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode support.
Since we are talking RSS:
For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed.
If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only works on certain views (article but not list etc.). Forget about changing the font itself or the colors aside from light/dark themes. It is ridiculous!
Do any of you know of a reader app, that lets me really customize that stuff why also being somewhat minimalist? The best thing I found so far is Palabre, but it also clutters the screen with useless header images, buttons and "Similar content" sections.
Yet considering, that many people here are also often unhappy with wasteful and user hostile software, like windows, i think a look at this kind of thinking can be really beneficial. Especially, since at least the actual programmers reading this site can easily have small impacts on these kind of problems, by just making sure, they craft their software with more care on such issues.