Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.

Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.

Piped should build out better error messages so that users know this is a problem with Piped getting the video from YouTube.

Should we fix the system so that people both want to and can vote for candidates they want?

No, that wouldn’t be American. Make something punitive that can be disproportionately leveraged against the poor and marginalized community neighborhoods.

Use something like rclone (that can use file change deltas) when you just need to copy files to remotes and feel free to combine it with an incremental backup solutions like Borg or restic or some custom rsync scripting. Example: keep a Borg repository of your laptop or emails or whatever with whatever retention policy you want. Then copy your repository anywhere with rclone or similar.

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

lmao

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

This is something I’m very familiar with.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

This is largely the case, yes. Research universities do the basic research that industry then turns into a product and makes piles of cash from. And you are also correct that subsidizing STEM education is a subsidy for industry. It very specifically is meant to do that. It displaces industry job training and/or the companies paying to send their workers to get a degree. It also has the benefit of increasing overall supply in theur labor market, which helps drive down wages. Companies prefer having a big pool of potential workers they barely have to train.

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

That’s good!

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

I think your approach is better. I also prefer to write better-quality code, which for me entails thinking more carefully about its structure and interfaces and using best practices like testing and CI.

If the government is the US (federal), I think you are technically supposed to release your code in the public domain by default. Some people work around this but it’s the default.

But anyways, the example you’ve given is basically that you’re paid with government funds to do work to assist industry. This is fairly similar to the people that do the work for free for industry, only this time it’s basically taxpayersl money subsidizing industry. I’ve seen this many times. There is a whole science/engineering/standards + contractor complex that is basically one big grift, though the individual people writing the code are usually just doing their best.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus.

Perhaps it makes the world a better place, perhaps it doesn’t. This part of the industry focuses a lot on identifying a “social good” that they are improving, but the actual impact can be quite different. One person’s climate project is another’s strategic military site selector. One person’s great new standard for transportation is another’s path to monopoly power and the draining of public funds that could have gone to infrastructure. This is the typical way it works. I’m sure there can be exceptions, though.

Anyways, I would recommend taking a skeptical eye to any position that sells you on its positive social impact. That is often a red flag for some kind of NGO industrial complex gig.

Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Well you’re paid so of course it wouldn’t be that.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

Sometimes the industries will open bug reports for their free lunches, yes. A common story in community projects is that they realize they’re doing a lot of support work for companies that aren’t paying them. When they start to get burned out, they put out calls for funding so they can dedicate more time to the project. Sometimes this kind of works but usually the story goes the other way. They don’t get enough money and continue to burn out. You are paid so it’s a bit different, but it’s not those companies paying you, eh?

You aren’t harmed by closed source derivatives because that seems to be the point of your work. Providing government subsidy to private companies that enclose the derivative product and make money for their executives and shareholders off of it.

Oh no I mean that there are companies that just don’t care about licensing and plod ahead hoping it’s never an issue. Like having devs build a “prototype” that they know uses AGPL code and saying, “we will swap this out later” and then 6 months later the “prototype” is in production.

Personally, I make a lot of my personal projects’ code closed because I specifically don’t want it to be useable by others. Not for jerky reasons, but strategic ones. IMO common licenses don’t achieve what a lot of people hope they do.

Software licenses don’t change ownership. That requires transfer of copyright, like with contributor agreements.

Though I am aware that a small set of people seek less copyleft licenses because they think they’re better. They are usually wrong in their thinking, but they do exist.

I’m not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?

Yes you can. You just change the license that lives with the code.

What it changes depends on the project, how it’s used, who uses it, etc. It’s really a social question of how people might interact with your project differently.

The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it’s free and they don’t have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I’ve seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.

The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It’s just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.

If you do run local, properly use a firewall to prevent it from phoning home. Or airgap.

Don’t try and turn this into a ridiculous class war statement on me. Am I a homeowner? Yes. I’ve literally only been a homeowner for 13 months. Before that, I rented for over 26 years. Most of my friends still rent.

The idea that renters simply have a prefer rent is absurd and I was attempting to be charitable in that you might be socially removed from this reality. What is your excuse for this absurdity, then?

And yes, there are people who choose to rent - some choose the motility, some choose to invest over mortgage and some choose to remain renters for the reasons stated in the start of this very comment thread. Don’t pretend otherwise.

These are almost all misunderstandings of basic finance, not informed preferences. False consciousness, if you will. There are a handful of people who live in a place for a year or two and should rent, sure. This is very few people outside of maybe college students. Choosing to “invest over mortgage” means you think you’ll be netting 100% returns every year. This is for delusional climbers that think they will beat the market or the financially incompetent. Luckily, very few people do this. In the real world, people rent because they cannot get a mortgage (yet). They are economically coerced by not having a sufficient down payment nor financial security to get a loan from the housing brokers - banks.

You’re still acting like loan debt repayments and a rental payment are the same thing.

No I’m not.

In short: I don’t care how badly you want to be a pontificating chud

I don’t think you know what a chud is.

1. A bank does not legally own a house under mortgage.

Legality is an incomplete analysis of the relationship of ownership. Cool, you have mortgage. What percentage of your total payment goes to a bank? What happens if you fail to pay for a year or two?

2. Rent and loan repayments are not the same thing.

They are similar in this circumstance for the reasons I have provided. Feel free to address them directly if you would like to.

Get over it.

Oh dear.

Yes, absolutely. It is beneficial, at a personal level, to have inflation hedges like this. When one is fortunate enough to have the means, it is good to have diversified holdings that guard against inflation, and naturally, hyperinflation. Having some gold is a clasilaic strategy and it is honestly not a bad idea for hedging against inflation. It’s not a sure thing investment by any means, but you will probably be able to sell it to buy a plan ticket out of Dodge of things get bad enough.

Another good thing to participate in is the building of mutual aid networks. They constitute a network of people with various useful skills for sustaining life and community even in difficult situations. They will more effectively distribute resources in the case of emergency and can consitute and alternative form of governance if and when there is no practical alternative.

Of course!

I think you are confused. The dismissive behavior was not to just give advice and I pointed out what it actually was. And it is not dismissive to meet people where they are at. I think you’re now reaching for some fairly basic defensive behaviors (straw men and even the “I’m rubber your glue” kind of retorts) so I’m going to disengage.

Please do try to interact with others with more empathy.

I was going to let them reply first. You are being rude and dismissive of them, however. Please show your fellow humans a bit more empathy.

They have already stated that they think they should be speaking to someone but are clearly having a hard time. If a chatbot is helping them right now I’m not going to lecture them about “pretending”. I recommend the approach of a polite and empathetic nudging when someone is or may be in crisis.

repaying a loan is not ‘rent-like behaviour’, applying a brush that broad would paint any regular payment as ‘rent-like behaviour’, which is preposterous.

I’m not being broad, I’m specifically talking about what it takes to “own” a house for the vast majority of people on this website. In order to do so, you must enter into an arrangement with a bank wherein in order to have housing, a basic necessity, you must provide monthly payment, half or more of which goes directly to the bank as interest. If you do not make the payments in a timely manner, you lose your housing.

People looking to buy rather than rent are usually interested in housing security, in actually owning the place they live, rather than having to regularly pay someone else for the privilege of not dying from exposure. In reality, these arrangements make them a partial owner at best, roughly equivalent to the equity. You will learn this rapidly if you are foreclosed on.

• ‘Economic rent’ is a meaningless phrase, especially in this context. Rent is a concept of lease without ownership. We are literally talking about owning property. There is no rent. There is debt and burden, sure, but there is no rent.

I encourage you to inform yourself of the meaning of the term “economic rent”. Spiraling land and housing values paid to real estate and banking interests is a financialized form of economic rent. The land component is one of the very oldest recognized forms, in fact.

• Equity is not a lie. It’s the very simple concept of a property’s worth after deduction of amounts owing. Now the nuances and application has gotten insanely out of control in miltiple countries (I’m Australian, ask me about our multigenerational housing inequities!) But the basic idea of inflation increasing cost/value is generally sound.

I didn’t call equity a lie.

A rental property and a ppr are nowhere near each other, not financially, socially or emotionally.

They are quite similar, actually. You will be paying for someone else’s mortgage, namely the banker’s, but just a smaller amount, solely for the privilege of having your own mortgage. Giving them different names doesn’t change the financial relationship in which you are paying an excess to someone else just to have housing - and giving them the ability to remove that housing based on your personal finances. These are basic and undeniable facts of how the financialized housing market operates. It did not always work this way and the history is quite revealing.

They cannot be equated, no matter how much you torture the syntax.

I didn’t equate them. I’m afraid you’re exaggerating.

I’ve said “here are some similar things” and implied that one’s ownership of a house is incomplete if they have a mortgage. Not much torture of syntax going on, I think it’s pretty straightforward.

Each has their place for personal preference, but they are not the same

Renters are almost always economically coerced into renting, it’s not a preference. The people who do think of it as a preference are rare and are usually so rich that they don’t care that they are paying more to rent than have a(nother) mortgage.

Do you have many friends that rent?