digital file sharing […] has had MASSIVE benefits in information sharing and accessibility of some information […] but has also prompted artificial scarcity

You mean artificial scarcity of those resources by, for example, companies charging access fees, as is the case with scientific journals?

I think that problem is still inherently a cause of scarcity. File sharing is cheap enough that it doesn’t have to be scarce, but companies want money, and they’ve figured out a way to make those resources artificially scarce. But if food and shelter and whole bunch of other stuff wasn’t scarce, companies wouldn’t even need to exist. Why work if all resources are readily available for free?

Do note that I’m talking about some Startrek-esque future utopia with basically unlimited availability of electric power, natural resources and automation. Maybe we’ll get that far as a species someday, but for now I guess there’s plenty of scarcity to go around. Pun intended. ;-)

Just going to reply to myself after giving it a little bit more thought…

The problem is scarcity. There aren’t enough resources to go around for everybody, so we have conflict with each other over those resources. If we could use technology to increase the amount of resources available such that there is no more scarcity, we wouldn’t need conflict anymore, and as a consequence there would be no point to having power, and no need for governments.

The big question is: is there a limit to technology which will prevent us from getting enough resources? We’re already using up this planet’s resources and soon we’ll start using the resources of our solar system. Mankind will simply expand to fill this new abundance of resources, because procreation is our nature. Resources will start getting scarce again, meaning we’ll have to venture out into our galaxy. But can we even do so, technologically speaking? The speed of light is finite, so the very laws of nature may mean a never ending scarcity of resources available to us.

That’s gonna be a tough one, and probably a world which you wouldn’t want to live in.

People are inherently selfish. It’s in our genes. We’re constantly in conflict with all other people over resources which will allow us to procreate. In order to get those resources, we need power over other people. It’s basically impossible to equally divide power amongst all people.

There will always be a small inequality, where some have a little bit more power than others. That small inequality will quickly grow, making a handful of people by far the most powerful. Over the history of mankind, we’ve seen that happen time and time again. Empires conquering Europe, landlords, slavery, modern capitalism, etc. There’s no escaping it.

So what we need is a system of checks and balances for those with the most power. Government is an integral part of that. It has the power to fight against the (selfish) interests of industry, hyper-wealthy individuals, other countries, etc. Naturally, government’s power must also have checks and balances, which is why, amongst other things, we have democracy: the power of the people to choose their government and to keep their power in check.

None of it is ideal, none is without flaws. Sure, sometimes governments will use their power to enact things that are against my personal best interests, but that’s the whole point: I’m selfish and so is everybody else, so government will always need to find a balance between everybody’s interests.

Technology can aid us in keeping those checks and balances. It can increase our privacy and help with communication. This is why we have to be so careful of letting a single power dictate how we use technology. But in the end, technology is just a tool; it can be used for good and evil. It’s not a solution for anything, merely an aid to make us more effective and efficient.

In short: there will always be rulers, it’s just the nature of things. We need to keep the rulers in check. One way we do that is with governments. A tool to aid us in doing so can be technology.

FOSS, but I think their principles can be taken to other aspects of life too.

Absolutely. FOSS is about freedom first, software second if you ask me. Lots of people that identify with FOSS values also strongly identify with freedom values in other places. I mean, there’s a reason why so many people in FOSS are also star-trek fans ;-)

I want to try to limit the amount of money i spend to big corporations

I personally have no problem giving my money to big corporations, as long as they act fairly. Obviously, that’s diametrically opposed to the goal of big corporations: to make as much money as possible. But it doesn’t have to be. This goal is mostly due to being a publicly traded company with share holders. As such, I find our current financial market … disgusting.

Now im thinking of avoiding chain stores for food

There are plenty of chains that aren’t big evil faceless corporations who’s only goal is to squeeze every last cent out of us. Where I live there are a bunch of consumer co-operative franchises from supermarkets to banks, insurance, etc.

I still prefer small independant shops or local farmers, if only because it fosters competition. But if I need a mortgage or a place to stash my life savings, I’d like it to be a more stable (read: large) organization.

Hope youre having a nice day :)

Thanks, you too!

Firefox is failing to innovate. All they do is copy Chrome in hopes of becoming successful again. Firefox keeps deprecating settings and they’re getting rid of the extensions, in favor of Chrome’s shitty web extensions. All in the name of safety and usability, but what good is a “safe” or “usable” browser if nobody’s using it? Firefox was once the techie’s browser until it took over the world. Then came Chrome. Now they’ve turned their back on power users, but it was their only userbase still left.

They also consistently lie about privacy, but are just as bad, if not worse, than Chrome. In the name of “Safe browsing”, Firefox also sends every request you make to Google, just like Chrome. Then there are the various intrusive “experiments” that you get if you don’t opt out.

I wanna like Mozilla. I wanna like Firefox. They’re just making it way too difficult for me to do so.

It’s to be expected that the companies behind highly experimental implant technology would get into financial troubles and have to fold on their support for the tech. It’s extremely expensive and the market is way too small.

Those that got the implants should have probably thought about that before getting them and I find it difficult to believe that they didn’t. Perhaps they were just desperate.

It is indicative of a larger problem though. Unsupported IoT devices, phones, tablets, etc are everywhere. That’s forgivable for fairly new tech like IoT, but I fear that in a few years, we’ll have to buy new washing machines and fridges every couple of years because they stop working after support runs out.

It’s also becoming harder and harder to find plain-old-tech like non-smart TVs. I don’t want a device with all kinds of stuff integrated. It takes away my choice. I’d much rather have a dumb TV with a fairly dumb media player so I can replace one or the other when I chose or need to.

Then again, in a few years you’ll probably have to pay monthly fees for usage of your tv, washing machine and microwave anyway, so support might be a moot point.

I don’t agree that there is an implied contract for watching an ad

Agreed. There was never a requirement for looking at the ads in a newspaper. It’s just that they couldn’t check whether you were watching it or just ignoring it. Now they can, but IMHO that doesn’t change the situation much.

If sites don’t want people to use adblockers, they should charge for access or try to block people using adblockers. I’m personally fine with that last one. Ill just go somewhere else. Just like I’m not required to watch their ads, they’re not required to feed me content if I refuse to watch their ads.

UDP joke:

Hi, I'd like to hear an UDP joke!
...
Hi, I'd like to hear an UDP joke!
...
Hi, I'd like to hear an UDP joke!

Wouldn’t have been a problem if they just used TOTP (RFC 6238) instead of fancy shiny push 2FA. I don’t understand how large companies keep getting this wrong. Google is a pretty bad offender at this as well.

I looked into your claims a little bit because I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe everything anybody says in the internet.

So the claim here is that Emmanuel TV (some christian television network), that broadcasts on DSTV, is homophobic or whatever. While I can’t find any other evidence of this, I’ll just assume this is true.

The link between Emmanual TV and Irdeto appears to be that Irdeto is owned by MultiChoice (although other sources claim it’s owned by Naspers), and that MultiChoice also ownes DSTV, which broadcasts Emmanual TV.

So they’re not directly linked and it seems that Irdeto has basically nothing to do with Emmanual TV other than that some grandparent company owns both.

All this sounds like conspiricy thinking to me. I’m not even going to further investigate any of the other claims, as I value my time too much.

I’ve carried a passionate hatred for systemd (and pulseaudio, and anything else that Lennard Poetering has worked in basically) since the beginning. But I do have to say that it’s kinda growing on me. The journaling system is still aweful, but the unit system is pretty useful. It fixes a lot of problems inherent in all the other init systems such as creating dependencies on network mounts.

I think, as they did with pulseaudio, they introduced it too soon when it was still unstable and buggy. And they really should have made the logging system plaintext. Like… really. Journaling is a huge mess.

You should probably never upgrade your system version of python, as the OS might be dependant on it. If I need a newer python version than my OS supports out of the box, I’ll first check the official repos to see if a newer version is available, and otherwise I’ll compile from source, which really isn’t that difficult.

Use uMatrix. Disable all javascript by default. Enable some javascript for domains you trust.

Sometimes I think what our world would look like without technology in it. Seriously, just try to imagine what it would be: a paradise where people would leave their real lives, not virtual ones, or a hell because of complexity of such world?

I’m old and grew up in a world without internet, mobile phones and PCs. There were computers of course, but they were limited in their functionality. We basically used them as glorified typewriters and calculators.

Some things were better, some things were worse. The internet has given us access to unlimited amounts of information. Simple things used to take much more time. For every school assignment you had to spend hours going to the library, finding the right information you needed. Interacting with government institutions (taxes, housing, etc) was a huge hassle. These things have much improved, at least in the country I live in.

Personally, I’ve gone full circle. I grew up without any of these modern technologies. In my late teens computers and the Internet became a big thing. I fully embraced it. I was an early adopter on it all. Building websites, instant messaging, you name it. This stuff was my work and my hobby. It was literally my life. I was considered one of those “sad people that met their wives on the Internet”. Yeah, that was considered sad back then.

Then came the Web 2.0 era and with it the likes of Facebook and twitter. Next, smartphones, IoT and the rise of the Data Brokering industry. For companies, your personal information is a now a resource to be mined, analysed, bought and sold. The goal is to get as much of your attention as possible, using whatever methods needed, so they can either sell more stuff to you or sell every scrap of information they have on you.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been steadily reducing my tech addiction. I deleted my facebook, my twitter and every other social media account. I’ve removed every app and notification from my smartphone other than navigation and calendar notifications.

I installed uMatrix in my browser to prevent any cookie from being set, and any javascript from running. No more pop-ups, auto-playing audio and video, no more tracking, no web notifications. Lots of sites don’t work anymore. That’s okay. I just won’t use those sites.

I’ve also become a minimalist in real life. I’ve stopped buying things I don’t need; cruft I can do without. I no longer browse web shops just for the fun of it. I don’t need a big smart TV, I don’t need the latest fashion and kitchen appliances or fitbits. During the corona lockdown in my country, all shops except grocery stores were closed. Nothing changed for me. It was just business (or should I say, “no business”) as usual, except for working from home.

I do, however, miss the sense of community that the early internet had. Which is why I’m on Lemmy now. This kind of goes against my “no social networks” rule, but I guess rules are meant to be broken.

So yeah, sorry about the long rant :-) I hope to read more of the interesting discussions here on digitalminimalism!

I’ve only just found out about lemmy and just created an account. There seem to be a fair amount of performance problems. Creating the account took about minute of waiting while the HTTP request went through. Saving my preferences takes a long time too, as did posting my first comment.

It’s probably not always like this I’m guessing. I’m kinda glad to see lemmy go through growing pains, as at least it signifies that there’s growth :-) Seems like a nice community so far!

I’ve had a few successful open source project. Bug reports and improving docs are great. But what’s really great is someone who responds to basic questions (in the form of bug reports) for me! Basically a small group of users who are willing to provide support to other users. Those people are a absolute blessing.