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| ▲ | grayhatter 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint. I expect all humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. I acknowledge that many people will likely fail to meet that expectation, quite often I'm sure. But I'm never going to accept or become an apologist for this asshattery. It's wrong to violate the privacy and dignity of other people. The correct response when you see people hurting others is not to make up an excuse about "business need", instead some anger, disappointment, and loud condemnation is required. Stop making excuses for those hurting others so they can make money. | | |
| ▲ | pixel_popping 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I agree that it's wrong, my point is really about the data itself being in their servers. Let's be real, a service nowadays DO have the choice to enable client-side encryption or methodology to be unable to consult data themselves, so any company that chose against that during development phase might have eventual motives of processing the data, my point is really about the blind trust from users which is just wrong from a security standpoint, every trust step added that you can't verify is just "faith" at this point, not security. Term of services are irrelevant as they are breached all the time, major companies are getting fined all the time for it, we must rely on cryptography, not human trust and people needs to stop being surprised the moment they learn that the data they accepted to leave in cleartext is used, that would be a first step toward forcing the change and using proper security standards. Want a useful action? Let's change the law to force cryptography regarding user data, attestation, SGX or whatever method (there is plenty), that would be a great start, the fact that in 2026 it's still legal to process user chats in plaintext is mindblowing. |
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| ▲ | sigmoid10 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Unfortunately, companies like Apple (and soon Google as well) are making this unnecessarily hard in their phone ecosystems. | | |
| ▲ | mvdwoord 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, perhaps they make verifying it hard.. but what is stopping you from publishing an app in the app store, while also hosting the source code for anyone to see, and use? 99 bucks a year? | | |
| ▲ | sigmoid10 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >99 bucks a year? You're already contributing a lot of personal investment to society with developing and maintaining FOSS and now you have to feed one of the world's richest companies' bottom line too just to make it available to their particular users? Yeah, no. Most FOSS devs simply won't publish there. Mac and homebrew can already be a pain, but iOS is just evil. Sucks for the users, but that's generally what you get for buying Apple. If they wanted this stuff on their platform, they'd make it easier, not harder. But they care more about making money with other people's software than offering a genuinely good service. | |
| ▲ | sayamqazi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who is gonna make sure that what I put in github is exactly what I am pushing to the store. | | |
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| ▲ | lrvick 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is actually a perfectly practical choice to completely ignore those ecosystems. I am the founder and active engineer at two companies and two large open source projects and have a family, travel a lot, and have an active social life in Silicon Valley. I also do not use any Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft products and exclusively use open source software for all of my work. It turns out none of this is incompatible, everyone just convinces themselves it is. | | |
| ▲ | NietzscheanNull 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers).
If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps? | | |
| ▲ | lrvick 3 days ago | parent [-] | | First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience. Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you. Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want. From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home. Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi. Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own. Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day. At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want. People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened. | | |
| ▲ | sundarurfriend 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That is a useful guide in terms of the personal psychology of how to go about doing it, which is an important side of it, thank you. I'm also interested in the mechanics of how you actually do it: for eg. your mention of paper maps for travel makes me think if a lot of that becomes workable because you're in planned cities with reliable maps. I'm a mid sized town in India where maps are vague guides for the general layout, but are missing the many many alleys and connecting roads that people actually live on (or have shops at). Roads, road names, traffic restrictions - pretty much every part of it is chaotic and incredibly hard to put together without a GPS on a digital map. On the family aspect too, do you have a Matrix or similar for the larger family to connect through and share news on (their own travel for eg., or difficulties they might be having, or news like child birth), or do you only use phone calls or texts to connect? In any case, I can definitely relate to: > even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. and feel the negative effects of that, so I'll be moving actively towards what you're suggesting. Maybe to a different point on the line and with different workarounds, but it sounds at least 90% workable and with significant benefits too. | | |
| ▲ | lrvick 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Roads, road names, traffic restrictions - pretty much every part of it is chaotic and incredibly hard to put together without a GPS on a digital map. If digital maps on GPS know about directions, then so does the internet, and the directions can be printed or jotted down in advance which is my go-to solution in new cities. A little trip planning makes trips safer and less stressful. You also end up remembering it faster. Regularly using a GPS provably atrophies parts of our brains in MRI scan studies. We were evolved to regularly reason about our position in the physical world and making decisions about where to turn from our own memories. > On the family aspect too, do you have a Matrix or similar for the larger family to connect through and share news on (their own travel for eg., or difficulties they might be having, or news like child birth), or do you only use phone calls or texts to connect? We helped move all family to Matrix. Most also use Facebook, but everyone worth talking to understands it is not reasonable to ask us to agree to Zucks terms of service to talk to them. They probably created facebook accounts in the first place for the same reason, so we do not feel bad about this ask. That said we also ported our cell phone numbers to a voip provider so we can still access calls/texts from any wifi device, or DECT phones around our home. |
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| ▲ | sundarurfriend 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you have a blog post or similar that describes how you do this? | | | |
| ▲ | brokenmachine 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you have only a dumb phone? | | |
| ▲ | lrvick 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I do own android devices for development and testing, but I do not have a cell phone plan and I do not carry any electronics when leaving home unless my explicit goal is working away from home, in which case I bring a laptop. |
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