20, they/she, math+CS student

  • 0 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle
  • That would be a fair point if we were talking about like, small businesses in markets that are well-suited to competition, but that is not mpdern ISPs.

    Iirc, much of the backbone of the US’s fiber optic cable network is publicly owned anyway, it’s just the “last mile” that’s privately owned, which is the local lengths of fiber that run through neighborhoods to individual residences. But most of this infrastructure was also heavily subsidized by the state, so the way I see it, ISPs are essentially leaches that extract rent from a system paid for by the people and (directly or indirectly) built by the state. Why should we let them collect profit from a network they didn’t build when we could own the entire network publicly and set monthly rates to break even, rather than generate a profit (which would keep prices very low, as seen in Every Other Country with mainly state/municipally owned ISPs).


  • I think they’re trying to apply the same logic that’s applied to internet platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc., where the platform is only non-liable for copyright violations on their platform if they have a good-faith system in place for preventing copyright infringement and responding to DMCA requests. I don’t think this logic should apply to ISPs, frankly the entire internet is far too large of a place to be monitored by any one company for copyright infringement, and I’d rather ISPs be nationalized and treated as public utilities than try to fit them into the same legal framework as social media companies.

    That being said, even if the courts decide they should be forced into that same legal framework, ISPs could easily satisfy their legal obligations by simply blocking access to copyrighted content via their DNS service (which can easily be worked around by using an alternative DNS). There’s no legal reason why ISPs would be expected to block individual users from their network, and even if there were, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to exist anyway, the state (and therefore the people) paid the lion’s-share of the cost to lay all that fiber-optic and copper cable across the country, so the state should own that infrastructure and operate it in the interest of the people (Internet access would be considered a human right and publicly owned ISPs would only have prices high enough to break even, not generate a profit).






  • Didn’t they already put ads in the Windows 10 start menu? Every time I see a fresh Windows 10 install, it’s got candy crush and a bunch of promotional links to Microsoft apps in the windows store (office, Outlook, etc.) in the start menu.

    Tbh my biggest gripe with Windows 11 isn’t even the ads, you can disable them or – like I did back when I used Win11 on a spare partition for VR gaming – just install a start menu replacement like startallback. My biggest gripe is that they removed the fullscreen launcher and mobile/touch optimized metro app system (ik windows store apps exist, but they behave like regular windows apps, which is awkward on a tablet when you’re using it without the keyboard cover). I liked that Windows 10 basically kept all the Windows 8 tablet features, but made them optional so that you can have a full desktop experience on a tablet. Now windows 11 just feels kind of poorly designed and clunky on a tablet PC.

    I ended up installing ChromeOS on my tablet through Project Brunch just to get a decent, polished-feeling tablet interface (with android apps, which is a huge plus since that’s already a massive library of touch-optimized software). I run NixOS on my main PC, but for the tablet it was either Linux+GNOME (GNOME is the only desktop DE with acceptable touch support imo, especially paired with the cosmic shell extension for automatic window tiling), or ChromeOS, and I tried a bunch of different distros (including open-source chromiumOS distros like FydeOS).

    In the end, I liked FydeOS, but ChromeOS through Brunch Framework has extra features I’d rather not live without (like Android phone connectivity), and FydeOS has borked touch support on the OpenFyde releases, so I’d need to use the proprietary Fyde For You builds with specific drivers for the Surface Pro 4, but those cost money after 90 days, and if I’m using a proprietary OS, I might as well pick the free one. If you’ve never used ChromeOS, it’s basically like if stock Google android had a good desktop mode and could (easily/officially) run desktop Linux apps.



  • You’d need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.

    Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn’t be able to run software for anything before like, Android 12 or 13 probably.