Interesting discussion of the details of the rules and breaches here, from a "this isn't actually about content or censorship at all" perspective: https://bsky.app/profile/daphnek.bsky.social/post/3m7aqqnarm...
Readit Newsbuildfocus commented on X hit with $140M EU fine for breaching content rules reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/pogue
buildfocus commented on FileZilla Pro "Perpetual License" – A Warning to All Users github.com/x011/FileZilla... · Posted by u/lobito25
And instead trust that subscription prices will stay constant and that the company will always stay in business and support the product you purchase?
The root issue is trust, not a lifetime license. In fact, a lifetime license is a good predictor of trust because users prefer it to subscriptions and it indicates that the company at least pretends to be interested in the customer's wants.
Trust can always be abused, as in this case. Trust is gone everywhere. That doesn't mean it can't be rebuilt. It won't be rebuilt on a subscription model that no one asked for.
This makes no sense. A lifetime license is convenient conceptually, but it completely detaches your goals (working software) from a company's incentives (provide absolutely zero after initial delivery - everything afterwards is cost without upside). Lifetime licenses are bad for users (cf this post, as just one example).
Subscriptions are incentives for companies to keep doing what you want, along with direct consequences (everybody will cancel) to penalise them for ignoring their core user base.
Don't let the awkwardness of the system (fully agree modern banking is shit at letting you manage recurring bills) distract from the underlying user-beneficial dynamics.
buildfocus commented on Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector downdetectorsdowndetector... · Posted by u/gusowen
As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year.
Cloudflare > Bunny.net
AWS > Hetzner
Business email > Infomaniak
Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
buildfocus commented on Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf] storage.googleapis.com/de... · Posted by u/virgildotcodes
They scored a 31.1% on ARC AGI 2 which puts them in first place.
Also notable which models they include for comparison: Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5.1. That seems like a minor snub against Grok 4 / Grok 4.1.
My impression is that Grok is very rarely used in practice outside of a niche of die-hard users, partly because of very different tuning to other models, and partly the related public reputation around it.
https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots... suggests 0.6% of chat use cases, well below the other big names, and I suspect those stats for chat are higher than other scenarios like business usage. Given all that, I can see how Gemini might not be focused on competing with them.
The contrast between the steadily shrinking freedoms in Apple-land and the open computing approach underlying all today's the Valve announcements is fascinating.
buildfocus commented on You will own nothing and be (un)happy racc.blog/you-will-own-no... · Posted by u/showthemfangs
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?
This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.
I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes:
Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives.
A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily driver for everyone it is certainly the route that needs to be taken.
I'm still unable to use it because is not easy to break away from Android, but is a platform that I think about almost every day, because I do not want to use Android anymore and I'm willing to sacrifice certain aspects to have an open and friendly platform on my hands. And if it is not PostmarketOS then let it be another project.
We need these kind of projects, not kneeling down to a company like Google and begging for Android to be open. Effort needs to be put elsewhere. That's how major projects like Linux, BSDs and open source projects have flourished and taken the world.
The way to make this work for real is with a smooth migration path, which means a way to keep running Android apps on your new system.
If you want to sponsor Waydroid to help make that happen, you can do so right now: https://opencollective.com/Waydroid (I'm not affiliated, just a fan, and it's the only realistic route to this I see).
buildfocus commented on Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance theslowburningfuse.wordpr... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224
The main concern here is that it will create a narrow bridge (i.e, the digital ID system) between people and various services and opportunities which will make it an easy target for people who wish to wield power against someone.
Perhaps your digital ID is needed to open a bank account, get a phone number, sign up for insurance, etc. Now, suppose some fascist government comes into power. They could start cancelling the digital ID's of people or groups they do not like or are bigotted against. These people start losing access to critical infrastructure.
Now, this could already happen, even with imperfect paper IDs, of course. But by making everything digital, we are reducing societal resilience towards such kind of hostility.
We already have exactly this right now, without digital ids, it's not even theoretical. The government blocks plenty of residents from aspects of society (eg can't work based on visa rules, can't access public/health services at all without legal residency). Currently that's enforced by random members of e.g. medical staff looking at your skin colour to decide whether to ask to check your physical paperwork before they'll look at your weird looking mole. Governments enforce plenty of paperwork checks & blocks today. I think a digital id strictly improves this scenario.
buildfocus commented on Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance theslowburningfuse.wordpr... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224
Which means the provider can track you across all those. What you spend, what you read, what medical treatment you have.
All just to save carrying a wallet?
For Spain, for online stuff signatures & verification it's mtls, with a client certificate issued by the government. You can sign documents with it or authenticate with it entirely offline (effectively nobody does the latter, but you could, and signing documents with it is very common). Government has no idea how it's used. 3rd party just verifies the government has signed the cert and it's got a valid date.
There's other issues (UX, privacy to the 3rd parties) and further improvements here coming with better wallets (EU-wide) soon, but even today it's absolutely possible to have digital id that doesn't tell the government every time you use it.