Readit NewsI remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.
Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.
It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.
At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.
I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.
I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.
But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.
This is not a disadvantage. By your own admission: we send dollars overseas in exchange for goods. We never have to actually send goods of our own. We effectively get them for the price of printing dollars, so effectively free.
This sounds... untenable? too good to be true? a shakey foundation on which to build an economy?
And therein lies the risk: research labs may become wholly dependent on companies whose agendas are fundamentally commercial. In exchange for access to compute and frontier models, labs may cede control over data, methods, and IP—letting private firms quietly extract value from publicly funded research. What begins as partnership can end in capture.
If it's war due to decreased economic interdependence, well yes that would be much worse.
Now, the govt also has to create rules for itself. So it creates the Privacy Act and layers of beurocratic checks and balances. These rules are to protect the people, not to derisk or protect the govt. After all, the govt has all the power.
So when capitalist businesses leaders are given the keys to govt, the normal ways of ethical alignment don't work. If you don't follow your own rules, who cares? They're your rules! I think what we're seeing is what happens if you apply traditional capitalist business practices to govt administration.
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.