“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2024年7月25日

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  • I didn’t “think I got you”; I was leading into something: what was it about Photopea prior to this that made them fundamentally different from Digikam, Slackware, and discuss.tchncs? I’ve donated to Lemmy too and various other FOSS projects, so I authentically appreciate that your donations strengthened that interconnected ecosystem.

    You clearly got plenty of use out of them, indicating how integral this apparently was to your workflow. You don’t show any indication you had problems with the Photopea maintainer’s actions or attitude before this. Was it the fact that Photopea isn’t FOSS? I’d agree it’s a huge difference, but at the same time, they’re basically free as in beer, and you weren’t just idly not paying them; you were actively, recurrently using their finite resources. Wouldn’t you agree that, even if you don’t want to give money to proprietary software (assuming again that’s the reason), they at least deserve to break even? If so, you could’ve just whitelisted them on uBO. But I also resent digital advertising for ethical reasons and because it’s a vector for malware, so I’d understand not wanting to turn off uBO and not wanting to give €5/month in compensation. But then it looks like, despite being plenty familiar with the FOSS ecosystem, you never gave it a fair shake. You just called GIMP icky and didn’t do the bare minimum level of searching that’d tell you ImageMagick exists for batch edits. So you weren’t willing to pay for the ad-free subscription (fair in isolation), you weren’t willing to turn off ads (fair in isolation), and you weren’t willing to try something else (fair in isolation), and thus you were just draining their money to your own ends (not fair).

    So realistically, it sounds like you were never going to support the Photopea maintainer regardless of what they did or how they acted, and now that they’ve cut you off from using their service for free, you’re acting like this is some kind of principled stance rather than being a lazy, entitled cheapskate.


  • I am not financially supporting developers who act like this.

    Are you financially supporting literally any developers at all? You made it clear you were not paying for a Photopea subscription and were using uBO, so there’s not a carrot or a stick here for the maintainer of Photopea (I guess there’s a very tiny carrot for losing you as a user in that you’re not using their resources). I mean that as a genuine question, by the way:

    • What software that you use have you paid for and/or donated to?
    • Was it because you had to, or because you felt strongly that they deserved compensation for their work?
    • Did you ever at any point stop giving said software maintainer money when you felt they were no longer acting in a way that comports with your standards?

  • I don’t really understand why you’re using ad-supported proprietary software that you’ve never paid a dime for (or given a dime to, since you use uBO), claiming that you don’t use GIMP or Krita instead because the former “is terrible” and the latter isn’t meant for cropping (a trivial, fundamental feature of the software), and then acting entitled to use the Photopea author’s own personal work with zero compensation. So you have free alternatives (as in beer and as in freedom), refuse to do even the bare minimum to learn how to use them, and then go full “you took my only food; now I’m gonna starve” when Photopea’s author stops you from using their own site/web app for free that they run and maintain at their own expense.

    If anything, you seem entitled and willfully ignorant, and I say that from the perspective of someone who resents digital advertising and proprietary software.



  • It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.

    So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.

    Basically, if I’m not flat-ass broke, I’m paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what’s the page yield? 430. I’m still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I’m so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.









  • They struggled to deliver their ambitious mainline Linux phone on time during Covid yes, but they eventually delivered.

    And for the people who requested refunds who waited months if not never received them? Despite them moving back their timeline literal years with repeated delays? I don’t care what challenges they faced; they knowingly took people’s money and refused to give it back to them when they couldn’t deliver. It’s their responsibility to be prepared for challenges. And in some extreme edge case where they couldn’t have been prepared, it’s their responsibility to be transparent about that to the people who gave them over a million dollars (let alone purchased the product after the Kickstarter was finished). I suppose too that the pandemic affected Purism in January 2019 when they were supposed to deliver their product?

    The fact that they did is a huge win for the mobile Linux ecosystem becoming a real contender just when we need it.

    The Librem 5 is not a contender for shit. It’s so overpriced that it can only be successfully marketed to people who care so deeply about their privacy that they’re willing to use an inconvenient mobile OS, get completely boned on hardware specs, and deal with a company notorious for fucking over its customers. Purism’s behavior is a fucking embarrassment to the Linux ecosystem.

    NXP i.MX family debuted in 2013; Intel i7 family in 2008. Their phone uses a 2017 i.MX 8M Quad, the same year they crowdfunded their phone.

    That CPU is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M4, launched in 2012 and 2009, respectively.

    2017 i7 computers are equally not from 2008…

    When I say “2013”, I’m not talking about the debut year of i.MX. I’m talking about the fact that you can compare this phone side-by-side with a Galaxy S4 or S5. 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, a 720 x 1440p IPS display, no NFC, USB 3.0, an 8/13 MP front/back camera (which they inexplicably call “Mpx”; good job, guys), 802.11n Wi-Fi, no waterproofing, and a shitty-ass i.MX 8M CPU. I still remember watching a trailer for the Librem 5’s continuing development, and as they were scrolling through a web browser, it was noticeably stuttering. This was years and years ago; I can’t even imagine it today.

    It still today remains one of the best ARM processors with open source drivers without an integrated baseband. It means basically any flavour of Linux can install on the device, with a significant layer of protection from carrier conduited attacks. Other modules have similar tradeoffs between performance and interoperability/security.

    I do not give even the slightest inkling of a shit try to confirm or deny this, so I’m just going to assume it’s 100% true, because it’s not relevant to the point that the spec is absolute trash and being sold for $800. If you are not absolutely married to privacy, this is not a sellable product in 2025.

    Want better specs? We either need SoC companies to release more of their drivers open source, or more people to patiently reverse engineer closed source ones.

    Actually, if I want better specs, I’m just going to go out and buy a phone that isn’t from Purism. It really sucks that it’s not open, private hardware, but Purism is such a scummy company that so wantonly fucks over their customers that I wouldn’t touch the Librem 5 even if I could justify spending $800 for that spec just for privacy’s sake.



  • They were apologizing to Shizuo Aishima, one of three executives […] who were wrongfully arrested and charged in 2020 with the unauthorized export of sensitive industrial equipment.

    Aishima […] was diagnosed with stomach cancer while he was detained. His lawyer filed bail requests eight times in hopes of getting Aishima proper medical care, but all were denied.

    Aishima was finally sent to an outside hospital but it was too late for treatment. He died in February 2021 at 72, five months before prosecutors dropped the charges against him and two other company executives.

    […]

    The company officials consistently denied that their equipment was subject to export restrictions. Prosecutors eventually dropped their case in July 2021, saying there were doubts if there was any illegality involved.

    You shouldn’t get the privilege to issue an apology to this man at his grave. Get the fuck out of there, stop defiling his grave with your presence, and pray for him from jail on your own and not as a choreographed spectacle for the media if it really soothes your bastard conscience.