Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
My job has a 3rd kind of complexity, non-essential complexity, which is like essential complexity in that it comes from the business domain, but isn’t actually required. It’s non-technical decisions about how our apps and services must function that introduce all our complexity and massively complicates our code bases. At one point we literally have to attempt to predict the future because they adamantly refuse to simply ask the customer what they’re planning.
The crux of it is that it allows for commercial use without needing to distribute the source code. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on who you ask. There’s basically a continuum for open source software with GPLv3 at one end and MIT at the other.
GPLv3 guarantees that corporations can’t play games with patents or weird DRM to hobble an open source library and tie it to their closed source product. A lot of corporations will specifically bar employees from using GPLv3 code out of fear it could force them to open source their proprietary code as well.
At the other extreme you’ve got MIT which basically says do what you want with it. Fork it, embed it in your projects, sell copies of it if you want. Anything goes as long as you include a copy of the MIT license along with your software.
Rust tends to get a lot of commercial usage so GPLv2 or MIT tend to be chosen over GPlv3, and between them most companies feel more comfortable with MIT.
I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
Wake me up when someone besides OpenAI says they’re the best at something. When a company releases a benchmark they designed that their own tool that’s generally regarded as not very good is suddenly the best at, that’s not news, at best that’s PR, at worst propaganda. This reeks of “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”.
Seems to be some kind of centralized streaming service catalog. Never heard of it before now and no idea why anyone would be willing to pay $30 for it let alone $60.
It is simultaneously the most promising and most dangerous tech imaginable. There are so many amazing and wonderful things it could enable. There are so many horrifying and terrible ways it could go wrong. It has to be approached with utmost caution and incredibly well thought out regulation and standards. I’m not sure I trust any government or institution in existence in the world currently to manage it the way it needs to be.
Absolute fastest way to kill this shit? Feed the entire Disney catalog in and start producing knockoff Disney movies. Disney would kill this so fast.
I think part of the problem is that “good” UX isn’t a single thing but a continuum. It’s very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an “average” user or even worse a newbie.
Blender is an excellent example of this. It’s regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it’s far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it’s going to be complicated.
Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.
This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.
File format standards certainly, and OSS generally embraces those (at least if they’re non-proprietary), but UI doesn’t have to be standardized. On the other hand though not everything needs to be a unique snowflake. UIs should take the things that work well and experiment with what doesn’t.
Lets also not pretend that proprietary apps don’t screw around with UI design just as much. I can’t count how many times now Microsoft has redesigned the UI of something that was perfectly fine and didn’t need redesigning only to end up making it worse.
What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?
Today it looks like the answer is technically none of them. The FAQ on bookshop.org claims they’re working with Kobo to add support “later this year”.
I don’t think that’s a harness I think it’s a chalk bag. You can see the bag just behind his hand.
This is interesting in a “how far can you launch a pumpkin using an air canon” way, not a “you only need to cool this down to -40C to make it super conduct” way. It’s a fun experiment with nearly zero practical purpose outside of some very niche edge cases. Wearable computing is probably the only realistic one at the moment for a CPU that you can stretch a little and runs incredibly slow.
Ah, so homegrown scum. I kind of lump them under the mega corporation header though as the goal for them is to eliminate regulations and oversight so they can pillage to their hearts content. Really trying to speed run that late stage capitalism dystopia.
Going to be real interesting to see where that money is coming from. My bet is some combination of the worst of the US political “thinktanks” like the federalist society, Russian assets, and mega corporations like Amazon.
But this doesn’t answer the most important question, is it a didgeriphone or a saxodoo?
Is it still passing the Turing test if you don’t think either one is human?
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector. That honestly is the biggest thing keeping manufacturing there. Things made from raw resources could be moved easily but the lower labor costs would be offset by the decreased demand due to most of their customers being back in China.
Things are even worse for anyone making something that requires manufactured components as all those suppliers are in China so now not only are they taking a hit for reduced demand, but also the headaches of having to import their components from China just to build anything. Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.