Because to put a build in F-Droid you need to write a build script to build the whole app from source on F-Droid’s VMs. You can’t, for example, fetch binary dependencies from Maven. You need to build them from source as part of your build process.

Android Firefox fetches a bunch of stuff from Maven as part of its build, some of which is proprietary libraries from Google to e.g. talk to Google Play Services or to Google’s trusted-hardware stuff, and some of which is the whole Gecko C++ source tree. Mozilla doesn’t want to pay their people to maintain two separate build systems for Firefox, one of which has to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Well how do you think it should work then?

I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn’t themselves Turing-complete.

Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user’s ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.

Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don’t actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.

Hello I am writing the firmware for MotherBoard 2021, a definitely completely different product than MotherBoard 2020, I am going to ship in in 2 weeks for Christmas, and I am going to write an image decoder on top of bare metal, and it is “not” going to let you hack the pants off the computer.

Said no one ever.

But if “You can fork it and do whatever, even remove the “please donate” thing, but if you distribute any spy/malware versions they have legal avenues to force it to get taken down”, that sounds like open source to me? You can indeed modify and redistribute it in almost any way you would like!

What? I can’t hear you.

Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?

They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.

Sounds more like open source but not free software?

We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.

The death of the device and the return of the system.

A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.

A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.

A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.

And it doesn’t cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there’s no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn’t require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?

People don’t generally reason about things like “intelligence” as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don’t encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren’t smart enough to understand the catch.

You probably want to run the command as nobody, the special system user who daemons become when they don’t want to have root permissions.

Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual “Android TV” for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn’t they use that?

too expensive for there to be competition

How does that work, exactly? For something like a railroad or a power grid, you get a natural monopoly because you need a system to connect everyone to everyone else for it to really work, and you need to pay to build out the connection to each person.

For video streaming, you need to pay for servers to transcode, store, and serve the video. Which is expensive, sure. But then each user comes in over the Internet; you aren’t paying to connect directly to their house, and you aren’t putting a CDN node in every town when the town has 5 users who can just talk to the central deployment.

If you want to run ads, you find some network that places video ads, and you get the ads from them and you run them. Maybe they don’t pay enough and the service is not profitable, but what would make that change if the service were bigger?

Where are the huge, unassailable costs? Where is the revenue you can’t get unless you are the absolute biggest?

native code in Chrome for detecting ad blockers within the next 12 months.

Just a new header for whether the site allows extensions that are not Google Web Protect certified.

Looks like the ads worked

s/grandma/Google account/

I think it’s it’s own thing.

The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.

This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn’t trigger any of your protective responses.

And that’s why you should never view an advertisement.

LTT reviewed a Roku one like that recently and for some reason didn’t recommend immediately binning it.

Aren’t the boxes running “Android TV”, the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?

They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for “Android TV” to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.