As if they haven’t been killing US citizens

Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine.

No, but it wouldn’t need to cost the original vendor that much backend resources either if they’re willing to relinquish control of it. There’s a reason most Linux distros would rather you use the torrent than their hosted images, and package managers allow you to add any mirror you want and for anyone to spin up a mirror. Something like IPFS (or BitTorrent) would be a great fit for software updates, because it doesn’t matter where the file comes from, as long as it’s the same file.

Updates are expensive for the vendor because they insist on their servers being the only place you can get them from.

Image/video/audio processing that requires more compute than you can reasonably except from average consumer hardware.

I’d be more accepting of this if it wasn’t for the fact that they increasingly don’t even let you try to run it on your own hardware. Taking an hour or even overnight to process a video might not be ideal, but there are still countless use cases where that’s acceptable and worth the security of not sending your data to the cloud.

Antivirus and other forms of security which require near real-time fingerprinting and/or new definitions.

Antivirus is an antipattern and the need for it is usually a symptom of the OS architecture/permission control model being hopelessly vulnrable. An ideal system would be zero trust and some random piece of code wouldn’t be able to do anything truly harmful to begin with. You can still social engineer the user into giving a malicious program trust, but you can social engineer them into whitelisting it in their antivirus too.

Licensing/certificate servers

Certificates don’t need that much backend resources and can be decentralized in the same way as updates, taking load off the original vendor.

Licensing is a circular argument. I’m paying for you to maintain the system that determines if I paid or not?

Servers which receive and process telemetry data

Yeah that’s not a “feature” most people appreciate. At best they accept it as inevetable because they can’t turn it off.

Also, if a company tries using that as justification for their subscription model, they can go fuck themselves.

Resources for submitting/processing/securing legal/government forms/documents

If it has to do with the legal system or government, then it should be covered by the ultimate subscription model: taxes. I shouldn’t have to cover a company’s costs of filing things with the government when I already pay the government.

*Junior devs

Senior devs are more likely to write one liners from their VIM window.

hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics

This isn’t bypassing biometrics. This is using biometrics as intended. Bypassing implies this was an unexpected side effect when every security researcher ever has warned that biometrics is intrinsically vulnerable and a terrible password substitute for this exact reason.

Some services, like social media, require backend resources and there’s no way around it.

Others, dare I say most, are backend by the company’s choice and usually to the detriment of the user.

Some require backend resources purely for DRM and so that they can pull the plug on it whenever they please and screw over everyone who paid for it. Like most single player games these days. Or as a means of holding your in game items hostage to get more money out of you (Pokemon Home comes to mind).

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you commented killing Palestinian children is bad on a social media platform they also own. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because that hello world binary you just shared with your friend got flagged as a virus. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were using adblock on their paid streaming service. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were sharing your password with your friend so they can use your paid streaming account. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, you uploaded media files that you bought but they got replaced with DRM versions.

Oh no, they’re suddenly not letting you log in until you upload your ID and a 3D scan of your head. Now all your data is held hostage.

Oh no, they accidentally deleted the production database and the recent data you absolutely can’t afford to lose wasn’t in the backup.

Oh no, you got phished and they changed your password from under you. Now all your data is theirs.

Oh no, they suffered a data breach. Now all your data is on the dark web.

Oh no, they’re developing the next generation AI. Now all your data is being used to help companies replace workers and the right prompt might just give some rando fragments of your personal information.

It can be taken out if, 1, you know it exists (is it documented?), 2, you know how to program (is it configurable through the normal instance setup or do you have to sift through the code and then maintain your own fork with it removed?). Sure seems like being able to take it out is a side effect of it being open source and was not intended to be configurable. If that’s your bar then any feature you don’t like in any fediverse platform “can be taken out.” You’re talking as if it was explicitly made to be taken out.

Also, it doesn’t just detect 4chan pictures. It MASSIVELY overblocks. This is Lemmy’s slur filter blocking “fire removedant” but on steroids. Tell me again how Pifed is the “anti authoritarian” Lemmy.

Oh please if Lemmy had that hard coded you would absolutely not be defending it. Even if it was just .ml you’d still use it to smear all of Lemmy. I hate 4chan too and would prefer not to see it, but this is still by definition a very heavy handed imposing of one’s personal opinion on others and limiting expression but somehow it doesn’t get the authoritarian label. Wonder why.

Lol y’all complain about Lemmy being authoritarian but think this is fine?

“How do you refer to an instance member in Java?”

“Sorry can’t comment that.”

If you think “not invading other countries for oil” or “not doing ethnic cleansing of immigrants” are purity tests I don’t know what to tell you.

Statistical fallacy #420: Assuming the value of a random arbitrary element will necessarily be close to the mean or median of all elements.

He’d lose the mandate of heaven so many times the dragons would come and smite the citizens for not overthrowing him already.

If there is an established pattern of malice, it is stupidity to attribute it to stupidity.

What about the IP issues? Not even talking about the “ethics” of “ip theft via AI” or anything, you just know a company like Microsoft or Apple will eventually try suing an open source project over AI code that’s “too similar” to their proprietary code. Doesn’t matter if they’re doing the same to a much greater degree, all that matters is they have the resources to sue open source projects and not the other way around. If a tech company can get rid of the competition by abusing the legal system, you just know they will, especially if they can also play the "they’re knowingly letting their users use pirated media that we own with their software” card on top of it.

Judgement is an essential nutrient for cats

Potato potahto

In America the justice system leans strongly in favour of the defence (unless you’re poor, but we’ll put that aside for now)

Neat trick the tankies hate: the West is perfect if you just say that the biggest counterexample is irrelevant!

There’s definitely an algorithm that decides if any arbitrary algorithm will halt or not (unless you feed its own source code back into itself, but we’ll put that aside for now).