Well, I live in the EU and I still have hope that there will be sufficient regulation to prevent the worst when it comes to privacy issues. There already is a lot of protection in place compared to the US (I know, recent developments point in the opposite direction, but the EU at least has some vocal privacy advocates which do their job well) Also I think there are not so subtle differences between recording telemetry (e.g. with anonymized user stats) and spying on users and selling all the data to the highest bidder.

But you are absolutely right that a working business model that is fair to the user, affordable and open still needs to be found. What we can see is that the US model is not sustainable. My prediction is that the tech conglomerates will enshittify themselves out of business in the long run. Because the competition does not need to improve much when the big player’s products get significantly worse over time. The competition can just sit there and wait until those big tech products become so unattractive to users that there is a real incentive to switch to an alternative. This effect can be observed when looking at Windows vs. Linux for example. While Linux has been pretty stable and easy to use for years now, Microsoft makes the Windows experience worse on an almost weekly basis, and now you need to use command line scripting to fix the worst things. Which is ironic, because it used to be exactly the opposite, Linux was the OS where you had to tinker on the command line to make it work. But these days are long gone. And as Microsoft doubles down in shitting on their customers with restrictions, ads and forced AI everywhere, millions of people feel compelled to stay on Windows 10 and wait how the situation develops or try something else. Windows was always disliked or seen as a necessary evil, but this time they might have gone too far.

Oh and about your last paragraph… people in the US are now beginning to learn the hard way why being the product is bad. When big tech is in bed with a fascist government and provides all the surveillance data which is suddenly being used against “ordinary people who have nothing to hide” it becomes pretty clear why being the product is a very very bad idea. Just takes a while to make the connection I suppose.

This and Satya Nadella’s response to “Microslop” are probably in preparation for next weeks headline: “Trump administration classifies criticism towards AI as domestic terrorism” yw

Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product

There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.

Some more valid reasons in my opinion:

1. Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)

2. Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.

3. US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.

On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.

There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.

Well, if you want to use that stuff for your personal use that’s totally fine. But there is a difference between doing that and selling your creation as a product. To pick up on your example, it’s great if someone learns woodworking and puts together a table or something. You probably won’t sell it though because unless you get really good at it, the piece of furniture will not meet the standards for a good product. It’s absolutely the same when using LLMs to put together a piece of software. It will fall apart quickly unless you put some serious work in it. A lot of people think LLMs are a shortcut to learning this stuff and then go on and pretend to be professional software developers. I also doubt these vibecoders learn a lot about about coding when they don’t even understand what the LLM is putting together for them as a result of a few wishful prompts.

While I (almost) agree with the conclusion, there is a lot of bullshit and unproven assumptions in this blog post. I always cringe about the “AI is democratising software development” argument in particular. This is just wrong on so many levels. Software development is not an ivory tower. Everyone with an internet connection had access to all the resources to learn the necessary skills for free, for decades. Everyone who had an interest in actually learning that stuff and putting a bit of effort into it was able to do so. What LLMs provide is not democratising anything but advertising the illusion that everyone can produce software, effortless and without any skills whatsoever. Software development is much more than just churning out lines of code that seem to work. The Vibecoding approach is like trying to build your own car without having the skills and asking an AI to construct it as the sum of individual parts which all come from different car models from a Lada to a Ferrari. The end result might be drivable, but it will be neither secure nor efficient nor fast nor stable nor maintainable etc. A Frankenstein car. Everyone with half a brain would agree that’s not a good idea, however with LLMs people just do pretend its fine.

Didn’t find anything, and it would probably void the warranty. But on the upside, using the app isn’t necessary to operate the bike, and the most important features work with the controller/display on the handlebar. The motor lock is disabled for now and I’m resorting to more traditional methods of bike security… a chain lock. The motor lock has a huge disadvantage anyways because it depends on a bluetooth connection to the app on a phone. If that phone for some reason doesn’t work or is unavailable then the bike is essentially bricked. It’s a heavy and bulky cargo bike, so being stranded somewhere with a blocked motor would be bad.

About the Bosch E-Bike, I have a bike with a Bosch motor and they really are that bad. The bike comes with an app and you need to give them your personal data to “unlock” basic features of the app and an electronic bike lock. If you want to let another person use that bike, you need a subscription. I deleted the app. Fuck Bosch.

Oh let me know if you find a solution. This is a task I have to accomplish this year too.

I have an old Chromecast but it’s not 4k. The new ones are enshittified as well as far as I know

First of all, don’t feel bad about it. That said if you want to improve yourself in the virtualization department and get rid of Oracle’s VirtualBox, I recommend having a look at virt-manager with KVM/Qemu as a VM host. It’s a bit more of initial setup but once this is done it works pretty much the same way as VirtualBox.

There is only a subset of Windows games left that does not run on Linux. Mostly games with kernelbased Anti-Cheat and a few other outliers. I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for years now. Have a look at the ProtonDB website to see if your favourite games are running on Linux

I had to setup a custom pihole LG blacklist to keep it from displaying ads in the menu. And LG is well known for spying on their customers in the worst way possible

Well the problem is we only use the TV for streaming and my partner wants Netflix and other commercial stuff. Which means I would have to connect another internet device to the TV where the same problem happens again. Going exclusively Jellyfin or whatever is not a solution at this time

I’m not going to buy anything from LG any more. My ongoing battle against my own LG TV’s enshittification (forced ads and AI everywhere, getting worse every update) has soured my opinion on LG. They can go to hell.

I did that one year ago, and I don’t miss it. Amazon degraded to a marketplace of low quality Chinese crap anyway. It’s really easy to avoid

Exactly this. If you use it as part of a compound word or as a verb it’s totally fine. However “der Führer” (the Führer) is exclusively used to describe Hitler, and it usually has a negative or ironic vibe depending on who says it.

About the Führerschein… führen and fahren have the same etymological root… It is still used in “Führen eines Fahrzeugs” which simply means “driving a car” and that is where the term comes from.

It’s also sad that Nextcloud with their pile of hot PHP garbage seem zo be the ony viable option (apart from selfhosting) when looking for an alternative to OneDrive.

Consumerism, Fanboyism and a feeling of superiority. In Germany Apple had a much smaller market share than in the US and people liked to show off that they can afford a Mac.

The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/