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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • The other commenters in this thread seems to be giving you good advice and moral support, so I’m just going to give my input which comes from a perspective that’s a bit different.

    Sometimes especially when the options we have are contrary to our beliefs, we have to consider if we really need to be a part of it. Sometimes the burden is the smartphone itself. I don’t use smartphones and I couldn’t be happier, somehow my life didn’t end. The last one I had was the N900 and even though it was a pretty cool pocketcomputer, I guess it’s now been around 10 years since I last had a smartphone. I don’t miss it and especially not when I see other people who have one. It’s scary so addictive it seems to be. Pen and paper for data sharing and just calling people can accomplish many tasks.

    Old people with bad eyesight also need banking, so I’d hope theres a bank out there who don’t require a smartphone. In my country banks use the national id for authentication and you can get a TOTP keychain for the 2FA instead of an app, perhabs similar options exist.

    Anyway, I hope you find something that works for you. Life is a process.







  • You’re in trouble already as a business, wasting a lot of money, if you don’t know where your target audience is. What you argue is that this is used for a business to probe where an advertisement would work. I’d argue that that is a very expensive way of finding your target audience, because you still have to pay for all the ads that didn’t work. There are much better ways of figuring out where your target audience is.

    I think most people believe that this obsessive data collection is neccessary, only because Google has repeatedly painted that narrative. This better advertising is just coincidentally the form of advertising that Google is in the best position to supply.

    If you carefully pick the places you advertise and do statistics on how it affect your business while a campaign runs I’m willing to bet you get a much better return. As a bonus to saving money you didn’t have to shit on an important principle in democracy, the autonomy of the people, protected by something called privacy.












  • WARNING. Everything other than the last paragraph is kind of rude and opinionated, so skip to the bottom if you only want practical advice and not a philosophical rant.

    First of all Free Software don’t need paid developers. We scruffy hackers create software because it’s fun. I have a strong suspicion that the commercialization of Free Software via the businessfriendly clothing “Open Source” is actually creating a lot of shitty software or at least a lot of good software that’ll be obsoleted to keep business going. Capitalization of Free Software doesn’t have an incentive to create good finished software, quite the opposite. The best open source software from commercial entities is in my opinion those that were open sourced when a product was no longer profitable as a proprietary business. As examples I love the ID software game engines and Blender. Others seem happy that Sun dumped the source code of Star Office, which then became OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but then again companies like Collabora are trying to turn it into a shitty webification instead of implementing real collaborative features into the software like what AbiWord has.

    …and back in the real world where you need to buy food. Open Source consultancy, implementation of custom out-of-tree features, support, courses and training, EOL maintainance or products that leaverage Open Source software is my best answer. See Free Software as a commons we all contribute to, so that we can do things with it and built things from it. You should not expect people to pay for Free Software, but you can sell things that take advantage of Free Software as a resource.