• 146 Posts
  • 220 Comments
Joined 11 days ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2025

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  • Something being free and open source doesn’t mean it’s good

    True. But it’s verifiable.

    It’s FOSS and you’ve looked at the code and found it to live up to its claims of being secure?

    Popular FOSS projects get audited all the time. Heck, there is even automated software to detect anomalies in code changes.

    Auditability is the only reason why you can only really trust open source but not closed source. With proprietary software you’ll always have to trust the developers to not do something shady and are competent enough. With open source you can simply verify it.

    Also being open source is what usually makes popular FOSS more stable and secure than most closed counterparts. A LOT of people donate their work and since it’s completely public, most want their contributions to be in good shape. If only a few or no other people see your code, you are tempted to write bad code a lot more. This of course is not always the case but more often than not.

    Also in most developed countries it’s illegal to purposefully introduce manipulated code. And I don’t think most people would risk punishment for that if literally anybody could find it.

    I’m trying to show that the particulars of why you like or prefer something matter.

    Sure. But most people don’t care about the details, unfortunately. In the case of messaging they just want to communicate. And if someone asks me, which platform I’d recommend I will always start with the most secure and private.










  • Since its founding in 2002, the company has made numerous advancements in rocket propulsion, reusable launch vehicles, human spaceflight and satellite constellation technology.

    Sure, but these are incremental improvements and not groundbreaking innovations. They surely have good engineers there. But the point that I want to make is that these improvements would have happened with or without SpaceX.

    I don’t know why but Ukraine was using it so clearly it’s good for something.

    I don’t know if they need low latency, but currently it looks like other providers like Eutelsat will replace Starlink in Ukraine.

    It’s also useful for people in remote places where there’s no good internet otherwise

    Viasat for example provides 50MBit+ download speed. Should be more than enough for remote locations.

    or to avoid government censorship

    Shouldn’t also be a problem with other satellite internet providers.

    I don’t think anyone in the 80s thought a smartphone was possible, nor did anyone in the 50s think the Macintosh possible. Maybe it didn’t have to be private institutions making them, but it was.

    If Jobs and his employees had the idea for that, others would have too. They weren’t some once in a lifetime geniuses. Also, it only was possible because the underlying technology was developed first.

    For a lot of modern technology decades’ worth of infrastructure and know-how are needed to even think about making the stuff, and most of that is the product of private investment and development.

    The know-how isn’t going anywhere. People have this knowledge, not organizations.

    I, as someone from the Middle East, don’t have access to that infrastructure and know-how and therefore am forced to pay through the nose for an American phone or a Japanese car. You can make the argument that private innovation is nonexistent or unnecessary only by using the results of decades upon decades of private innovation. You only need to look to the Global South to see what happens when you don’t have that.

    Maan, private investment is mainly responsible for the under-development of the global south. Capitalists took their resources and privatized vast amounts of land and resources. Just look it up.

    A lot of it (but not all) is in fact developed by developers in companies.

    But many are not. Not everybody is doing things just for the money.

    Also there are many applications where the best option is closed source, one example being Excel.

    Sure. But this hasn’t anything to do with it being closed source, but only because Microsoft decided to not share the source code. Also, I like LibreOffice more :P