And I don’t see why Arch is relevant to the discussion. My point is that software being non-proprietary is not a guarantee for preventing fuckery like Microsoft’s. Profit-maximizing companies will maximize their profits, proprietary software or not. Canonical, which sells a non-proprietary Linux distribution, is an example of this.

I mean canonical also tries to monetize its users. The problem is more shareholders who want profit than the software being proprietary.

But but… branding!

That’s not really true. I recently migrated from Notion to Obsidian. It wasn’t 100% painless but good enough.

I don’t believe that. You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP. Sure, we can’t reach some kind of theoretical 0.0 bias - even particle physics research is biased by assumptions. But at least it makes an honest attempt. Although the conclusions an article arrives at may be influenced by the author’s opinions, a journalist who is honestly trying to avoid bias would provide the reasoning, data and sources behind those opinions instead of simply stating them as fact. That gives me as a reader a chance to evaluate their merits.

The thing I’m really aching for in news media is journalism that rises above merely reporting events. “A guy got murdered yesterday” is not useful information for me. It’s barely even a data point, because I can’t read about ten such events and extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Other things like population size, number of stopped crime, completeness of data etc affect any conclusion that could be drawn from it

In fact I shouldn’t try to extrapolate from it, because I’m paying the journalist to talk to the right experts and hopefully also do research on their own, to figure out trends and cause-effect relationships. That’s meaningful journalism that helps me make decisions such as how to vote.

Media today has so much noise and so little signal. I don’t need a daily newspaper filled to the brim with events. I need perhaps a weekly magazine that I can read on a Sunday morning in half an hour, which teaches me something about what’s going on in the world without bias, and brings up the data as evidence. I wouldn’t mind paying for it and I’d take it on paper, though e-ink would be better. I’d trust it a lot more if ads were not mentioned anywhere in its business model.

The sites won’t say “we rip off our artists and they’re very unhappy about it”. In fact as far as I can tell from visiting spotify.com, Spotify is just fine. So this is apparently not a sufficient method for finding out if a site is a good way of buying music.

What’s your method of determining that Beatport and Bandcamp are good options?

I checked a couple of songs on my playlist and didn’t find places that were obviously better than Spotify. Is Bandcamp better? How about Beatport? Being able to buy and download music is not a guarantee that the artist is getting paid fairly.

As a side note I’m growing weary of having to keep track as a consumer of the revenue streams and ethics of every brand out there. There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way. Or, if they were being coerced into it, that they would push for regulation to prevent that. But I have a suspicion that the principle of supply and demand dictates that selling music online just won’t be as profitable as they (naively) expect it to be. Too many musicians, too few ears.

So, where do I buy the music? I’m not seeing an alternative being offered here.

Why are you not moving to a different distribution model where you’ll get what you’re worth? I’ll go where the music is. If you keep putting it on Spotify then I’ll play it on Spotify.

Probably they are just now being called out on it

Oh OK my bad, that was news to me. I stopped using it a couple of years ago when Firefox got the functionality built in, and it wasn’t advertised as an ad blocker back then.

Ghostery isn’t even an ad blocker, it’s just to prevent tracking.

Buy a small FM tuner for like $10 at the nearest electronics shop.

It’s his job to say who should buy it. That doesn’t mean he wants to take food off the tables of manufacturers. A review is useless if the reviewer cares more about not hurting the manufacturer than being straight about the product. That said, the review should obviously be done with a responsible level of thoroughness and competence, but that’s a separate issue.

The lady doth protest too much. The article reads like virtue signaling from someone who is TOTALLY NOT INTO ANOREXIC PORN.

So… in other words, it doesn’t work.

That’s a question of political ideology. I can just say that right now that’s what the general expectation is. Or at least, corporations get enough flak if they don’t fix the issues that they feel compelled to take the responsibility and avoid badwill. But one could certainly imagine a law where individual users are liable for the malware running on their PC:s instead.

Personally I think it’s good that developers take the responsibility, because there are too many users that will not upgrade and that causes a societal problem. For example, it becomes hard for banks to protect accounts when people log in using PCs that have tons of software with security holes.

That’s not how developers see it. We have a responsibility to push security updates to you even if you stay on 1.3x, because if your machine is compromised it can be used to further attack others. It’s similar to how people have a social responsibility to vaccinate themselves to protect others, but in the software world that responsibility falls on the software producers rather than you personally.

A big challenge here is that the cost and time required to develop and test a security fix is proportional to the number of software versions in circulation. So it’s better for everyone if we can keep everybody on the latest version.