Safari is still its own browser. Google doesn't own the Web yet. But Safari is effectively Apple-only now, and the only real game in town on iOS, so it's also not really doing much to encourage competition either way.

The community has not been able to deal with the DRM problem, not really. You still can't use any of the major streaming services normally on Linux. Almost all of them cap the feed at standard def or maybe 720p for one or two of the better ones.

Frankly, breaking that chokehold that the big players like Windows, macOS, iOS and Android have and forcing content distribution to open standards would be a boon to moving people off those big but increasingly customer-hostile platforms. Linux gaming used to be a sticking point for home users but these days games that don't work on Linux because of malware-like anticheats or the like are the ones that stand out. Today it's more about streaming media, something else that home users increasingly expect to Just Work.

But breaking that oligopoly is probably never going to happen through market forces alone, because the paranoid industry execs are convinced that anyone running Linux is just going to pirate all their stuff if they don't put DRM in all their contracts, as if the exact opposite isn't actually what's already happening. So regulation it is, and opening up a widely used market to much greater competition. It would help with allowing small players to make less user-hostile devices that stream to big screens as well.

There are so many things wrong with this statement, but to start with, what is or isn't illegal now might change with the next government. (Ask women in the US who have considered having an abortion if you think that's a someone-else problem that only applies in far away places with different cultures.)

You can now get in trouble for things you've said or done that aren't actually illegal.

It's not just about illegal content and your own police being able to access it, it's also about a commercial organisation with many thousands of employees being able to access it, and anyone else who manages to compromise that system being able to access it.

The list goes on. Everyone should be worried about moves to weaken online security. And contrary to the claim in the garbagewalled article that iPhone users have shown minimal interest, this story made the #1 spot on literally every major news and discussion website I use last week and in several cases stayed there for a day or more with unusually high participation in the resulting discussions.

[citation needed]

One of the major problems today is the often unspoken assumption that the above is true. And yet I know plenty of people who would be willing to pay entirely viable amounts of money, or extra money, for untainted products and services comparable to what we have today. The failure of the market to provide for that group of customers, whose size is unknown but certainly significant, is probably the strongest argument there is that capitalism has failed here and government regulation is needed to protect the ordinary people and rein in the "tech" (surveillance capitalist) firms.

Sometimes we don't necessarily even need it to be more profitable for the tech giants not to sell us out. We just need it to be viable for competitors to enter the market and distinguish themselves by offering respect for privacy as a selling point. That mostly doesn't depend on the price sensitivity of users. It depends on interoperability and being able to break the networking effects that keep companies like Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft dominant in their target markets.

Although when it comes to products like TVs and cars, it still wouldn't do any harm to dump on the entire industries that have sold out their customers for a few extra bucks. There should be laws requiring prominent advance disclosure of user/buyer-hostile practices before people choose to use or purchase something, like the very large health warnings cigarette companies have been legally required to cover much of their packaging in here in the UK for years, and if that still doesn't work, those user-hostile practices should simply be regulated out of existence without mercy.

The problem with this argument is that 5G and mesh networks are going to render your willingness to let your "smart" home devices spy on you and phone home irrelevant.

New cars already come with built-in SIM cards of their own. The next generation of networking technologies is probably going to make it cheap and ubiquitous for other devices to be independently online as well.

This is the part where the market has clearly failed and regulation is supposed to step in to protect the ordinary citizen, right?

Real engineers usually have formal responsibility for their work, and with that, they may also have the authority to direct changes or even bring a halt to a whole project to make sure the work is done properly and the results meet the necessary standards. People with that authority don't need a union to help them enforce acceptable quality levels and stop something known to be dangerous or harmful from going into production.

Part of the way you know software engineering has little to do with real engineering is that software engineers have no such responsibility and no such authority. This explains a lot about the quality of software compared to the quality of bridges, and about common attitudes among managers at software companies compared to real engineering organisations.

Are you seriously contending that software developers working for Big Tech firms with TC that is often orders of magnitude higher than the average and, at least in the US, historically several times as high as similarly skilled and capable people doing similar work in other similarly developed countries, have no choice but to take those jobs and build whatever systems they are told in order to survive? Yeah, right.

No-one with the skills and experience to get those jobs at Big Tech actually needs to work on ad-tech, surveillance capitalism, high-pressure sales, content harvesting, addictive and ever-less-social media, or similarly ethically challenged applications to pay their bills. Not a single one of them.

I worked with a client recently who was using MS online products like Teams and Office. It was my first time working with that software for a little while.

The online version of Excel literally couldn't even show a simple spreadsheet without obvious drawing bugs that totally broke the basic grid layout or even completely hid changes that had just been made to cell contents when rendering the sheet. The online versions of Office applications often seem to be dumbed down and missing functionality that was available in their desktop counterparts about 20 years ago.

Teams could set up group video calls fine when we used scheduled meetings, yet when we tried a quick 1-1 video call afterwards with someone from the meeting we'd both just attended, we couldn't see each other. Every now and then screen sharing wouldn't work at all or someone would be completely unable to connect to a meeting but then the bug apparently got fixed by the next day.

We wasted so much time on that (expensive and short term) consultancy engagement working around bugs in MS software that it materially affected how much we were able to deliver for the client by the end.

It might be significant that we were all running Linux and using browsers like Chromium or Firefox, not running Windows 11 and Edge. But then stories like TFA come along and we're all glad that at least our machines booted up this morning!

This might be the biggest challenge arising from modern AI tools. They make half-decent replacements for junior developers, and with the market dynamics of the past 10-15 years, hiring junior developers was already a questionable idea for most businesses. So if hiring good seniors and providing powerful workstations with AI-driven tools becomes SOP then where has the next generation of good seniors come from in 2030 or 2035?

However, so far I don't see much evidence that these tools will pose a credible threat to existing highly skilled and experienced developers. I am bearish on the potential of the current style of LLM-based code generators, because while they do make useful autocomplete++ tools and provide an alternative UI for copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, I see little reason to expect further quantum leaps in capability along the path we've been following. We already have models trained on the largest public bodies of work now and enough memory and processing power to do that training within useful time frames. There's no Stack Overflow Pro where there is 10x as much code written by developers who are 10x as good. And most of the real progress in software development involves significant innovation and/or domain specific knowledge, which are two areas where LLMs will always be limited by the quality and quantity of training data they are based on. No doubt we'll continue to see incremental improvements, and that's useful in itself, but incremental steps rarely add up to more fundamental change.

While posting, did anyone else find this statement from Taylor a bit naive?

The guy's apparently a developer by background, so surely he knows what compilers and interpreters are. Almost all software developers have been operators of code generators since somewhere in the middle of the 20th century. The trick has been, and still will be, to make the specification of the behaviour you want clear enough for those code generators to do what you actually want them to do. If only we had a name for writing such a specification...

Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

But we've dropped really low if we even skip OP or can't remember it a couple PgDn's further, haven't we.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Now, would you like a slightly smaller burger with your slightly smaller portion of fries?

BTW, that'll be 5% more with the new pricing.

You think that instead of having standardised access to some software via a web app, users will be better off with half-baked platform-specific apps bending the knee to whatever Apple or Google decide to allow in their app store this week?

If so, I have news for you: a lot of software developers still aren't going to make Apple native apps and still aren't going to pay Apple's high cut to get listed on the App Store (unless the happen to decide on a whim that they shouldn't be). It is a fool's game for any small company to play by those rules. Web apps are a great equaliser and for many users doing many things they are more than sufficient. When they aren't, quite often it's because Apple refuses to support some useful web standard that everyone else does, and often has for a while.

Apple's browser limitations are anticompetitive behaviour that stifles competition with its lucrative App Store business, pure and simple. And there is a reason that this kind of anticompetitive behaviour is prohibited in most civilised places: it's extremely bad for users.

Raising a question is asking a question

Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.