As an engineer, I can tell you it's not even easy to keep things working internally - let alone support every possible integration. Just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's feasible to do.
But if you're convinced its what people want, there's nothing preventing you from making it your life - like other people have done with their strategies.
No one is asking for support for every possible integration.
What people are asking for is not actively preventing other integrations. That means through business means and deals as well as technological measures.
I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments are completely divorced from reality.
No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
No one wants to deal with the Windows 98ificaiton of phones.
> I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments are completely divorced from reality.
> No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
Just like no one wants to get rid of Internet Explorer, right?
No one wants to, in large part because it's a fucking nightmare. I say that as someone who not only knows how, but knows how to write the code for it too. Why is it so hard? What makes it a nightmare? Their business model requires a walled garden, because otherwise...
Anyways, People have no issues migrating from myspace to facebook, or from youtube to instagram to tiktok. If it wasn't a fucking nightmare full of bullshit, user hostile rules (e.g. manifest version, or max age of TCP connections) there'd be a market for Google alternatives.
Right now the only motivation is privacy, and Graphiene works pretty well. Turns out, caring about privacy is a lot more motivating than wanting some feahure to work. Especially when "they" have a vested interest in making sure no one else can provide that feature.
You probably simply don't know what this is about. When Android phones "age" to a certain point, they become locked (user cannot log into the OS), and the only way to circumvent this is by jailbreaking them and installing a different firmware / OS.
I have a Galaxy S7 that is in this condition, and I haven't the time to try to reinstall it.
Many users never face this problem because they buy new phones before their old ones hit this particular point, often because many applications will stop working before that due to developers discontinuing support effectively rendering the phone useless. I ran into this problem because I kept my phone around due to some images stored on it (well, now that's lost forever).
I know this requires changing the SoC to x86_64 or ARM but I want bog standard Linux any distribution to run on the cell phone, at least run in the sense of the kernel. The applications would be up to the distribution maintainers. Talking to the modem should just be a Linux kernel module that has been blessed by Linus Torvalds. The code must be clean enough that at no point is he tempted to raise the middle finger or start writing an email. No obfuscated code, no lawful intercept JTAG debugging code, no dodgy BIOS just bog standard Linux and standard x86_64 or ARM hardware. Maybe something like coreboot as the BIOS.
In fairness I also want a goose that lays golden eggs.
Nobody wants that because there's currently no market for it, so no solutions for it.
(And yes, we can quibble about alternate Android app stores in countries that aren't China, but Google's rigged that game heavily in their favor via defaults)
I appreciate the engineering perspective, and you're right that supporting every integration isn't trivial.
Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible integration"(?)?
Setting that aside, it seems it not every possible combination needs official support, but rather that providing an open or documented way for motivated users or communities to build upon or repurpose devices would be beneficial. Many projects exist precisely because tech companies allowed or at least tolerated community-driven solutions.
It's less about expecting everything to be effortless for the original manufacturer, and more about avoiding deliberate restrictions that prevent the community from extending a device's useful lifespan.
> Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible integration"(?)?
As a different engineer than the one you where replying to, I can say that yes, there is a substantial difference between the two. What the original comment was likely referring to with unlock codes, is the ability of unlocking a smartphone's bootloader so that one is able to install custom ROMs. But this is very different from providing support for said ROMs. A company can totally say: "here's the unlock code, but you use this under your sole responsibility, we will void your warranty if you do this". Being able to install custom ROMs at the cost of losing the warranty is a compromise I'm willing to accept: one can still wait for the warranty to expire and then install custom ROMs.
Do the tech companies that make the devices that we now require for daily life because they decided to make the world that way release all of the resources necessary for independent people to do what you're suggesting?
The regulations stop more people from being able to do this than competition does. "because they decided to make the world that way" Who is "they"? Participants in the free market? I don't think inept politicians should supersede them.
A useful big step would be to just use the exact antitrust regulations and laws we have had on the books since the first time we had to figure this out over a hundred years ago. Teddy Roosevelt helped take care of this, though we definitely didn't wield them against AT&T for too long.
They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take aggressive control of any market they want as long as they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.
We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't matter that it's not efficient, what human being will turn down $100 million just to stop competing? "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice
A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely pervert markets if you let them.
Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so comprehensively that their resources end up warping the market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.
I think one of the things about growing up is accepting personal responsibility and not looking at the government/daddy to protect you from everything. If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?
I'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches at home just fine.
>I think one of the things about growing up is accepting personal responsibility and not looking at the government/daddy to protect you from everything. If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?
Yes, especially if your target market for those skateboard are kids / minors.
>I'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches at home just fine.
If someone makes a sandwich for themselves incentives are aligned to prevent unhygienic practices. I'm not going to cut corners to maximize some different measure. If some restaurant produces food for me, they are incentivized to maximize profit margin, which is not directly aligned with my desire for non-dangerous food.
What I hate about this argument is that the FDA does not predate civilization. In fact, it's a relatively recent development. Not only has this idea been tried, but throughout most of human history, people lived in the world you describe, died of salmonella, and the people who lived in that world decided they'd be better if that wasn't a thing anymore.
Yeah, making sure there's a standard of cleanliness or food safety in restaurants seems kind of pointless, right? If the consumer eats that food, it's their fault for sure.
I can see a world where there's a private alternative to the FDA going around and certifying that food is safe for consumption. I just know that the world before the FDA didn't have one, and the FDA works well enough that I'm not willing to find out. I think this has a lot of parallels to software - if it ain't broke don't fix it.
That is a really good point, what would be the business model of such an organization? Who funds them?
If it is the government, then that is just the FDA with extra steps
I could imagine food companies funding it to keep their competitors in check, don't know how likely that is in practice
Maybe there could be a way to make the consumer pay for the service. Provide a website where customers pay a fee, enter the name of the product/restaurant then get their safety levels. You could even include fancy graphs and charts to sweeten the deal. How to do that profitably I dont know.
Part of the thing about growing up is realizing that you are a PRIVELEGED little product of a stable society. And maybe it's worth caring about others in that society instead of "corporate innovation" that threatens to fully destabilize said society.
A sense of personal responsibility dilutes very quickly as more people get involved. This is a well researched dynamic in groups and collectives.
As it turns out, it's very easy to rationalize your own actions if you can defer your responsibility to a wider context. On an operational level: "My job - HR, SRE engineering, project management,... - didn't hurt anyone.", "I received an industry award last year for my work",... On a strategic level: "Too many people rely on us, so we can't fail.", "Our original mission didn't change.", "Our mission was, is and will be a net positive", ... Not just that, actually being convinced that those rationalizations are 100% true, and not being able to consciously notice how your own actions in a small, or large, way contribute to a negative impact. Just listen to testimonies of these people, the truly are convinced to their core that their work is a net positive for humanity.
> If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?
Suppose your design involves a wonky wheel. If you sell 10 skateboards, and 1 person falls, breaks their leg and decides to sue you for damages: that's a private problem between you and that person. If you sell 400 million skateboards, and millions of people people break their leg: that's a problem for the entirety of society.
Safety is also why car design is heavily regulated. Not necessarily to ensure individual safety, but to make sure that society, as a whole, isn't crippled by hundreds of thousands of people requiring care or getting killed in car accidents.
If you are able to sell 400 million skateboards, I sure hope there are regulations that enforce the safety of your product design.
This is a nice fantasy, it's just a shame we live in a world full of psychotic C-suites that would do anything and everything they could if it meant the magic line goes up half a percentage point. I guess you could just "take personal responsibility" to not drink polluted water tainted by unfiltered chemical dumps, but I'd much rather we tell companies to get bent when they try pollute rivers and lakes en-masse to save a buck.
What I always find hilarious about these naive libertarian types is they never even bother to check their hypotheticals against reality. For example, FutureMotion had to have a regulatory body intervene because they were killing and injuring people with their skateboard designs:
Who said the problem is solely deficits? I don't think spending should just "scale" with anything and there is empirical evidence that that is a horrible way to run an economy.
You are literally just suggesting we spend more no matter what. Obviously, there is a massive difference in types of spending right? And we have an incredible amount of bad spending. In fact, in places like public education and health, we continue to spend more to get worse outcomes.
You're making large, sweeping generalizations and most of the positions espoused are more political than scientific.
The entire premise is to cut wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective spending. I’m sure nobody will agree with every single line item cut, but generally throwing money away on ineffective and fraudulent spend isn’t contributing to wealth transfer. Putting “bad spending” in quotes like none of the spend being cut is actually bad is disingenuous. If you tax the wealthy and get $100, but 95 of them end up in landing in other wealthy people’s pockets along the way, the people who need it aren’t winning. if you can remove $90 of waste, give the people who need it $20 instead of $5 and spend $5 to grease the wheels, you’ve cut spending 3 fold while transferring more wealth.
Then why are we talking about personnel at all? That's like 3% of spending. The only way to achieve actual savings is to reduce program spending, which isn't even an executive power.
You understand that firing a program manager doesn't de-obligate the spending of the program he managed, right? Because I'm seeing a lot of people online who don't seem to grasp that.
One cannot write without tropes, and not only because the attempt itself is such a trope.
That doesn't mean one cannot find Flanderization to be annoying, not even a decade (at least) before the character after which that TV Tropes entry was named, was created.
> This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents.
Really? Do you realize that the amount of civil asset forfeiture has exceeded burglaries? The militarization of police is absolutely a huge problem. As is mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes, over-criminalization, no-knock raids, etc.
They just raided a dudes house for a squirrel.
And no, I don't advocate for the idiocy in CA where they legalized violent crime as a petty response to having their budgets threatened.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Would you even have known the details for each of the 25k people? I could make a similar argument that when I worked for Apple back in the day I didn't know about anyone doing anything illegal. But Apple is a massive company and I'm sure there was probably all sorts of things going on.
seriously - what a waste of money. Guaranteed the maintenance is rife with corrupt arrangements. Also guaranteed that almost any American car manufacturer (Rivian, Tesla, Ford, etc.) would have done a far better job for far less. Did they even pretend to have a fair bidding system? Oshkosh Defense? Seriously?! What a joke.
In any case, even if the process was terribly corrupt, I'm not sure why that would have you so bothered. Last sentence from the USPS press release on Oshkosh winning: "The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations." https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-...
Both results are on the first page of a google search for 'usps truck bids'.
The only thing that comes to mind is maybe defense co. has experience building with indestructible materials, and the specs are for lasting 50 years, which when amortized is optimal for an entity like the government that can dump huge amounts of capital ($40B) at once that a private sector CEO can never do.
It is, to some degree, a jobs program. Whoever wins is guaranteed a lot of work for a long time. So contractors really want it.
I don't think Tesla or Rivian are used to working with government contracts. I'm not sure how much someone like Ford does either outside of mild customization. But defense contractors spend all their time working with the government, building to their specifications, handling the requirements and compliance/etc.
They're simply very very well equipped to work on such a contract.
They'd also be very used to making something for decades because that's what the government wants. Does Ford have a vehicle they make that's nearly unchanged for 30 years? I'd assume even the transit vans have changed a lot in that timeframe.
I think it’s mostly that defense contractors are specialized in selling to the government, which entails jumping through regulatory compliance hoops and placating elected officials by distributing the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible.
How does making military vehicles make you qualified to build vehicles that drive in urban areas? These vehicles need to be safe for pedestrians, not emit excessive noise, exhaust etc. All these things are irrelevant for the military.
X and Tesla are some of if not the most pro-American values companies in the world. Sorry if freedom of speech offends you but that definitely puts you at odds with the American Founders and myself - an American.
As an engineer, I can tell you it's not even easy to keep things working internally - let alone support every possible integration. Just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's feasible to do.
But if you're convinced its what people want, there's nothing preventing you from making it your life - like other people have done with their strategies.