With Farbfeld, it's possible to further reduce the size of image data to be 24 bytes, or 16 if you're ok with your image not being displayable

    Magic Number: 66 61 72 62 66 65 6c 64 (identifies the file as a Farbfeld image)
    Width (in bytes): 00 00 00 01 (specifies the image width)
    Height (in bytes): 00 00 00 01 (specifies the image height)
    First Pixel Data: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff (represents the color data for the first pixel)

Kelley and Cro argue that bounties foster competition at the expense of cooperation. But isn’t it through competition that we Escape Big Tech’s clutches? Without competition, we’d all be slaves to the monopoly of Big Tech, a corporate monolith driven by surveillance capitalism. Competition brings innovation and diversity, giving each of us the tools to fight against centralized power. Bounties create an environment where developers are incentivized to solve problems creatively and help users Escape Big Tech through faster development and better solutions. Cooperation and competition can coexist. In fact, they must coexist if we are to Escape Big Tech. The FOSS community is not a utopia; it’s a battleground. And in a battle, we need all the weapons we can get. Bounties are one of those weapons. The FOSS space thrives when there is a race—not just against time, but against mediocrity. Bounties create an environment where developers are incentivized to push their boundaries, leading to faster development cycles and better software solutions. To argue against this is to undermine the essence of free-market capitalism, a realm devoid of governmental intrusion and packed with individual liberties.

But also, one aspect largely absent from the original blog post is the financial sustainability of being an open source developer. While the love for the craft and the mission to Escape Big Tech might be enough to fuel initial enthusiasm, the reality is that developers need to eat, pay bills, and sustain their lives. If someone aspires to be an open source developer as a primary occupation, financial backing becomes non-negotiable. Bounties, donations, and sponsorships serve this very purpose—they are not just incentives for competition, but also a means for livelihood. Rejecting these financial channels out of an idealistic vision of cooperation is not just impractical but dismissive of the economic pressures that developers face. Let’s not forget, FOSS is an open market where both ideas and resources should flow freely. Monetary incentives can co-exist with the altruistic goals of the community. It’s a balancing act, but one that serves both the ideological and material needs of the FOSS world. For those of us aiming to Escape Big Tech, these financial pathways are not just welcome; they are essential.

I think I need to rethink the way I wrote this article, because the wrong message is being understood. Clearly I have done a bad job at writing it. I should rewrite this article entirely. Thank you for the feedback

the point of immich and photoprism is that you host them on your computer, on your own network and it never goes through those centralized entities in the first place.

I've actually been looking for a good self hosted solution for pictures, that allows me to automatically upload pictures from my phones (I use both ios and android). I've been using nextcloud photos but honestly the experience of the photos app for nextcloud has always been bad for me.

I've been looking at immich and photoprism; how do the two compare, what are the advantages of immich over photoprism, and vice versa?

If you are on iOS, PhotoSync works great. It's just a backup app but supports a ton of different endpoints (I use sftp), scheduling, and most importantly to me custom naming. iOS photo names are dogshit and renaming them to be time-stamped it amazing.

it says a lot about the state of society when I actually cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I think it's sarcasm, I'm almost convinced it is, but at the same time it's an argument that I'd expect Big Tech companies to make.

gitea is also a great self hosted alternative!

I think that's what Forgejo forked from (and Gitea, in turn, forked from Gogs). I am not involved so don't know the details, but yeah basically all of these will do. I ran my own in the Gitea era and was happy with it, 10x lighter and easier than gitlab, I expect Forgejo has a similar experience.

often people point out how unreliable self-hosted services are, well, hosted services are just as unreliable if not more.

this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should always self host critical infrastructure

Depends on what you want. If you want uptime, then sure. If you want to be able to blame someone then no.

If you are down for 1 hour a year on self hosting, but Office 364 is down 3 days a year, your CEO is going to be more understanding of the Office outage as all his golf buddies have the same problem, and he reads about it in the NYT.

But in any case zero downtime is difficult, that's why you need two independent systems. I had a a 500 microsecond outage at the weekend when a circuit failed which caused an business affecting incident, not a big one fortunately, as it was only some singers, but it was still one that was unacceptable -- had it happened at a couple of other events in the last 12 months it would have been far more problematic. Work has started to ensure it doesn't happen next year.

Neeva did only one thing right: they cared about privacy, but otherwise they really did not do a good job. Their search results were worse than google, their load times were even slower than google, they tried making too much money too quickly, and they jumped towards fads too quickly.

This is also my experience. I was ok in rust after using it for 2 weeks, I still had the weird issues here and there, sometimes but after just using it for as little as one month I started feeling confident enough in it where I could develop anything given enough time. Now after almost a year, there is no language i'd rather use than rust