Where I live (Germany), it’s fairly common to buy the generics. Not everyone does it, but enough people. They’re available and oftentimes it’s the exact same ingredients inside, just a different packaging and brand name on it. And a third of the price or so. I think it’s more that people buy what they’re used to. And if you just ask for Aspirin (which is a brand name here), the pharmacist is going to hand you that, and not the generic. So it’s a bit more effort to add half a sentence to deliberately ask for the cheap one.

I don’t think the app in the picture is driven by AI. Seems like a catalogue of questions. Probably to assess some situation by some standard procedure. I’d trust that. Regarding the AI apps mentioned below: I wouldn’t trust them at all. If my private parts start itching and I can’t make sense of it, I’d go to the doctor. At least if it’s serious. Or use Dr. Google if it’s not too bad.

Sure, the universe is big. If you travel far enough, there is bound to be a planet with water and maybe breathable air. You might have to travel a few million years, though. And keep in mind that plants produced the oxygen here on earth by photosynthesis. So I’m not sure about how that’d happen on other planets. Maybe they can have oxygen for other physics reasons. Maybe they already have life on them. It’s difficult to quantify the statistical chance for that. But the universe is a big place.

If you question is if we can go there, the anwer is most certainly: No.

wtf?

Sure. Oftentimes it’s the not so popular places that have their own charm. And I mean the USA is kind of a big place 😆 There are lots of very different experiences to choose from.

You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They’re pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don’t want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don’t have any experience with those.

Certainly Ubuntu. But fortunately I have more options to choose from.

The national parks? I’d like to visit one.

I don’t get that from the article. And I mean it’s not a “web” if it’s not interconnected, is it?

Things have shifted a bit in the last many years. Now almost no one reads blogs anymore. They want doom-scrolling and interaction. And even the old school nerds moved away from RSS, Mail and IRC. I also liked some Linux forums, but I feel it got more quiet there during the last years. Mostly to the benefit of proprietary platforms like Discord and such. But I don’t thing they’re very social, as in open and giving freedom to the people…

What’s a better protocol for a social web?

What I really like to do in my spare time is electronics projects and tinker with microcontrollers. So I’ve contributed to a few libraries, added some features, tried to fix stuff and participated in a few smart-home projects. And I self-host some web services. There’s always some mild annoyances or things I find out while doing the maintenance. And sometimes it’s easy enough for me to do some changes myself and I send that to the project.

In my private life, I almost exclusively use Free and Open-Source Software. So if something on my computer doesn’t work as expected, I write bug reports. Sometimes I already got to the root of the issue and if it’s in a programming language I understand, I don’t just file a bug-report but also propose the exact fix.

And some one-off things. During Covid I played Minetest and sent some pull requests out to some mods. And occasionally I see some abandoned (niche) Linux packages or projects and update them. Even if that doesn’t get incorporated anywhere, people will at least have the steps to make it work again.

Generally, I’m not that invested in some specific project. It’s more some smaller fixes here and there. I think people call these “drive-by commits”. I might have some mild form of ADHD, or there’s just too much interesting projects out there… But I’ve struggled homing in on any single one of them. And I can’t muster up the time to maintain anything myself, that’s just too much of a commitment.

And what I also do is participate in Linux forums or here on Lemmy. Just help people with their woes. Or help them make a decision on what software to use, etc… Aside from writing code, that’s also a big and important part of Free Software culture.

My verdict is: Most people I meet are nice. Sometimes they’re really interesting people with some crazy niche interests. Sometimes it’s some dude from oversees having a job and kids and on the side they also maintain some software for the benefit of everyone. Or I want something fixed, propose something and go to bed, and when I wake up the next day, someone put in lots of thought and some time and fixed my stupid issues, or at least restructured their code so I can use their software how I like. And in the case of Minetest it was either some middle-aged people still invested in playing sandbox games, or some teenagers who were frankly not super adept at coding, but very open to suggestions and learning things. That’s the outstanding positive encounters. I don’t have that many negative ones. I’m not here for the drama, but like to keep things to the technical aspect. If someone isn’t listening or an annoying person, I just don’t engage. I mean usually I don’t have to use their software. And I can’t come up with any specific example that I was involved in. Usually my annoyances are either someone doesn’t have the time anymore to maintain their project. But that’s okay, interests change and sometime life takes a turn and you can’t invest lots of time into everything. Or complexity. Sometimes it’s tough to understand some complex software with lots of moving parts and that stops me from engaging, even if I want to. Yeah and I think I talked to a bunch of people who might be on the autism spectrum. I can’t really tell but occasionally someone is super blunt and a bit different than people I meet on the street. I can see how being super honest and picking on someones ideas for technical reasons, or rejecting them, citing formalities can discourage newcomers. Honestly… I myself don’t care. If someone is straightforward, I just take that as an invitation to be very direct myself. Usually these people are focused on the technical aspects and that aligns with me if I just want to use the technology. I can live with that as long as they give some justification for their reasoning. And usually they do. And it’s rare anyways, at least in my experience. So rare that I forgot when I got annoyed by people after the next dozens of very positive encounters. Usually it’s steep learning curves that put me off. But we can’t do much about this except invest lots of time to write good documentation. And it’s a technical problem and not a people-problem.

I’m theoretically against Codes of Conducts and politics in free software projects. I think we should stick to the technical aspects, just respect each other and don’t waste each other’s time. Be welcoming to contributions and don’t care if it’s a 14yo kid, a woman or whoever. Most projects get that right. They don’t write pages and pages of text to describe their politics, but instead they just do it. I think that’s the way to go. I think all of this goes without saying. And if we want to attract people, we should focus on writing documentation that helps them get started, instead of CoCs and GitHub bots that enforce them and make everything more complicated than it really is. But there are some limitations… Bigger projects might have to deal with politics.

Sounds like standard practice. First embrace as long as something helps you grow and then wait for the right moment and extinguish.

I don’t think this will be received well in the western market. But that might not be their main criterion.

Nah, it’s not that bad. I’ve contributed to free software for almost 20 years now and it’s not remotely that bad. I get thanked a lot. Maintainers take time to review my ideas and incorporate them so I can use their software how I like. I’ve learned a lot myself and I get to use all that stuff. So I gained a lot and generally it’s been nice interactions.

Occasionally there is some drama. And I’d say there are some computer nerds with behavioral pecularities. It’s rare but it happens. I’d say we’re all just humans. I’m okay with that, and I’ve only had that happen to me in like 1 out of 100 interactions or less. I get annoyed by people way more frequently in my every-day life, so I’d say on average the free software world is a nicer place.

But I mean if you got the same spare time, just less money… Do you then give up having hobbies? Or have different ones? I’d imagine coding isn’t that bad since you don’t need lots of fancy material goods, just a computer and those got way cheaper.

I can see how someone would be dishartened and then give up contributing to the world. Maybe we see the same dynamics with other voluntary work? I’m not educated on that. It doesn’t feel that bad where I live than I get from reading the news… YMMV. But your numbers are right. And I don’t like that form of neoliberalism and capitalism over people’s lives either.

I wonder if it’s the same worldwide. I think we here in Europe work fewer hours in a year. And also in the USA the average didn’t like increase substantially in the last years. I’m not sure about this. Sure, it’s become more difficult. But the numbers don’t seem to reflect young people work longer than older generations. On average it seems the other way around.

The processors and peripherals aren’t as uniform as they are on computers. Each SoC has a different set of components, which need drivers and custom set-up mechanics and they’re often only shared between the chip designer and phone manufacturers. A lot of complicated reverse engineering is needed. And that’s often not worth it as there are many different phones on the market and they’re short-lived devices. So we end up in the current situation where we don’t have the operating system foundation / drivers available to the community to build upon.

There is Linux on phones. A modified Linux kernel runs on every Android device. Just the userland is an entirely different one. And Linux isn’t there yet with the desktop and apps. A lot of features are missing, power saving, delivering messages while sleeping and doing background tasks while saving power in the pocket… It’s kind of a chicken and egg dilemma. We’d need some popular Linux phone so people are motivated to tackle the remaining software issues for a mobile ecosystem. And we won’t get one unless there is some good software so it can be marketed.

What changed about young(er) people?

I’ve been keeping track of free and open source software and federated social media. Discovered Lemmy quite a while before the Spez/Reddit thing happened. But I only really started using it then, as it exploded practically over night and became usable to talk to more than just a dozen people or so.

You’re going to find out soon.

And I mean if she does a right-wing move by French standards, wouldn’t that be considered socialist and far-left in the USA?

I still don’t get what you’re trying to do. So your users contribute some text, pictures or measurements they did on their own? You can make them license that stuff to you and everyone, yes. But they can’t upload some Harry potter books, pictures they downloaded from the internet, or whatever we call “copyrighted content”. Adding that to the database will make the whole thing non-shareable. And you can’t attach a license then. You’d have to write some terms of service and everyone needs to agree not to insert material into the database they didn’t create themselves or got a license to redistribute. And they’d need to grant you a license automatically in that terms if service.