Enshittification is not just erosion\reduction of the role of open projects and non-encumbering licenses.

All your examples are of successful enshittification. Except since C64 a lot has changed.

XMPP - you’re right, but wrong. It’s still usable, which is more than what one can say on other examples. But it’s architecturally insecure and half-broken. Some kind of “Signal with federation” would be interesting.

Android - yes, using it in a good way is more rare than FreeBSD on desktops. And the ecosystem is good only compared to Apple’s.

The Web - you are as wrong as it gets. It was really open, with standards one can grasp, and with the ability to use any embedded content using all kinds of plugins, usually proprietary, but not always, via Netscape plugin API. Java applets - open enough, but often insecure, Flash videos - that one could play with open plugins usually, Flash games and other applications - usually not, but you wouldn’t have to install Flash if you don’t want that. The security problems could be solvable with sandboxing, maybe with something else. The browser itself had only to support web standards and said NPAPI (if one wanted those plugins). People do come up with all sorts of solutions. Instead of looking for solutions everybody was looking for an excuse to make a web browser itself an overly complex platform. Some consciously, and some thinking that the magic of the Web will grow with its functionality. It was the opposite. It is enshittified because of stuffing everything into the browser instead of modularity.

C64 and RPi - these are too different to say anything. But RPi being open is not true.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

My cause for hope is that the humanity will do the right thing after exhausting all other options. Just as usual.

I want a p2p native application like that. Using some arcane shit with smart contracts and distributed reputation and zero-knowledge distributed cache and cryptographic identities to get recommendations and fetch what they refer to. I won’t explain how it would work cause I don’t know. I just think technologies behind those buzzwords would be useful.

Probably I should spend the next weekends researching that, and not texting people I haven’t seen for years stupid questions, listening to music, playing games, commenting here and watching pron.

Have you heard the saying about horrible end being better than horror without end?

BTW, about Opera - the newest events with OpenAI and other stuff and Winamp devs not being prosecuted for GPL violations all lead me to one thought.

Are leaked Presto sources really-really illegal to use?

There’s a kind of people who think they don’t need to know an industry to know where it’s heading and where the progress is.

Mobile computers being thinner and replacing buttons with touchscreens are from that kind of delusions.

Now built-in chatbots with voice recognition and synthesis are all the rage. If you remember that “elevator in Scotland” sketch.

Yes, and we also need that for personal computers.

I mean, monochrome easy on the eyes displays being all you need to normally use it. All the fancy stuff on a separate hires color display that may even not be there.

We will have proper computing in our age.

Returning proper controls for most things is just the first step.

Seems similar to some tanks.

I haven’t driven a tank.

That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.

I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.

This always happens, with change you have things you don’t need and things you need, and things you consider and things you don’t consider, and things you had and things you will have. Of these there’s a combination of things you had, you need and you don’t consider. Which means you will not have them, while needing them and not considering them.

Correct good feedback is in that area.

I don’t know Don, I’m sure he’s a fine guy, but I’ve read about all these kinds of rules (EDIT: emerging) much earlier - as early as 1940s, with airplanes and cars and other machines in production and in front lines that people had to operate for long hours under strain and make as few mistakes as possible.

Even USSR, not the Rome of ergonomics, had GOSTs for average ratio of errors an operator makes on a certain machine, machines had to be inside those numbers in tests involving people, or they wouldn’t get adopted into wide usage.

Note how the criterion is defined. Not formalities like the shape of something or the layout conforming to some vague definition, but the results of an actual test on people. Of course, though, there were also a myriad GOSTs as to how the specific controls may look, a GOST for every detail one could use in a device.

Not answering your question, I would expect the main contributing factors to be the same as everywhere.

One man’s innovation is another man’s loss. This is why power distribution affects conditions for innovation - people with power always fight against innovation bringing them loss.

A libertarian society is better than a corporate society then, and a corporate society is better than an authoritarian society.

Then there’s the incentive for innovation - if it brings one power, then one will work for it, and if it doesn’t - less likely.

This is why a libertarian society is worse than a libertarian society minus some patent protection, but better than one where patents are strong and do not reflect inventiveness and are used to gatekeep markets.

This is also why China is more innovative than Russia - in China some efficiency in actually making things makes one more powerful, but in Russia power is purely a matter of capturing it.

Political parties calling for deregulation usually in fact call for token deregulation in some areas and more regulation where their corporate sponsors need it.

Deregulation in patent and IP law is a good thing. The thing is - it’s not the same as most other laws, it’s the fight over definition of property on an enormous amount of value. It was treated without sufficient attention, so now it’s pretty bad.

I think any real change in that would require something similar to a revolution. Everywhere, especially in countries home to corporations built on such legal framework.

There’s the unsolvable problem - to prevent companies doing stupid things.

And there’s the solvable problem - have enough competition so that companies doing stupid things would become or remain small.

Which is why all the stupidity in computer industry in our days is a result of patent laws and protectionism.

I think Sun made mice that didn’t work without their metallic mouse pad, that had some sort of grid on it.

Apple’s problem is in following:

There are industrial designers, fashion designers, managers and engineers.

Apple doesn’t have industrial designers. Only fashion designers pretending.

In a normal company managers consult designers and engineers back and forth, both figuring out some compromise and also asking the other group whether there is a better way.

Not in Apple. Their designers are clearly superior hierarchically to engineers.

And in the end their products are of inferior quality (for that price).

Apple’s idea of how things should look and work, when expressed in words, is absolutely fine! It’s actually wonderful. And perfectly possible, it’s actually the same goal as with industrial ergonomics.

Except they don’t have the process they need to fulfill that. They only have the PR to pretend.

It is convenient when you don’t hit that button accidentally, only by lifting the thing up.

Seems consistent with the Apple justification of “ape users shouldn’t be physically able to do something stupid, then they won’t blame the computer”.

Anything involving a ministry in Russia is not a serious plan. They’ll receive funding, hire a couple of bash script writers, well, maybe a couple of people who’ll write drivers for Elbrus, Baikal or something that’s sort of developed and produced in Russia, but nobody really uses it even in governmental structures.

While how we should view it is shown in “Idiocracy”, Azimov’s “Foundation”, 20-17 BBY era of Star Wars EU. And in fuckload of other fiction showing use of too complex blackbox interconnected technology as Troyan horse by some enemy. And, of course, if some people here have read real science fiction, then in Lem’s books and stories.

OK. I just meant that one can demand that as a sign of respect or something. With a sufficient degree of narcissism.

Marcus Aurelius apparently has found a way

Maybe you are right. I’m thinking about the wrong kind of autistic people right now.

Not really, a good fascist should be always ready to fight for their place in the sun, on all levels, their collective included. There’s no rightful domination there, or right per se, but there is fighting and the resulting domination of the strongest. So if you disobey and lose, you have contributed to fascism to the best of your ability. If you disobey and win, you are the most virtuous fascist. Apathy is the worst crime there. It’s the “jungle” ideology in some sense.

It would be fine if not for the fact that it doesn’t contribute anything to the human, just describes the basic level and how to succeed there, but there are better levels.

Still I think it’s important to deeply understand fascism and how it’s not all evil, because we must understand why and when it’s in demand. It’s an ideology of chaotic life and violent evolution, and the demand for it arises when more gracious alternatives erode, and nothing around is certain other than one’s will to fight.

Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” is a wonderful book deeply exploring fascist aesthetic, by the way.

The issue with fascist followers (an important word) is that it doesn’t take anything to pretend to be a fascist, while being a submissive slave in fact.

I actually find it funny how if you remove NAP from anarcho-capitalism, it can become both classical fascism and classical anarchism, with the difference being in what people of these ideologies want from the future, not the rules these ideologies impose.