A side effect of Reddit/Twitter/etc having captured most of the population/eternal September might be that a web directory has become feasible again. Ignore social media, ignore AI, ignore paywalled sites. What's left and high enough quality might be manageable to maintain a directory for.

Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.

Every now and then someone shares a small web link here (Kagi is one aggregator). It’s like survivors picking up the shards of civilization after the apocalypse. Of course such a project can remain viable and useful as long as it remains niche, which is virtually guaranteed as long as there’s no money in it.

It’s incredible how too much money corrupts everything it touches.

Some of my best work has been done as a labor of love. I do have the vague impression that we as a society have taken a wrong turn in selling the sacred. I am not in favor of collapsing society down to hippie communes or anything, but it does seem to me that we told better stories back when stories were freer.

I sometimes imagine gathering up some number of like-minded electrical and software engineers, and founding some sort of monastary in which everyone was fed and taken care of and built the best technology they could, as a gift to humanity. I do wonder if the day's robber barons would find a way to shut us down, of course, but I still remember a bright and optimistic time when technology was made to serve people, not to oppress them, and it seems to me like a bright expression of human spirit that oughtn't to have been sold.

Law enforcement, from the same industry that brought you targeted ads recommending refrigerators because you just bought a refrigerator.

They want fingerprinting to work for everyone because the more effective it is, the higher the value of the ad inventory they sell.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.

Many are saying the US just did.

Trading practice of primary skills for indirect skills like AI is like a writer deciding they should stop writing directly and get really good at Microsoft Word.

That's why I write my own assembly language. Compilers just atrophy your skills!

The job that a compiler does is just a boring mechanical process, which makes it well-suited for a computer to replace. Also, I can use a compiler for free without relying on an evil company.

Personally I just accept that all technologies are great and must be embraced! This way I do not have to think about ethics and potential implications for society.

If McDonald's food was featured in sci fi movies about being able to end humanity through war, that's when this would apply and they'd cultivate fear of that nonsense to distract from their food being shitty and overpriced and unhealthy.

There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading.

In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this.

And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.

From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.

I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.

You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.

Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.

To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.

With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.

We complain when good sites are acquired and shut down, but maybe it's even worse when they're acquired and kept running in a shitty state like IMDB or Twitter. Big enough to stave off competition and prevent progress.

Until recently IMDB worked without javascript even. It's the onslaught from AI crawlers that is driving the current enshittification of the web. It's really accelerated in the last six months.