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.

His followers know he’ll deliberately cause instability, that’s what they want.

OK, will watch

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Not sure this is the case with FDA.

We’ll see. Roadkill for snack is fine when meat’s cooked correctly, unless it’s a roadkill near Chernobyl.

But it’s understandable not to trust the guy who had part of his brain eaten by a parasite to cook meat correctly.

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.

While RFK Jr is the same worm man, let’s please remember all the cries about drugs being expensive and regulators stifling competition there, and that (from what I’ve read, I’ve never been to US) what can be put into food is already not very well regulated in your country.

Those agencies are problematic. Just like actions aimed at something good may have negative side effects, often outweighing the effect in the intended direction, similarly it is here.

And after typing the previous I’ve read the article and that’s what he’s saying, mentioning Canada as the good example. Unfortunately by analogy this would mean that for drug regulation he’d go the same way, only with his antivaxxer views. Also talking about kids being healthier is cringe.

Probably because he’s smarter.

Without photos then.

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

The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

Yes! Thank you.

Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.

It’s a pendulum.

People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.

And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.

Tribalism leads to degeneracy.

Well, maybe US-produced porn will stop being glossy garbage for a difference.

Left wing, right wing, the people, the elites - forget all that.

There’s only taking responsibility and giving it to someone else.

We have to nuke something

but Stalin shortly implemented bans on the Ukrainian language in education, government, and industry, as it was deemed “counterrevolutionary”.

Any sources for that?

I dunno, try to imagine useful tech manuals in Pennsylvanian Dutch. Similarly there would be no need to specifically ban Ukrainian.

Things I’ve said are factually true.

Truth can’t be whitewashing.

OK, so you live in Ukraine. This gives us what?

I am Ukrainian. So let’s just say you won’t convince me of the uncle Stalin coming to liberate eastern Europe BS narrative. I would you and your family to try and speak Ukrainian in the occupied territories.

Ukrainian language was not in any way suppressed in the USSR at any point. My grandmother happens to be from Ukraine.

It was less prestigious, because of technical education being given in Russian and the “distribution” system after university, where graduates were being directed to workplaces all over the union.

If you mean these days, I don’t think there’s been a vote on invading Ukraine.

A strong majority of russian are genocidal imperialists. Not because of any inherent qualities, it’s the choices they make.

Well, since you’ve pulled some Ukrainian roots for your position, I’ll say that I’m Armenian and those Ukrainians I’ve met who’d open their mouth on Artsakh did not lead me to believe that Ukrainians make better choices (and they can stick whatever they call “international law” where sun don’t shine, if that set of rules in their opinion makes a land consistently Armenian since before Slavs made it into written history and till now to be Azeri, because in USSR someone decided so and some bastards “recognized” it as such).

I will just add that the russians should take ownership of the outcomes in their history (not just 1996 election, but more generally). They are not children and they need to take responsibility without looking for scapegoats as they always do.

Do you do the same in full for every identity you apply to yourself? If not, then why are you giving advice to Russians?

The 2000 and 2004 elections in russia are generally considered free and fair (2004 perhaps less so, but I digress). That didn’t really have an impact later on.

I meant 1996. Wide protests, the first election in independent Russia widely put in doubt, but in the West - lots of enthusiasm that the bad thing didn’t happen and those communists didn’t win.

even their much fetishized celebration of WW2 victory is a ruse as the USSR initially sided with the Nazis to split up Europe

I disagree. (Sorry for the very long elaboration that follows, but it’s needed, I think. Stalin’s USSR wasn’t nice, but what you said is usually part of the narrative most of which is plainly not true.)

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a temporary (and very abrupt) change of policy and not what some common narratives make it seem. Soviet propaganda almost since 20s and till that short period actually portrayed Germans in some form as the main potential enemy.

Those Baltic countries USSR swallowed were typical fascist regimes, just small. Military aggression is not nice, but the narrative people from the Baltics love now, about how USSR was “worse than the Nazis” - well, very few Baltic Jews survived, I guess that makes their position consistent with reality, but doesn’t sell it very well to me.

Parts of Poland annexed were Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, and Wilno which is now part of Lithuania. And no, Polish Republic of that time wasn’t very minority-friendly. Again, not as clear-cut. There Soviet troops were really welcomed in 1939.

Even the Winter War was preceded by repeated offers of similar or bigger amount of territory given to Finland by USSR in exchange for what it asked, and what it asked was the really necessary territory to make Leningrad defensible from the Finnish side. It was not as barbaric and aggressive as the common narratives say as well. Karl Gustav Mannerheim, if you know who that is, not only supported accepting the deal, but was in favor of some concessions more than the minimum that USSR demanded. And after the war, forcing its victory, USSR took no more than that.

And Soviet Union did pay the biggest human cost of those fighting in Europe.

The fetish is disgusting, of course, and also anachronistic - there were no regular parades initially in celebration of that war ending, only those on November 7, and of course nobody was enthusiastic about an opportunity to “repeat it”. It was a hungry ruined country with disabled veterans in poverty, gangs of orphans, years of darkness and despair, one can say. The years between end of the war and Stalin’s death are not really remembered for anything other than that.

Actually for all the Cold War the USSR’s propaganda position was that it wants only peace and united humanity, and the people who want to “repeat” something are on the other side. I’d say that during the first Indochina war and even later this was, well, true.

Or send nukes from the Moon to silence the Internet, it was a mistake

Being a continuation of England more or less, you’ve got more. Especially since those democratic traditions were pretty English in the beginning.