This is how the world ends
This is how the world ends
This is how the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a big popup you can't close that's asking if you'd like to become a premium member.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I wouldn't be upset if it wasn't bullshit every. damn. time.
Like sure, when Linkwarden auto-tags my bookmarks, that's fine. Who cares if it uses an LLM under the hood.
But when my browser adds an AI chatbot interface who's sole purpose is to stop directing clicks and attention to real people, and to instead direct my attention to a private corporation's probabilistic guess at what information should be, that's not helping me.
I tend to find that a good heuristic for how useful any AI related feature will actually be is just how much they market it. The more they claim it will help you, the more likely it is to be crap. Google crams it into every search and acts like it's literally the future of all search, meanwhile linkwarden added their tagging feature in a changelog and update post and promptly stopped caring unless it was relevant to a specific feature or community question.
Guess which one is more useful to me. I'm sure it's really difficult to tell.
Duckduck go has been completely fucked by this.
Look up jessie combs (yes, yes i know, sic) and then click on image search.
I had no idea Diddy broke running records. That's cray.
Huh? All I see pics of there are the Combs twins whose mom died of pneumonia while being completely healthy according to her other ex
Google crams it into every search and acts like it’s literally the future of all search
I'm genuinely dreading the day that Google takes away the search results and just replies with the AI prompt.
I know it's on the horizon, as soon as they can figure out how to get ad revenue from it properly.
Don't worry, you just have to wait for them to take what they already did and switch it to the default.
I'm sure it won't be long now 😔
Edit: As for revenue, considering one of their examples was how it could book tickets for you at sporting events, I have a feeling this might just shift the internet from more of an ad-based business model to a referral/commission-based one instead.
Ugh. Deeply depressing.
I have found it easier to find good search results for more complex queries using Gemini. Google search quality has declined significantly over the last decade.
In Firefox that "AI chatbot interface" is basically just a bookmark in a sidebar, when I last checked it out
The only "nice indie software" is Free Software. Everything else is looking to abuse and exploit you as soon as you let your guard down, or will be eventually when it sells out to vulture capitalists.
Oh no, people want to be paid for their work, what a horror
people want to be paid for their work
There's multiple flavors of this, unfortunately.
Love to contribute money to a project I support.
Hate to have my favorite software suite acquired by a Big Tech company that pays some oversees software sweatshop to shove pop-ups in my face trying to sell me glitter icons.
Yeah but you don't contribute tens of thousands every year so if you're one of 3 contributors on a project so big it takes 100 hours of work a week to develop and maintain, that's not enough. The sad part is nearly nobody donates. And those who do, often do it one-off, not monthly. I'm guilty too. Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don't have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.
you don’t contribute tens of thousands every year
Really depends on the business model. If it's business software, I very well might because it's cheaper to finance hours for improvements than to commission custom code from third parties. I've worked at a number of companies that operate this way - letting the lead spenders define future work while the small fries just take what's on offer.
Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.
Sure. It's far from a perfect system. But public financing of projects and official lines of communication can improve this significantly.
Universities are great at churning out FOSS applications for this reason. A lot of the mainline software has derivative applications. So you'll get a library that's great at file management/transfer used for purely academic work and financed by a public grant to that end. But then you've got people picking up the library updates on Git and applying them to all sorts of tangential projects without needing to go out of pocket to finance it.
They might contribute bug reports and the occasional feature improvement (or just fork and let the OG authors pick up improvements as they please). But they aren't on the hook for thousands of dollars to use something that is just a useful improvement to existing technology.
Getting paid for your work isn't necessarily antithetical to developing free software. Free means free as in cost and freedom for the end user, not as in free of compensation to the developer(s).
For example, Blender is free software, yet the Blender foundation's Development Fund brings in about a quarter million dollars monthly in donations to fund the actual development of the project.
I will say though, I certainly don't agree with the original point that "the only 'nice indie software' is free software." There are great indie projects that you can pay for, that still aren't exploitative, just as there are indie and corporate projects that are exploitative. I just think there's a higher likelihood of something funded through personal care and goodwill from a developer, or user choice (e.g. donations) being good to the end user, rather than force (e.g. keep paying us monthly or you can no longer open your project files)
Blender makes most of it off corporate donors, don't they? They procide value to those corporations and they want a say in what gets built next.
Build something for the common man and you don't get 20 Fortune 500 companies sponsoring you. Though some very niche projects do still get very passionate supporters. Bevy engine has been able to hire full time people like Alice who was already working on it nearly full time before she even got hired.
They make the majority (about 47% from largest corporate donors, another 10% from other corporate donors), but they make the remaining amounts from individuals:
- Individuals (17% or about 440k euros/year)
- Blender Market (6% or about 149k euros/yr)
- Misc. Large Donations (10% or about 250k euros/yr)
- Generic Small Donations (10% or about 260k euros/yr)
That's over 800k euros/yr not from corporations. They currently spend around 2.5m/yr on all costs, but some of that is for things like grants that they don't necessarily have to give out, but sure, it doesn't cover all of it, but I'm sure Blender could theoretically operate just at a smaller scale if all corporate donations entirely pulled out.
I'm not saying this funding model works for every project out there, but it does show that software that's free for the end user can still be funded without coercion.
On top of that, it's not necessarily bad for a project to have corporations funding it. Let's say Adobe goes the Blender route and runs entirely off donations. How many corporations that rely on them for creative work would donate? Probably enough to keep them afloat.
But would that be worse than when every smaller individual had to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the same software, while Adobe did everything they could to charge them more, and even make cancelling your subscription cost a fee? I doubt it.
It's not necessarily perfect, but it's still much better.
People want the means to survive, grow and live in comfort. Just because we live in a capitalist dystopia does not mean the current requirement to live is what we want.
If you have all of those and somehow cant find a passion that creates value i rather have you sit at home and do nothing because i have no expectation the work will be of any quality.
Of course you wouldn’t sit at home and do nothing because that would be boring and people with the means to be mentally and physically healthy expect more of themselves.
Point to the “dirty” jobs like swiping the streets and i’ll point to the volunteers doing a much better job keeping things clean then the career people. Passion and the inherent desire to make things better is everything.
All the important cyber security stuff is build on free software nowadays, because it is superior software in every possible way you can measure.
Of course it's not what we want, I'd also like to have the luxury of working as much as I want to, on what I want to. However, a lot of people, including software engineers who create said "indie software", need to put food on their table. There are so many open source devs who are struggling under a heavy workload for very little money in donations. It's the entire reason for the xz backdoor that could've affected a lot of Linux machines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm writing this comment on my desktop running KDE Plasma. I love me some good FOSS. I've occasionally made contributions too. But until I'm financially independent, I'm afraid that most of the software I create is going to have to earn me money.
There's also a difference between small shops working on things they're passionate about, versus companies like Google and Microsoft, where you work for ONLY the paycheck. As a car enthusiast, allow me to introduce VCDS: A 3rd party diagnostics application for most VAG vehicles (VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda are all supported and if you buy the top tier license, you also get support for some Lamborghinis). The original author, Uwe Ross, has been working on it for over two decades now, it must've been a passion project in the beginning at least. It has a bare-bones UI, but it works great and you get excellent first party support on the forums. It costs money, but it's excellent software, hasn't been enshittified via ads or anything, and you get a license when you purchase their cable or wireless OBD dongle. By now he probably doesn't need the money anymore, but nowadays he's got employees working on it as well and they also need to put food on their tables.
We need to collectively refer to AI as Sparkle from now on.
Tech glitter. Gets everywhere and you can’t get rid of it.
I've used it only once... To create a pregnant couch... Some regrets.
JD? That you?
Found it, was making fun of him in that conversation actually rofl
Don't you mean "rag-rets?"
NO RUG-RETS
Glittertech
That's already a rimworld mod.
"I am disrespectful to accuracy!"
Based on these comments, I question everyone’s commitment to SparkleMotion.