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Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 9/5/2025
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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You need sheep. Or guinea pigs...
I don't understand how ads are now showing up in things people have paid for, like software or cars.
I can't say I've been a fan exactly since vista, but this just seems egregious. Was installing fonts today only to get a notice that the legacy font panel is going to be retired. It's like if libraries suddenly made you read everything in Bog Pront - weird and slow. I know it's on me for not leaving though.
I would but I don't have anyone to look after them when we're away 😀. I am also not sure we actually have enough grass for even one sheep to get by over the summer or winter when the grass stops growing. We could section off a piece, then grow it long and make hay to get through the summer/winter, but at that point I feel like it might be less work to just mow the lawn 😅
I would be interested to jump forward in time 100 years and see where software laws ended up. We are in a period of uncertainty at the moment, with software being so new. Even until say 20 years ago, you would buy software, and it would keep working until you changed something (e.g. installed a new version of Windows). In this way it was similar to say a new toaster, that would work until it didn't. If your toaster died in 6 months then you'd expect a replacement for free so that you could continue making toast. Neither Quake 3 Arena nor your toaster would suddenly change what it did, it was the same from the day you bought it to the day it stopped working, and if this period of time was extensive then you were happy.
Now we have a subscription model, with endless updates so long as you keep paying. You are paying for the software specifically for (say) one month and then it's not yours anymore, next month you will have a new licence for that month where the software might be the same or different.
Then Windows has become the next step. You didn't buy Windows, you bought a laptop that has Windows pre-installed. The licence is therefore between the laptop company and Microsoft. Your personal rights are unclear, because you bought the laptop specifically with Windows installed on it, but you (presumably) signed away all rights to continue to keep the same user experience by continuing to use the product (since someone else installed Windows, presumably you didn't get prompted to accept a licence). You are under this subscription model with changes forced on you but you aren't paying with money.
So now we have a situation where your rights are unclear. Is it enough to say that you agree to whatever they decide to change just because you are using it? At what point can you say the product is not substantively the same as what you purchased? How long are you entitled to keep the product substantively the same, since you are not paying for a subscription but it's a subscription style model. If it were a toaster we would expect it to work the same for an amount of time based in part on how much you paid for it.
It also raises the question of what happens when you buy a toaster that is wifi connected and they change the functions with a software update (or even just shut down the server used for the wifi connectivity, breaking that function even though the toaster otherwise works fine).
Ultimately I think these are things companies get away with now because of their power and because they are testing to see what they can get away with. I don't think this will be settled by new laws, I think the grey areas will be largely be settled by case law as companies are taken to court over these practices. I expect it will get worse and worse until a straw breaks the camel's back and a string of court cases will decide where the dust settles.
Yeah I think you are right, it still has a fair way to enshit before it shakes out.
I think my last computer was the last "toaster" I will get to own until I change platform. Updates were optional and manual, and I owned everything on it outright. I managed to jump through hoops just now to buy a copy of office that isn't subscription-based or infested with AI, but I feel like a dinosaur watching the asteroids falling.
I think we will see sharper bifurcation between the European market and the US/world market, as well.
There are some really crazy overreaches. I notice Adobe is setting its AI to rummage through subscribers' image folders (which is a legal and privacy nightmare for the companies concerned) and sysadmins are complaining about how they have to contact Adobe and go through a lengthy process to make it turn that off.
A few years back I switched to using Linux. I have played with it on and off for 20 years or more, but it has leapt forward in strides recently. For technical people, it's hugely configurable. For non-technical people, I would say we are at the point that it can be used as a daily driver so long as it came pre-installed on your laptop or you know someone who knows how to install an OS. It's the same difficulty as installing Windows, but computers tend to come with Windows installed which puts Linux out of reach of most people.
The only caveat is software - if you specifically need MS Office and the web version won't do, or if you need the Adobe suite etc, then you'll struggle. There are alternatives, but not without their own learning curve. There are also issues if you want to play some online games with certain anticheat software.
But given the average non-technical person uses a laptop only for browsing the internet (in my experience), then I think it's time for technical people to start installing Linux on all their friends' computers 😆
I think this is a good thing for us. As a small market it can be hard to have much sway, but if Europe starts putting their foot down then companies may start to have these two tier things like they do today where TVs in the US record what you say and take screenshots of what you're watching and send what they learn to advertisers, but the same TV sold in Europe doesn't have this (and I assume not in NZ either). By Europe forcing the companies to provide the more private versions, we can make laws that force them to give us the privacy protecting version. If it was us against the world we might have got told to shove it, but they can't ignore the whole EU.
Ever since I got a free trial of Photoshop that then charged me $100US to cancel, I have never wanted to touch their stuff (don't worry, I escalated myself through support tiers until they reversed the charge). I got good* at GIMP instead 😅
* "good" is subjective
I think you're right about the EU. We have them to thank for C cables on everything.
Those are the exact reasons I had to stick with windows. Office was essential at work (much as I like Libre Office it just doesn't quite cut it when you need perfect compatibility) and I used to use photoshop a lot (and Dreamweaver ha ha ha those were the days).
GIMP latest release seems to finally have non destructive editing so I will have to take another look.
Work is another beast. You really need to have your whole workplace on LibreOffice. Microsoft loves to tuck proprietary stuff into things that mess up the compatibility we could have.
Last I checked, still no basic shapes though 😅
For workplaces that constantly deal with documents from other workplaces, even making your own one switch wouldn't work. Microsoft's evil strategy works - it really does have it sewn up unfortunately.
Wait what why does GIMP not have shapes!? Kudos to you for being able to find your way around its GUI. It hurts my brain.
If you want to do a circle, there are multiple ways but e.g. you can use the ellipse selection tool to select a circle area, then select the outside of it (perhaps with the border select option, setting the width you want), then use the fill tool to colour it in 😅
To do it properly, there's a lot of pre-work required. It's listed here: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-layer-types
It's listed simply as "No" 😆, I think this means there is no one actively working on it, but there are people working on the prerequisites.
There was a bit of conversation on Lemmy about it recently: https://lemmy.nz/post/20638412
It's just what I'm familiar with. I struggle with photoshop, I'd rather use GIMP. But it has it's limitations!
Some gems in that conversation.
I used to use that exact same circle method in photoshop back in the day, before I learned how to use shapes and paths! (All my photoshop skills are self taught over the years, but I've used it for a long time, like you have with GIMP).
The idea of "intuitive" in software interface kind of fascinates me. So much of it is cultural or built on the shoulders of years of habit, but it feels so real and objective even though it isn't. I wonder about what it does at the level of synapses etc. Like, do you and I have a tiny piece of differing physiology at this point because of GIMP vs Photoshop?
One of the big things these days is "personas", which is basically sitting down and thinking about all the different people who might use your software. Which might be some guy called Fred who drives trucks doesn't really use a computer very much. It might be some chick called Jessica that has used the software for years and likes the current layout, or it might be Susan who has used photoshop but doesn't like the new subscription model so is looking for another tool.
All these people have very different needs, and you need to make sure it works for them all. They will all have quite different expectations about how things should work. Ideally you'll find people that fit each of your personas and get them to test and give feedback.
Unfortunately when software is made by volunteers, a lot of this side of things can be lost.
That's super interesting; I had never heard of personas in that context but it makes a lot of sense. How do you come up with/discover the personas?
This is probably a defining characteristic of half a generation!
This is a rambling tangent but one of my super weird memories from the late 90s was being asked to a market research focus group where all they did was give us cell phones and sim cards and video us trying to open the backs and insert the sims. It was new tech for most of us at the time and it's really funny to me now how challenging we found it.
You talk to people! Something that's a lot harder for a FOSS project to arrange. User Experience (UX) is a whole job, including interviews with users. And a related job is Service Designer.
"Design thinking" is a good starting point to Google😉
That market research group sounds like the above UX stuff I was talking about!
SIM card swapping is an interesting line of thought. Because you could sell phones with them installed, so problem solved. But if it's hard to do, you might struggle to convert customers from a competitor. But at the same time, it might help prevent your customers leaving.
Do you know what they were trying to learn?
That sounds like a really interesting field. I just realised there are Silicon Valley scenes that are about this as well...
Not really but it took ages and paid better than most. We had to read a set of written instructions so I think they were testing those, because everyone got given the same model of phones and afterwards we had to talk about how we found the instructions and how easy was it. The phones had those annoying little metal gates in them that some candybars used to have. I remember being completely weirded out by it.
Oh I haven't watched Silicon Valley, is it good?
I am struggling to follow, what are the little metal gates in candy bars? I have a bad memory 😅