(and Japanese)

It’s been 5 years. I don’t think they’re going to change the license to allow distributions to distribute MongoDB more easily.

We should actively be against corporate leeching.

In a world without free software, Amazon will build their own proprietary software for servers that is better than everyone else’s, and will be in the same position. At least with Redis, multiple employees of AWS were core maintainers for Redis. It isn’t like Amazon didn’t contribute anything back. Now that it’s non-free, they’ll just fork it. Again.

All this really accomplishes is making licensing a headache for everybody, which is the main reason people and organizations use free software.

I think free software developers should be able to make money from their software, and money from working on their software. I also think everyone else should be able to, too.

To put it another way, open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.

Additionally, Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic. Redis doesn’t belong to Redis, either.

Not only companies: https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/OY2DLNWTZOBPAHFE5FSV4Q6AIWGZO6KV/?noscript

It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

I somehow missed A YEAR OF SPRINGS, which is a fantastic visual novel by npckc. It’s discounted by 29%.

I must admit I only looked at the pictures, looked at the specs, and looked at the reviews. I didn’t read the description at all before I posted this. After reading it, I can see how it could be seen as exploitative:

“Ms.Izuho…What does it feel like to be in love?” Konami Izuho was suddenly kissed during her teaching training internship by a student, Ema Serizawa, when they were alone in the classroom.

Konami later found out that this student happened to be the popular illustrator “Ema”, of whom she was a huge fan. On top of that, Ema would soon ask her, “can you help me with my drawings?”

Although Konami thought she would get to look at the new works of her favorite illustrator, what Ema asked from her was quite different. Kissing, bathing together, and sleeping in the same bed were just some of Ema’s requests that left Konami’s heart pounding.

“Huh? Help…means k-kissing or sleeping together?”

Konami’s encounters with Ema confused her and made her go back and forth between feelings of admiration and love. Now, the curtain will be raised on this Romantic Drama.

I can’t find any mention of ages, but it seems to be set in a high school, so one of the characters, in the best case, is 18 years old. The student teacher is probably somewhere between 19-21 years old. It’s common for visual novels to be set in high school and feature sex scenes between teenagers (though there are plenty of great VNs that aren’t), but there is a power imbalance here not usually seen in those games, even if the age gap is small.

I second Neo by saying that if you have an issue with the content of the game, you should contact GOG about it. MangaGamer and itch.io also carry this game. For now, I’ve marked the post as NSFW, as the GOG page does have some suggestive pictures.

I can hope…

👀 An easy way to buy Fate in Japanese, and not tied to the Switch like the Tsukihime remake.

I’ll add it to my wishlist once it gets a page on Steam. Hopefully it’s cheaper than WITCH ON THE HOLY NIGHT…

Fossify Messages has a release on Github too.

PHP 8.0 is no longer supported so I hope they update the “really, really old technology” to at least PHP 8.1 today.

Most likely. This blog was written in February 2022; support for PHP 8.0 was only dropped in November 2023.

I was half-asleep when I wrote this, lol. Bitbucket dropped Mercurial recently, too. Sourcehut is the only other code forge I know of that supports hg which I really love. Kind of sets a high bar for contributions, but not being vendor locked in is a bonus. And I wish they’d more tightly integrate the subdomains…

I thought Github only supported git, too. Did it support Mercury at some point? I assume this is the last of other VCS support in Github.

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

You’re not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn’t realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.

Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don’t want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don’t think I’m contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That’s the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

It’s worth mentioning that Android Auto doesn’t work on GrapheneOS due to the privileged access it requires, and will not support it unless it is re-architected. Which phones were you thinking of when you said “compatible”?

This is the kind of high-quality technical discussion I don’t understand a word of that rarely surfaced on reddit.

It seems like this issue is finally, actually fixed with the new driver release.

I haven’t had a chance to try it out but the responses on the thread look promising.

Edit: Ah, I see you’ve already gotten the news. Well, good to hear.