The hell is with all these comments?

Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they’ve actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.

It’s got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no “net good”, only perfection and villains to be spat on.

You don’t have to post to LinkedIn to have your data on it. Unfortunately it’s almost a prerequisite to any serious job seeking in many fields.

The point is the client presumably paid for it for their users, who are their customers, but they have no idea what those users want.

Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That’s getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I’m the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

I was gonna say, clients aren’t the only ones.

Feels like a lot of developers and especially UX designers have a bad habit of disappearing up their own asshole nowadays.

That’s generally what you here from people who have basic use cases and simply can’t fathom other people may want or need different things from their devices.

Which is fine, they don’t have to understand. If stock is good enough for them nowadays, more power to them. What I’m sick of is the condescension. This bizarre thing where they somehow think a person wanting control over a device they paid for is worthy of derision or shame, because they don’t personally so the point.

It’s like someone only checking their email on their laptop laughing at someone using a desktop for heavier work.

Shit like this is why I can’t abide GrapheneOS or their cheerleaders.

It’s legitimately the same attitude as Google itself. This parental, condescending tone, acting as if wanting freedom to control their own devices is somehow irrational. Continuing to push this toxic idea that handcuffs are the only way to protect users. Like a sysadmin at a workplace, but without the justifiable reasons.

What a weird thing to talk about out loud. That feels like a joke you’d make at Thanksgiving, not publicly in the middle of a vice presidential campaign.

I called it pop when I was a kid, then I grew up. I don’t call it soda though. Now I just call it whatever is actually in the can.

Disappointed because lack of butt stuff, or because cornhole is a really boring game?

I’d believe either.

Is that real? That legitimately sounds like an Onion article itself.

People seriously need to start pushing back on the word “secure” being used as a blanket excuse for every restriction.

It feels like every time that word is used, no one is willing to call out the fact that user freedom is equally as important and it’s a lazy, disrespectful developer who won’t take that into account by finding ways to maintain both.

You’re talking about laws. They’re talking about the IRS.

The IRS doesn’t make the laws. They’re an agency like any other, and a very important one.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don’t. This is like a child’s understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.

Strictly speaking, tax filling software, even the free ones, have simplified it all so much that for people who have a single source of income from work and not a lot of tax forms to collect (most Americans), it’s pretty trivial. Maybe 30-60 minutes, once a year.

Less than ideal but far from the grueling, soul sucking work I was told would plague my adult life when I was a kid.

That’s why the IRS is finally doing their own online filling system. No more making Americans shell out for software, so everyone gets a nice, simple tax season.

That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.

The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

The fact that an entire generation thinks the only proper way to use software is through an app store is absolutely terrible.

Did you turn off Play Protect?

And yeah, when we set these barcode scanners up, unfortunately it made me appreciate Intune’s Android management tools. I despise Microsoft and Google, but Microsoft won that round of “Who do I hate the least right now?”

At this point, even that would be preferable.

Your right, any open platform will be bastardized eventually, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a need for “resets”.

There is no perfect platform for escaping it, because the market forces will always adapt and assimilate. The only true escape is to keep moving.

That’s why it’s important for users to be hermit crabs, and move to the next thing, no matter how janky, because they will at least be able to influence it positively and have a relatively open platform for a number of years. Then the cycle repeats.

If propping up Linux phones will get us the open platform we need, even if only temporarily, we should do it.