Let's get the band back together

[Kintaro]

I have begun boycotting a lot more than MS, in any productive area of my life. Though, this has expanded to my personal life and I have stopped using Facebook. The latter, is much worse and is a much more severe imbalance of power than anything anyone here could have imagined two decades ago. There is a lot of other software companies that are misleading about security and cryptographic integrity, and are proprietary and lack any kind of actual peer review. You can add Telegram, Whatsapp, WeChat, Discord, and many other things to this list along with dozens of VPN providers. There are a lot of companies in the VPN space that offer worthless features, and make use of the Tor network in worthless ways just so they can put Tor's logo on their products.

I think this forum should move to a wider focus on every form of this insidious soyware! You get a lot of young people with poisoned minds, whoms semantics have been manipulated by trademarks (like Discord servers actually being their servers to them and such) to brainwash them. It is time a stand is made and soyware producers are given notice for their bullshit. I think we should be doing a mass campaign of complaints to whatever part of your jurisdictions government handle false advertising and deceptive trading because the bullshit really is everywhere these days.

Does anyone want to get the band back together and join me on this?

[Refalm]

I also don't like soyware that much.

Modern development is like:
* Let's make use we excessively track users' every movement
* Do as many calculations client side as you can to save on hosting costs
* No emphasis on efficient coding, just copy/paste stuff from StackOverflow and ChatGPT, if it works, then it's fine
* More code = good code monkey
* Better have too many packages than too few
* Annoy people with newsletter signups because they're too stupid to not sign up
* Borderline scam people with “hurry up fucker, or this thing you wanted is gone or more expensive” psychological trickery

[Kintaro]

An amusing site on this subject is programming motherfucker, I own some of their merch.

The same deceptive bullshit is driven to down end users and marketed in similar ways, for example GTA V Online has been reverse engineered and is proven to do things terribly starting up so the loading screen is there a long time, making the game appear bigger. It reminds me of shit in QBASIC when I was 12, but I was more intentionally creating things that look like hacker movie props with lots of sleep statements and stuff.

In the VPN world beyond an encrypted VPN there is often a lot of redundant and useless features, that just add things to product descriptions that an idiot can Google and sound high tech. At the same time in the VPN world, a massive part of the public miss the part that they are just having an ISP with extra steps.

I also really hate Docker, find me one thing I can't easily remove from Docker and run without it, well... if I have time. "It only runs on my machine, I'll just ship my machine."

All of the scams you mentioned in development, or what I am saying about marketing revolve around red herrings, shifting definitions, and generally using semantics like a control freak wife beater who screams drunk all day. It is pretty sad, overall.

I bet a lot of boomers who get scammed hard got scammed and phished inside some premium VPN product that probably costs 9 times more than the data they use on it.

The thing with a lot of things is to carry as much tech bling as possible into it, products are given far more features than are useful or serve anything in their use cases, which gets to that bit there "Better have too many packages than too few" because when you do that you get to tell novices it has all these features. It doesn't mean they will know which are redundant or useless to them.