ambitiousslab

I can highly recommend Mythic Beasts (UK).

There is no upsell or variable pricing and they make money by charging a flat rate on top of the cost from their supplier. See this blog post for more info

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source - public money, public code! The only way to take down these giant US companies is to work together, and the most effective way to work together is to release everything in the open in such a way that anyone can build on top of it.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US. It wouldn't increase productivity in the long run, it would instead substitute dependency on a few US companies for a few EU companies.

But, if they invest in open source software, it could spur innovation not only in the companies that are directly funded, but also thousands of other companies throughout the EU that would now have common infrastructure that they can build on top of.

That's good news, in my opinion. If they're allowed to just completely disregard copyright when training, then I should be able to completely disregard any attempted copyright on the output too.

Another benefit to postmarketOS is that it runs (close to) mainline linux.

In the android world, vendors fork linux, put their own (often badly written) patches on top to make the device work, and then stop maintaining this fork after a few years.

postmarketOS carries as minimal patches as possible and actively works to mainline what remains. This makes the "10 year support" goal very achievable, as once a device has mainline support, it will get updates as long as the linux kernel itself is maintained.

By making everything standard and relying on the upstream kernel and linux stack as a whole, any improvements made to phones also benefit laptop and PC users, and vice versa. So, we have one big platform that can support any kind of device, sharing resources so everyone benefits.

I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).

That said, I'm sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.

This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror's browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari (and not just their engines) may have been free software today. Or, at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started.

That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.

I made a comment about this on another thread, see this comment.

You can do this using JMP Chat, which bridges phone numbers to XMPP. Unfortunately, it's USA and Canada only, for now.

Alternatively, you can use a "SIP Trunk Provider". For instance, in the UK, Andrews and Arnold offers this service. You can then connect any compatible SIP client (e.g. Gnome Calls).

I'd prefer having both analogue and digital options for things, but I'm fine with requiring technology, as long as open standards are used throughout. That is the only way to ensure equal and non-discriminatory access.

You should never have to use any particular piece of software, or be forced to sign a terms of service, to go about your daily life. Requiring an app for everything only entrenches iOS and Android, and most apps really don't cater well for people with disabilities or other requirements.

Meanwhile, open standards allow a variety of software to be built that can cater for everyone's needs.

I've used Mobian stable and pmOS stable on both the Librem 5 and PinePhone Pro.

I also can't give in an-depth comparison, but apart from the obvious (differences in available packages, versions and OpenRC vs systemd), I found them basically identical. Both had difficulty keeping the modem connected for more than an hour at a time, but otherwise did everything I expected (wifi, text messages, mobile networks, adaptaive apps, cameras, music/podcasts, etc).

For now, I'm sticking with pmOS, as, for the current stable version, Mobian doesn't offer prebuilt Librem 5 images with full disk encryption support (I can't remember why - this is specific to the device, and I'm hoping it will be fixed in the next release).

This affects me a lot day to day. I have a phone, but it runs postmarketOS, not iOS or Android. It really shows me the importance of open standards. I feel that every business should be required to support open standards for each of the services they offer.

For me, buying train tickets used to be ok, but is getting harder now. Some train operators are really pushing you to use their app now, and getting rid of the option to download a PDF. It really frustrates me: it's not like it costs them more to offer PDF download - if anything, it's much cheaper to offer that functionality than to build and maintain an app for iOS and Android.

Back when I had an Android phone, I used Monzo, and it was so easy to send money to friends, set up standing orders etc. I wish they offered a proper web interface. Now, I use Natwest's online banking, and it's a real pain - I use the card reader to authenticate, then the website logs me out seemingly every 2 mins of inactivity. Some features, like pre-notifying that you'll be travelling abroad, are only available on the app. I only see this trend continuing.

The concert tickets example in the article is insane to me. I can't think of a use case that is better suited for PDFs, and that's what we've been doing for the last 10+ years without any issues. It really is user hostile and excludes people on the edges of society who don't fit, for whatever reason, with what the 80-90% do.

Yes, me too! But, only if I have the autonomy to improve things where I can. Otherwise, I just find it demotivating

I agree, it's a great UI in terms of speed and no JS, but it's not super intuitive and not helped by the way it's been split into modules.

Basically, each subdomain (git.sr.ht, todo.sr.ht etc) doesn't link to the others - the only one that links everywhere is the root "sr.ht". You can think of sr.ht as a "hub" that links to the others. So - to take an example:

• You can open "tickets" (todo.sr.ht) from https://sr.ht/~delthas/senpai/
• But - if you click on "source" (git.sr.ht), the references to the other pages anymore (including back to the hub)

So, in your case, if you replace git.sr.ht with just sr.ht in the URL, it should take you back to the "hub" for that project. Then, if the tickets feature is enabled, you should see a link to "tickets" there.