>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.
For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.
Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I bought before streaming services was a thing or the new dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.
I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.
I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
Is it though? If it were nothing artists might be in a better negotiating position to demand something. But now instead of demanding payment, they are asking for a raise instead.
Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?
I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich
Yes so this is the future you're speaking of. A complete separation between client and server, and none of the current bs enshitified monopolies. Just need to wait a few years tm.
I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.
In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.
Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).
And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.
What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?
I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.
No we are not, and a brief look at the history of the planet will show that. We're driving most of the changes today, but the planet itself also changes on it's own (tectonic shifts, for one), as do extra-planetary factors (solar cycles), and both of these impact our upper atmosphere.
From the article, there's significant uncertainty what's driving the currently measured effect:
> Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes.
> The team also found that 80% of the overall reflectivity changes in these regions resulted from shrinking clouds, rather than darker, less reflective ones, which could be caused by a drop in pollution. For Tselioudis, this clearly indicates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, not pollution reductions, are driving the trend.
> But Loeb, who leads work on the set of NASA satellite instruments called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, which tracks the energy imbalance, thinks pollution declines may be playing an important role in the cloud changes, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “The observations are telling us something is definitely changing,” he says. “But it’s a complicated soup of processes.”
To your point, however, we do appear to be the only ones capable of intentionally modifying the environment, so if anybody's going to understand and address this, it'll be us.
I don't necessarily agree with GP's comment but they do have a valid point.
> We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
Everybody wants to solve the problem with technology. What if, the solution is just plain old hard work like planting trees, conservation, better recycling, better laws that help in saving ecosystem. But who would do that. So let's keep on creating problems with technology and then solve them with more technology.
Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes.
The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).
Yes, what do you mean? The biggest climate effect at the moment is human carbon use, which is changing weather patterns, and the cause of the cloud shrinkage is changing weather patterns => cloud shrinkage is driven, to some degree (I would guess strongly, but let's be careful, so some degree) by human carbon extraction.
I build simple applications for personal use like issue tracker, day planner, etc,. By default if you ask Claude it will generate React for frontend but I ask it to use HTML/CSS/JS instead. Because as a backend developer that makes sense to me. I find it hard to read the react code and want to avoid having dependency on npm.
It's surprising how well the core technology works without fancy front end frameworks. Claude does most of the grunt work related to CSS/JS allowing me to focus on more interesting things. I only have to do few minor changes here and there which I am happy to do.
Yes, 100% this. I’ve seen this idea before somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people started to basically develop more of their own software from first principles like this.
I was doing it today to create a gantt chart from mermaid.
I’ve built other applications inside react components as react seems relatively stable - I don’t really care about react though, only that it has a lot of training data for it.
Yeah it's surprising how easy many things really are. I asked Claude to spice up another vanilla JS/HTML app with a Material UI like touch ripple effect and... it simply did.
Was just around 100 lines of CSS/JS. No need to rewrite everything.
Of course it works without frontend frameworks, but if you develop a frontend application using plain JS your core problem is still the one frameworks solve: syncing your application state with the DOM.
At first you can do this manually using selectors, but a complex app will need to be capable of doing this to hundreds of elements whenever state changes. At that point you will build some kind of abstraction because manually updating every element would be insanity. That abstraction might be a simple virtual DOM, and now you are halfway to building your own React.
To be fair, OP never said this was necessarily related directly to the article.
I’ll often post loosely related tangents like this because I would enjoy discussing the tangent with the HN crowd, but there’s often not a better opportunity to discuss it, so why not while we’re sort of on the topic anyway.
Ack that I don’t think it makes sense to discuss not even remotely related topics. But as long as it’s in the ballpark and it’s not going against other guidelines and leads to interesting discussion, I think it’s fine.
Indeed. Furthermore, the fact that there is still a replacement makes the discussion even more pertinent in this case, since OP is arguing for the abolition of any such protocol.
