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Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft).

Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft). If it wasn't for GDPR, most of these companies wouldn't even offer exports of your data.

henvic 6y ago
GDPR was born yesterday, and government intervention on such private matters can really cause a disaster. You want to have control over your data, and just to cite one case, Apple has started embracing it a while ago ahead of GDPR laws. Perhaps because it is a hardware company it has more incentives (like, it could very well create something akin to a 'family vault' that would be a fancy digital vault that you could buy and store your family data on it, and it would survive even fires - just thinking some crazy ideas, so don't judge me too much). I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect sooner if it were not by GDPR. One thing that has to change in my opinion is the idea of 'exporting out'. People should be using such services to import in what they have to share with others, instead of blindly relying on them to access remotely.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Unfortunately in the real world, noone writes about the Honeywell basic-ass wifi AC controller but instead jizzes themselves over the Google Nest "with AI" which I will find time to write an extension that replaces "with AI" with "with if statements" sometime this century.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  It's pretty common for up-an-coming players in a market to push for interoperability and then once they have dominance to shut it down. This happening is not proof that GDPR isn't needed as such measures only cover a small fraction of the market at any given time.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  >I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect sooner if it were not by GDPR. Considering how many business practices across the board aren't very consumer friendly and are seemingly growing ever more anti-competitive in nature while skirting antitrust definitions in grey areas, I'm personally not nearly so sure we can rely on "market forces" to protect anything but the business in question. In fact, the only thing I've seen market forces achieve is self-preservation and interest which may or may not align with the rest of what society wants or needs.
  - Proven 6y ago
    Apple doesn't have a relationship with the rest of society and doesn't need to cater to it. It has a relationship with its customers and each side can exit the relationship. That's much preferred to the GDPR nonsense and associated costs. If that doesn't suit you, don't use Apple.
ramraj07 6y ago
Netflix is always the perfect example against this weird logic. They commited to AWS, and stuck with it even after Amazon itself is one of their prime competitors. They clearly decided that infra and devops is not their core competency and have absolved themselves of that responsibility and are ready to pay a premium for it. On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in their back about their Emacs setup being able to run a web server from a raspberry Pi. We're at a place where it's fairly counter intuitive to continue arguing against cloud providers. I doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business (and even then it should be recoverable). The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app. But thars more about your ability to recruit disciplines engineers, no point blaming it on the cloud. Look at Imgur. For the most part bootstrapped, scales extremely well, and if I'm not wrong, is very frugal, also runs off AWS.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business Were you asleep when S3 East failed to the point that half of the internet was offline or did you just not get a notification? https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ > The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app The public cloud has never been recession tested and these next few years may be the only way to do it. The model works as long as there are people willing to pay for Amazon and Azure will raise prices if the base load drops below a certain point.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Houses catch fire/flood/tornado too. The question is overall SLI, and multihoming, not has there ever been an outage.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And that half of the internet decided that it wasn’t worth it to have multi region redundancy. I’m not saying that was a bad decision. It all depends on how much they would lose in an outage vs. cost.
scarface74 6y ago
And now with GDPR I have an annoying “we use cookies” splash page every time I visit a web page. Win???
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Those are not actually compliant with the regulation - it explicitly forbids annoying/confusing/forced consent prompts. There is a problem with the lack of enforcement, but the regulation itself is sane.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    So the end result was that it wasn’t effective. Imagine that, ineffective government regulations with regards to tech. Who would have thought?
    - erinnh 6y ago
      So the end result should be that we dont try?
      - scarface74 6y ago
        More regulation actually increases the barrier of entry to make it even harder for new companies. Well financed established companies are well able to comply. There is a reason that FB always begs for regulation.
        erinnh 6y ago
        If the barrier to entry is "don't be a dick and sell data to whomever you like without telling your customers", it's kinda a good barrier, or not? Regulation isnt a black and white/good or bad thing. It can be either.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Think about a regulation being passed that says if you allow user generated content, you must have a system in place to prevent copyright infringement. Would a startup be able to design such a system? It would give FB and Google an advantage.

henvic 6y ago

GDPR was born yesterday, and government intervention on such private matters can really cause a disaster. You want to have control over your data, and just to cite one case, Apple has started embracing it a while ago ahead of GDPR laws. Perhaps because it is a hardware company it has more incentives (like, it could very well create something akin to a 'family vault' that would be a fancy digital vault that you could buy and store your family data on it, and it would survive even fires - just thinking some crazy ideas, so don't judge me too much). I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect sooner if it were not by GDPR. One thing that has to change in my opinion is the idea of 'exporting out'. People should be using such services to import in what they have to share with others, instead of blindly relying on them to access remotely.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Unfortunately in the real world, noone writes about the Honeywell basic-ass wifi AC controller but instead jizzes themselves over the Google Nest "with AI" which I will find time to write an extension that replaces "with AI" with "with if statements" sometime this century.
marcinzm 6y ago
It's pretty common for up-an-coming players in a market to push for interoperability and then once they have dominance to shut it down. This happening is not proof that GDPR isn't needed as such measures only cover a small fraction of the market at any given time.
Frost1x 6y ago
>I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect sooner if it were not by GDPR. Considering how many business practices across the board aren't very consumer friendly and are seemingly growing ever more anti-competitive in nature while skirting antitrust definitions in grey areas, I'm personally not nearly so sure we can rely on "market forces" to protect anything but the business in question. In fact, the only thing I've seen market forces achieve is self-preservation and interest which may or may not align with the rest of what society wants or needs.
- Proven 6y ago
  Apple doesn't have a relationship with the rest of society and doesn't need to cater to it. It has a relationship with its customers and each side can exit the relationship. That's much preferred to the GDPR nonsense and associated costs. If that doesn't suit you, don't use Apple.

ramraj07 6y ago

Netflix is always the perfect example against this weird logic. They commited to AWS, and stuck with it even after Amazon itself is one of their prime competitors. They clearly decided that infra and devops is not their core competency and have absolved themselves of that responsibility and are ready to pay a premium for it. On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in their back about their Emacs setup being able to run a web server from a raspberry Pi. We're at a place where it's fairly counter intuitive to continue arguing against cloud providers. I doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business (and even then it should be recoverable). The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app. But thars more about your ability to recruit disciplines engineers, no point blaming it on the cloud. Look at Imgur. For the most part bootstrapped, scales extremely well, and if I'm not wrong, is very frugal, also runs off AWS.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business Were you asleep when S3 East failed to the point that half of the internet was offline or did you just not get a notification? https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ > The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app The public cloud has never been recession tested and these next few years may be the only way to do it. The model works as long as there are people willing to pay for Amazon and Azure will raise prices if the base load drops below a certain point.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Houses catch fire/flood/tornado too. The question is overall SLI, and multihoming, not has there ever been an outage.
- scarface74 6y ago
  And that half of the internet decided that it wasn’t worth it to have multi region redundancy. I’m not saying that was a bad decision. It all depends on how much they would lose in an outage vs. cost.

scarface74 6y ago

And now with GDPR I have an annoying “we use cookies” splash page every time I visit a web page. Win???

Nextgrid 6y ago
Those are not actually compliant with the regulation - it explicitly forbids annoying/confusing/forced consent prompts. There is a problem with the lack of enforcement, but the regulation itself is sane.
- scarface74 6y ago
  So the end result was that it wasn’t effective. Imagine that, ineffective government regulations with regards to tech. Who would have thought?
  - erinnh 6y ago
    So the end result should be that we dont try?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      More regulation actually increases the barrier of entry to make it even harder for new companies. Well financed established companies are well able to comply. There is a reason that FB always begs for regulation.
      - erinnh 6y ago
        If the barrier to entry is "don't be a dick and sell data to whomever you like without telling your customers", it's kinda a good barrier, or not? Regulation isnt a black and white/good or bad thing. It can be either.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Think about a regulation being passed that says if you allow user generated content, you must have a system in place to prevent copyright infringement. Would a startup be able to design such a system? It would give FB and Google an advantage.