Cool Links

This is a spot on overview of how pretty much every tech company now has no clear direction besides making more money. No vision, no goals, no passion, except for making the number go up.

Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.

The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.

In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive’s opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?

He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?

We rely too much on software companies nowadays, and most of the popular ones are USA-based. With the USA becoming increasingly less trustworthy on an almost daily basis, people have started gathering EU-based alternatives to the most popular services.

This is interesting even if you’re not based in Europe, as companies there are forced to respect your data and privacy by law.

Really nice article that pretty much sums up the iPad situation: it is interesting hardware but that has pretty much no software that showcases what it does best.

The best iPad apps are… web apps. And the iPad’s only available browser being Safari doesn’t make things better.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but The Browser Company, the company behind the Arc Browser (which I’ve been using for a couple years as my main browser) has announced that they’ve pretty much given up on monetizing it and will just keep it working as-is in the future, with no new development.

This article reflects a bit on how it seems that tech companies seem to be running out of problems to solve, which results in great products that can’t find their footing (outside of small niches) due to not really changing much about their user’s lives.

There’s really nothing else I can add to this argument that Cory hasn’t already said. But really, RSS is the best way to follow a publication or a person there can be. It’s the best way for you to actually have control of what you read and decide when to do so.

This great article goes into how Apple went from being kind of an underdog to becoming the biggest company in the world, and how that made its loyal fans from back in the 2000s kinda loathe the company nowadays, with its greedy actions and overall abuse of market power.

I never had access to any Apple products until ~4 years ago, so I never really got caught in the Apple hype train. Still, that’s what I mostly use nowadays and while I like their products, it’s really hard to have any kind of sympathy for them (which is honestly okay; companies should never be your friends). So, it’s nice reading what someone that was in that hype train feels about all the negative Apple news that are all around us all the time.