I've seen you make the comment about the OS being open-sourced a lot. But this largely has nothing to do with the OS. This is a conversation about infrastructure and data. The concern (from what I gathered and will condense greatly) is that Core will take in all the current app data and infrastructure setup, duplicate it themselves, move themselves off of Rebble, and continue developing on it privately.
I don't think it's equivalent. When Rebble did what they did, it was because Pebble was going under and they had no EOL plan. Rebble took it upon themselves to carry the torch without having been passed it.
If Core were to do the same thing here, it's not the same, because Rebble is still active. You can't kill what's already dead (Pebble), but Rebble is very much still alive.
So Rebble wants to benefit from code they didn't write (Pebble apps)... but also wants to prevent Pebble from benefiting from code Pebble didn't write (Rebble updates to Pebble apps)?
This seems a little silly, no? rent seeking behavior for maintaining code they didn't write to begin with?
The fact that Core is not willing to just start from the old dump publicly available already shows that it's not just "rent-seeking". Core clearly wants what Rebble has spent significant effort in not just maintaining but also building.
They're entitled to it just because in some sense Core is a successor to Pebble? No, not really.
Of course it's rent-seeking, akin to squatting — Rebble took Pebble apps developed at no cost to the users, and then maintained them and added cost. In some cases they might actually be required by the licenses of individual apps to open source their maintenance.
No one's actually entitled to anything here on either end (legally), I see 0 work being done to actually contact the original authors to seek permission or licensing details.
AFAIK, there wasn't a blanket license that covered all apps in the ecosystem... so each app would vary. In the absence of a license all rights are held by the original developers.
> Rebble took Pebble apps developed at no cost to the users, and then maintained them and added cost.
Again, if that's all it were, Core could and should just take that old Pebble dump and use that. Why bother Rebble if they haven't done anything as you imply.
> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.
So, another point of consideration is whether looking at names and pictures so you can personally favorite them constitutes as commercial use. Based on what Eric said, I don't really think so.
But to be clear, the agreement does allow him API access to view apps and display metadata. Presumably, to build App Store experiences on top of the data. Which could easily include something like stack ranking your favorite apps as a review system, or displaying favorites.
Saying this is scraping is so pedantic, and given that Eric’s company is paying for access to the API, they should kick rocks.
I hardly think wanting to be more productive/efficient on your own behalf is "bending over backwards" to save a company.
It could be a project with a deadline, and you want to knock some things out earlier so that there is less crunch time needed in a few weeks.
Maybe you want to get some of your work done early so you can take it easier in near future where you anticipate yourself being preoccupied with other responsibilities.
Or, hear me out. You feel secure in your job position, and simply take pride in your work. You will be there working anyways. I would rather get stuff done and feel productive at work than to have meaningless down time twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a response.
It’s quite a luxury to work in a company where every interaction is perfectly empowered.
Many of us have jobs that are on the whole very good, but where inter-departmentmental or inter-personal challenges come up from time to time. I’m definitely not one who’s willing to quit in search of the elusive perfect company in that case.
Startups often offer it, and it doesn't have to be so early stage that one has to work more hours either. Once a company gets older, it adds layers of damaging bureaucracy that comes in the way of innovation.
I’ve worked at several startups and I’m not at all sure the typical employee is more empowered. Yes, large companies have bureaucracy, but startups often have micromanaging founders who haven’t learned stuff like delegation.
Videos are typically already summarized substitutes for complex topics--topics for which you might need to read text or literature to get the full context of. Now we want to min-max and summarize the video themselves. Then what? If that video summary is too long, we throw it into another LLM to summarize the summary of the summary? To what extent does this end?
There's more to learning than just information density. There's visuals, presentations, explanations. And if you want more proof, then a video played a 2x speed is twice the information density, yet we all know that many videos would be extremely hard to retain anything from at that speed.
Lots of youtube videos are not the well-organized presentations you describe, but instead have a minute or two of good information with ten minutes of meandering asides, background you already know, and other fluff. Some are well-disguised clickbait. A good summary prevents a lot of time wasting.
As for the good videos, I can't watch them all. If I can skim a good summary, I can decide whether, for me, this video is worth watching, or ignoring, or just reading the summary more carefully.
If ads were "completely fucking irrelevant" then companies wouldn't be spending the large amounts of money that they do on it. I agree that ads are a nuisance, but they're not going to be easy to simply get rid of, as long as money is involved. And considering how tightly coupled finance is with policy nowadays, I find it highly unlikely legislators would pass bills banning public advertisements. Especially when sometimes the government itself is the one getting paid to promote goods and services.
Finally, the issue is also defining what constitutes an advertisement. How do you draw the line between advertisement and free speech? If, theoretically, a very passionate citizen, enjoyed a product so much that they simply wanted to publicly express their satisfaction with it, posted a sign of that expression, does that constitute an advertisement?
If it does, and gets removed, then I'm afraid that's no different than some dystopian form of censorship.
If it doesn't, then it would be trivial for companies to continue advertising, because then every ad could just be re-framed to be the personal expression of an individual.
Ntfy is phenomenal. I love having my own compiled app for the background notifications on a self-hosted instance. It's so easy to hook any update or alerts I want into and get it delivered to any of my devices.
Even though I haven't used one in a really long time, the Pebble Time still stands out to me as something I wish I still had.
It's an absolutely shame that Pebble was so innovative and functional, but couldn't reach mass market. But, I am extremely excited and happy that the Pebble team can start it again. I don't like Google for many things, but, I am grateful that the open-sourced PebbleOS. What a joyous day!
> It's an absolutely shame that Pebble was so innovative and functional, but couldn't reach mass market.
I think trying to reach "mass market" - or specifically, the market of people who are into fitness and sportsball - is largely what killed them. I'd like to believe that they could've catered to existing userbase a bit longer, grew a little more slowly but sustainably by doubling down on an idea of an ergonomic, battery-efficient, programmable smartwatch extension - a tool, not a toy.
Alas, maybe the whole thing was over once Apple, and Samsung got their marketing wheels spinning.
I think openness is vital for such a (new) platform or ecosystem in general. The ecosystem has certainly gotten older by now, especially compared to when Pebble first started, but in my opinion a lot of the organic growth has been stunted. It's too difficult to try new things, find new useful applications and to innovate with all these walled _wearable_ gardens.
I still miss a few things the Pebble had but my Apple Watch doesn't. Which in turn makes it feel less like a tool and more like a gadget.
I’d strongly disagree with tool vs fitness gadget here. Compare a Garmin to an Apple Watch or pebble, and it absolutely is a tool. Arguably the MIP display beats out the ePaper, ergonomics are great (I can use the buttons even while swimming), and it’s built like a brick. Not knocking the pebble too hard, but it certainly seems like an enthusiasts toy. I’m not sure what else would last me a week while tracking exercising for an hour or two each day.
I think the ethos if the tech world is "grow as fast as possible or die" but there should be more companies that create good products and make a profit catering to a small demographic. 2 million customers is nothing to sneeze at.
I'm still using it, in fact to the point that it's probably the biggest factor why I have been procrastinating on still staying on Android rather than trying alternatives like PinePhone.
That the OS has been open sourced is great news (though it's sad it was on GitHub... and hopefully other communities around Pebble will spring up outside of platforms (article only mentions Discord and Reddit)).
Pebble Time (Steel) Kickstarter is the only crowdfunding I truly regret missing out on. I remember seeing it at the time, but I think the reward levels I wanted were sold out or something.
Even in retrospect it seems weird that it failed the way it did.
They list out what the proprietary bits are. All of it is third party gernical hardware interface libraries that they do not own. Bluetooth stack, etc. All stuff you can rewrite easier today.
The Magic of pebble was the UX of the OS and it's extensive hackability. All that magic is OSS now.
But previewing can involve automatically loading resources. This "attack" is very similar to CSRF in that your exploit involves making the victim load a specific resource. That's why in secure mail clients, nothing but plaintext should be rendered, and an optional "Load all resources" button is shown for when you trust the sender, and want to load any media elements that require HTTP onto your client.
Signal could mitigate this with something similar, where it didn't load the image file AT ALL, and instead showed a message:
The difference being is that it's not a resource controlled by the attacker, it's an attachment hosted by Signal. But yes, removing previews for everything would mitigate the issue.
Traditionally this would be solved by inserting a comment into the code that insults the user (for example the classic "The user is a wanker" comment [1]).
> Shit. I was just about to launch into an explanation of our code review procedures. Every week we sit around a table and carefully and dispassionately analyse and constructively criticise each others code. And it works. We sit there and listen and take it all in. It works really well and team morale is excellent. One day we're even planning to do one when we're sober.
> Trying to hack on other people's junk with NixOS is just asking for pain.
Yeah, but being that Nix is essentially a giant wrapper for the system, that kind of goes without saying. The other side of the coin is that, using other people's Nix junk is extremely easy. Far easier than what any other distro could hope to achieve.
My favorite example is simple-nixos-mailserver. Try passing someone a dovecot, postfix, and openssh configurations/instructions in any other distro and see how long it takes before they mess up, or more likely, give up.
Whereas with simple-nixos-mailserver, you're guaranteed to get something to work, essentially right out of the box.
agreed. Like I said, if what you want to do is within NixOS's well supported wheelhouse, it's great to have a fully declarative OS, that includes application configuration.
