Connected appliances and cars have got to be the stupidest bit of engineering from a practical standpoint.
It’s self reinforcing because those companies that get subscription revenue have both more revenue and higher valuations enabling more fund raising, causing them to beat out companies that do not follow this model. This is why local first software died.
Example: I made a firefox extension that automatically fills forms using LLM. It's fully offline (except OPTIONALLY) the LLM part, optionally because it also supports Ollama locally.
Now the issue is that it's way too hard for most people to use: find the LLM to run, acquire it somehow (pay to run it online or download it to run in Ollama) gotta configure your API url, enter API key, save all of your details for form fulling locally in text files which you then have to backup and synchronize to other devices yourself.
The alternative would be: create account, give money, enter details and all is synced and backedup automatically accross devices, online LLM pre-selected and configured. Ready to go. No messing around with Ollama or openrouter, just go.
I don't know how to solve it in a local way that would be as user friendly as the subscription way would be.
Now things like cars and washing machines are a different story :p
It's sad because the dynamics and incentives around clear, up-front prices seem generally better than SaaS (more user control, less lock-in), but almost all commercial software morphs into SaaS thanks to a mix of psychology, culture and market dynamics.
There are other advantages to having your software and data managed by somebody else, but they are far less determinative than structural and pricing factors. In a slightly different world, it's not hard to imagine relatively expensive software up-front that comes with a smaller, optional (perhaps even third-party!) subscription service for data storage and syncing. It's a shame that we do not live in that world.
That, and also there are real benefits to the end user of having everything persisted in the cloud by default.
Related: I've been incubating an idea for a while that open source, as it presently stands, is largely an ecosystem that exists in support of cloud SaaS. This is quite paradoxical because cloud SaaS is by far the least free model for software -- far, far less free than closed source commercial local software.
It's the same thing as the subscriptions for movies like Netflix, except at least in the last case we can fight back with various means (and it's not a necessity).
The SaaS model is basically a perfect racketeering setup, I think it should be outlawed at least philosophically. There is no way business is not going to abuse that power and they have already shown as much...
I agree with your sentiment on Open Source. I think like many of these types of things, it lives in contradictions. In any case, Linux as it is today, couldn't exist without the big commercial players paying quite a bit to get it going.
Obsidian is doing a pretty good job selling sync functionality to their free client. Because the have a really good markdown editor implementation IMHO with community plug-in support that IMHO beats every PKM cloud tool out there that competes with them.
No, what we need is a way for people to not starve so that they don't have to make money at all and can focus instead on their passion project(s). Cough UBI cough
But by then my extension probably also won't be needed anymore as it would likely be integrated in the OS.
So you can run 1000 local first app that syncs to a Dropbox for that 10/m in storage. And that storage is full B2C level ready to go not some low level s3 like primitive. Has auth, has supported has programs to sync.
Really most of the cloud cost is not needed.
If we really wanted a system where we deem certain items essential and went everyone to have access to them, it makes no sense to pay for them. Money may still make sense for nonessential or luxury items, but it just gets in the way if the government has to give me money so I can go spend it on the food they actually want me to have.
I'll admit that I was unclear because I used the word “starve” in my message. Obviously this choice of word was borne out of the principle that food is among the most vital basic needs, and that depriving people of it is one prominent way in which our current society is cruel. Nevertheless, UBI is not about just food, but more generally about basic needs.
Surely it wouldn't just be food, but regardless the government would be coming up with a list of items and basing the UBI on that. If those items are deemed necessary enough that everyone should have access, why not make them freely available rather than abstracting through money first?
Nobody is forcing anybody to make their games rely solely on online services. It's not a legal requirement, regulatory requirement, or anything else. It is a choice, like most things in software. To make the choice to rely on online services and then say "we'll have to spend money later to unfuck this!" is honestly short sided, pathetic, and nobody should accept it.
For a UBI to exist the government has to define some kind of system for how to set the basic income level, I assume they would define a basket of goods (and services) similar to how CPI is calculated and define a formula for how the UBI is calculated from there. One way or another, someone in the government would be coming up with a list of what is "essential" and deciding how much to subsidize.
They would also need to similarly define how the UBI is adjusted over time. Prices change over time, and there would likely be a pretty quick jump in prices when the UBI is first put into effect.
All that to say, we will never have a UBI without it being centrally planned from the top. Whether it is authoritarian or not would be up for debate, it can be centrally planned and pushed from the top down without being authoritarian - unless one thinks we're already authoritarian, most of our current federal programs would fit into that category.