I didn't take "protect" the same way as you at all.
Big tech is putting inside our heads that users shall be protected by removing control from them and that's detrimental. This gatekeeping is not protection, it's dystopia.
Protect can be taken as in "Protect the user from bad decisions", or as in "Protect users' freedom" [1], which would completely go your way. I understood protect as "make the user your first priority".
I'm happy with being protected. I'm not happy with my control being removed. It may look like the first implies the second, but it should not and we need to fight against this idea. This leads to (tech!) people here on HN believing their restricted mobile ecosystems are good for them and their parents.
[1] (edit:) another commenter suggests "protect their interests", which nails it for me.
Very few mottos can withstand literal dissection. For that matter, many phrases have entirely different meanings than if they were read as normal words.
Words bend to the context, and by associating a motto with the ideal it is proposed for, it quickly becomes its own context.
"Protect the user, their data and the truth!", if you say it loudly, comes across to me like something the Three Musketeers would exclaim. If they were programmers, about to enter the forest of dark patterns, risking their lives for the users they know, and those they will never meet.
"Protect" can mean whatever the service provider wants it to mean. Such as requiring developer verification for any program you want to install on your own phone.
I agree. A better choice of word would have been diligere, meaning to value (verb). Value the user, the data, and the truth. Diligere usorem, data, (et) veritatem.
Further, I'm not sure if the infinitive was the best choice of verb form. It feels to me more applicable as an imperative (thou shalt...), so I think it should be dilige (present imperative) or diligito (future imperative). I don't know Latin well enough to judge which of those two it should be.
There's a reason some buttons are behind glass and some switches have guards you have to unlock first. You say you don't, but you can't not qualify when, otherwise you're simply wrong.
As long as you can reach the buttons by yourself and don't need to ask big tech's permission, I fully agree that having safeguards for potentially dangerous buttons is a good thing.
The people that operated looms in cotton mills used to say the same thing. A guard would get in the way, It slows me down when I try to do x. "I'm a skilled technician, just let me have access"
They'd keep saying that until they lost a hand, arm, leg to the big swirling mass of metal.
Apples and oranges. Installing an encrypted chat app, a torrent client, or an open source OS stripped of spyware will not mangle my limbs, but big tech and governments are hard at work trying to make these a thing of the past.
People on hn would do well to stop giving cover to such disastrous pretenses.
on a thread about developers making sure that user data is safe.
I want to install an app, I don't want to scout around and make a value judgement to see if its going to steal all my data. In the same way that victorians had to work out if the local baker is cutting cheap flour with chalk or worse[1].
we are "qualified" to make that value judgement, the vast majority of people outside of this forum are not. This means that the longer we let predatory spyware run our ecosystem (lets be honest, most of the "internet" is paid for by google, facebook and apple et al) the longer we ingrain in people to expect to be exploited.
The solution is not only opensource, because frankly thats even more user hostile. (oh you lost your entire history? lol you should have done x,y,z and not pressed the "make it awesome" button, as if you'd read the code you know its in. alpha) The solution is as "the people" to demand safe software. This won't happen because the current tech giants are the only reason why US GDP is growing.
The solution is tackling the tech behemoths. But that wont happen with current US system.
Reframing it as "protect their interests" helps. Protect the users from corporate manipulation, from lock-in, from rent seeking, from dishonest practices.
I'm also reading TFA's intent as less about big-brother and info-hygiene stuff, and more about standard enshittification.
Since we're talking about "doing more things with a piece of software than [users] could do without it", well, living with 10% of the features at 1000x of the price would typically still fit those criteria. Since this is exactly where most companies would like to go after establishing market-dominance, yeah, I think we do want to be protected.
Whether any dev or group of devs could realistically push back against the forces at work in the org or the wider economy here is a separate question of course.
'Res gestae' in Latin are aren't just 'things done.' The phrase is an idiom meaning "exploits" or "deeds" -- with the implication that there's something notable about them -- e.g. they're worth recording or remembering -- i.e. 'accomplishments.' So 'res gerere' to my ear means something closer to "accomplish" than "do things."
Big tech is putting inside our heads that users shall be protected by removing control from them and that's detrimental. This gatekeeping is not protection, it's dystopia.
Protect can be taken as in "Protect the user from bad decisions", or as in "Protect users' freedom" [1], which would completely go your way. I understood protect as "make the user your first priority".
I'm happy with being protected. I'm not happy with my control being removed. It may look like the first implies the second, but it should not and we need to fight against this idea. This leads to (tech!) people here on HN believing their restricted mobile ecosystems are good for them and their parents.
[1] (edit:) another commenter suggests "protect their interests", which nails it for me.