Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

Honestly, this sounds great!

Funding.json is a good idea for a standard proposal and seems to solve most problems I‘d personally recognize with FOSS funding :)

On a European level they interpret that as fixing the EU, e.g. giving the parliament meaningful power, creating a pan-European army etc.

Yeah, but I don’t know whether you’ve recently taken a look in one of the local newspapers— being able to select topics you want to read about may very well be worth the extra effort (also, fun of course)

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

iOS user here, uYou++ is quite good, but only a mod for the regular YT app, not a complete alternative.

YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.

Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.

This is not necessarily the case.

You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.

But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.

The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software

As a (fellow?) Munich I’m also looking forward to it…

It does (via the dock and probably directly as well), so that would absolutely work!

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

apart from ne not having that much money laying around a the moment I’m not a fan of people having to pay for their search engine, as I’m of the opinion that such a fundamental tool to use the web should remain free

Yeah, I’ve recently switched to SearXNG instances on some devices, definitely seem to be getting better results

it sometimes seem to, most advanced searching still works, at least on DDG