Escape From New York: Louis Rossmann Edition - Hopefully he does not make Texas a bughive

Atlas Sneezed said:
Louis reached out to sponsor another FOSS project with FUTO money. I imagine he'll make a video about it soonish. I selfhost immich since the very beginning and I find it very useful.

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I set this up after seeing the news and it's so unbelievably good. The search is basically instant, image recognition is mind bogglingly good and processed nearly 100 GB of images within an hour or two on a VM with 4x E5-2670 v3 cores (old!)

Seriously recommend this for anybody who is using Nextcloud for images and is looking for something halfway usable. For once I don't feel like some second class citizen for being a FOSS fag, I can magically pull up photos of my dogs faster than anyone else.
 
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I like seeing more letting people know how bad of a service Amazon has become. The amount of throwaway fly-by-night Chinese sellers on Amazon is simply amazing. Back when I used to buy from Amazon towards the end of that time, it got increasingly more difficult to find the actual quality brands, as opposed to the throwaway ones like Louis describes. For that, and the absolutely horrific return experience (very important when it comes to cheap quality crap products like what's shown), I've given up on them entirely, and use eBay for almost all my online buying.

I keep one particular email exchange between Amazon's outsourced customer service and I hung on my bulletin board in my office as a reminder to never do business with them again, even if it's the easier option. The headache is not worth it.
 
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Rossmann had a livestream called "Addressing FUTO license drama! Let's see if I get fired..." which he took down due to having some crazy Orange Man effect. A 30 minute shorter version with an intro has been uploaded to the FUTO channel under a new title: Using the term "open source" - a response to everything!
Personally I think this should be uploaded to his main channel since anyone who saw it on there would have a hard time finding it on the FUTO channel given the title is completely different and Rossmann's community post just says he's reposting it and not that it'll end up on FUTO. You can't find the FUTO version when searching for the original title as it's not mentioned in the description so YouTube can't index it.
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I went looking for an archive of the original stream since he took it down basically straight away and it wasn't mirrored to Bitchute or Odysee. I did end up finding an archive posted by a random fediverse sperg so I've re-encoded it to 360p and uploaded it here for anyone who wants to watch the original in all its orange glory.

I haven't watched it yet, just Louis' intro and the tl;dr is the goal is to make the software open but not exploitable and to do this they have a special license with terms that prevent companies from using their work without compensation. The video he references on discussing the FUTO license changes is here
It's going to be an uphill battle for Eron and Rossmann to get companies to do the right thing but I hope they're successful. There's a lot of taking and very little giving and it's not even a case of devs not wanting to support the FOSS projects they use, it's the people in control of the company bank account that give zero fucks about doing "the right thing". Hopefully the threat of getting stomped in court is enough to compel their lizard brains into parting with a few shekels.
 
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clipartfan92 said:
Louis going at MKBHD and Apple:
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The context for why he's going hard on Marques Brownlee was in a community post earlier. Definitely worth reading, even if you don't care about Apple itself, for the rant about a 1 star review.

There's a video you guys have wanted me to respond to for a while.


The truth is that haven't responded to it because anything on the topic of Apple & right to repair really depresses me. I've been deleting all the emails from people asking what I thought of it. I didn't have the energy or motivation to reply to any of them. I lost it.

I feel like I have done everything I can to advocate for Apple to treat consumers better by pointing out design flaws and encouraging consumers to push Apple for extended recall programs that would result in my repair shop making less money, as I cannot compete with free. I've done this for years alongside advocating for independent repair centers, as well as you, to get access to the parts and manuals necessary to perform economically viable repairs. This isn't all about me; it was about making things better for everyone.

In spite of this & dedicating my life to making all of this as available as possible, the general consensus usually becomes that I am only doing this for my own personal benefit or making it up. Further, less parts, chips, and resources are available in 2024, than were available in 2008. My colleagues, and myself, are worse off now than when we started. So I stopped caring to respond to all of this. I gave up.

For example: I got a TOTALLY DESERVED 1 star review on Google recently. It was 100% **EARNED!!!** With regards to the repair this customer wanted, we provide a horrible experience. I should've gotten 0 stars, or negative stars. I even updated my website in 2023 to tell people in more professional terms that for this repair, we suck, because I know people are coming here via referral as we used to be the best in the business at this specifivc service. The experience we used to provide wasn't just better than Apple, but better than everyone! I specialized in stocking screens for _EVERYTHING_, not just Apple products back in the day and bought 1k+ at a time to get the best prices, and had the first pick of Grade A LCDs before anyone else got them. https://web.archive.org/web/20121225114401/http://www.rossmannsupply.com/ I had enough different LCD models to be able to repair over 5000 different models of laptop, with a cross-compatibility list of what model screen worked in what model laptop that couldn't be beat.

This meant I could offer incredibly affordable repairs with a 20 minute turnaround, even on products that had the new LCD-cell-separate-from-the-frame-and-backlight-layers repairs. We were doing those high-difficulty ones all the way back in 2012, before anyone else in NYC did them! And we had 5 stars doing them all! My first youtube video, if you sort by oldest-to-newest, was boasting about the quality of the LCDs we bought, and the fact that they were all stocked right in the room next to my office.

Now, we can't get access to anything. the only way we can do these repairs is by using used junk, whose prices & availability constantly changes, that requires extensive hacking around and/or tools we don't have so the used part will even have the features of the original. Years of advocacy work later, and my industry is worse off than it was 15 years ago. My customers are worse off than they were 15 years ago.

It is difficult to not be depressed at that topic, after dedicating my life to it for a long period of time, and being worse off than it was in the beginning. When people tell me about the next thing Apple did, I lack the energy to care anymore.

What I learned is that my small corner of the world was a canary in the coal mine for what would follow everywhere else. This isn't just in my industry that it's happening; it is happening in similar verticals as well.

You might have noticed that I stopped discussing Apple as much. That wasn't just because I gave up trying to push a boulder up a hill. Rather, because there is so much anti-ownership nonsense going on in every other industry with every other company, that I want to bring awareness to before it spreads like a cancer that can't be rooted out. I stopped focusing on Apple as much.

I changed my mind, because it appears that Marques Brownlee's propaganda video was a dress rehearsal for a 24 page propaganda piece released by Apple this month which you can find here https://support.apple.com/content/d.../otherassets/programs/Longevity_by_Design.pdf This document on top of that video is a slap in the face & a kick in the balls to my life's work.

I will have something by the end of today.
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Basically he stopped talking about Apple because he was a bit depressed that things got worse over the 15 years he's been advocating. His repair store can't do repairs they did a decade ago, and specific repairs are now low quality because of how the parts changed.

"This [Apple] document on top of that video is a slap in the face & a kick in the balls to my life's work." Go get 'em, Louis.

Also, the video got a nod of approval from Gamer's Nexus. It would be interesting if Steve takes up the charge, fresh off forcing Asus to change their customer service practices.
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Harvey Danger said:
The context for why he's going hard on Marques Brownlee was in a community post earlier. Definitely worth reading, even if you don't care about Apple itself, for the rant about a 1 star review.


Basically he stopped talking about Apple because he was a bit depressed that things got worse over the 15 years he's been advocating. His repair store can't do repairs they did a decade ago, and specific repairs are now low quality because of how the parts changed.

"This [Apple] document on top of that video is a slap in the face & a kick in the balls to my life's work." Go get 'em, Louis.
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I think this is the best Louis Rossmann video in a very long time.

Ripping an absolute corporate safe reviewer apart for 40 minutes, all while displaying his sheer knowledge on how poorly these products were made, mostly from prior experience.

Also keep in mind MKBHD did a "pro right to repair" video years ago. I never bought it, as this guy seemed extremely brand safe for companies that are antagonistic for the repair industry, and it's nice to see he seems to have forgotten he made that video a long time ago, as nobody that gave two shits about repairability would have condoned such a horrible interview.

This video was great to wake up to.
 
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Sharpeteer said:
Also keep in mind MKBHD did a "pro right to repair" video years ago. I never bought it, as this guy seemed extremely brand safe for companies that are antagonistic for the repair industry, and it's nice to see he seems to have forgotten he made that video a long time ago, as nobody that gave two shits about repairability would have condoned such a horrible interview.
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I predominately remember him from a fiasco where he was making tons of sponsored videos without disclosing such to the viewer or something like that. It was probably five years ago now, but that would be career-ending for a smaller/white youtuber. It's funny the things you can get away with if you're a fucking smelly nigger.
 
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Ah yes here they are.


There's also the ones from that podcast he does, but it's pretty much the same, very surface level.

And I sat through his review of the iPhone 15 Pro, the latest one, and sure enough, no mention of the software pairing and serialization of every component inside that a user might need to replace, preventing any reasonable means of the customer fixing the device themselves down the line, and I'd be willing to bet my trusty ThinkPad X220 (not really I love it too much) that his current Mac laptop reviews are the same way. Even if they wanted to go through that joke of a repair program Apple offers, you have to have their support "verify" it over the internet every step of the way, meaning if they decide to stop offering this service for that model one day, too bad for you. So it's "repairable" as long as they allow it to be, you have to buy the parts from them as long as they offer it for that model, and they can choose to stop "verifying" the part for you for any reason. Their laptop section is even worse. I'd personally like to buy some of that shitty shoe rubber they put inside the case to press chips down, because soldering is hard to them. Not to use of course, but as a little collector's item. :story:

If he never gave a shit about Right to Repair that's fine. I couldn't care less if he wants to be in that Apple ecosystem of stuff that's incompatible with everything else, that's his business. But outright lying, spreading misinformation and putting up this front years ago that he cared about R2R is so disingenuous, and it was clearly just him chasing a trend at the time.

Also I don't buy this "people don't need to know about this repairability stuff in a product review" nonsense. That's so stupid. Sure they may not care right when they first buy it, and they still have that "new toy" feeling. But wait until there's a problem, and they find out that sorry, we know just the screen is broken, but because we only sell them as a whole assembly, and you have to buy from us because we pair them via serialization, you have to pay us many hundreds of dollars for what would normally be like a $100 screen. I used to work in a repair shop, and I would hear ALL the time that people wished they knew about the bad design and repair solutions for something before they bought it. So yes, people don't care about it until they need it. Then they wish they knew.

Something Awful said:
Fucking hate MKBHD, it's depressing how many people are happy to listen to a blatant shill as long as the videos are well-produced.
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If by well produced you mean they lack weird jump cuts and have good video quality, sure. But I personally hate that same music that plays in the back of all these videos, everything shot in the style of a commercial that focuses only on how something looks rather than stuff a person might really need to know. A lot of times when looking up these reviews for phones, I can't even find an answer from them as to whether they have headphone jacks or MicroSD card slots or not.

I'm going to shill some of Louis' old videos for a bit, but you know what some of my favorite product reviews ever made are? These. Obsessing over the comfort and usability of something, plus going over the design changes in autistic detail, I like it. Plus pouring water on it to see if the keyboard liquid drainage lives up. The video quality and jump cuts are shit, but they're exactly what I want to hear when deciding whether or not I want something.


 
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Genuinely excited for this one. FUTO has paid for the development of a proper FOSS keyboard with voice dictation that is all processed on the phone.
My mom struggles immensely to type damn near anything and I've wanted to suggest voice dictation but held back because it's a privacy nightmare so this is very cool.

Personally I was using HeliBoard as it was literally the only FOSS keyboard I could find that supported swipe typing (through loading a closed source module sadly) and had functional suggestions, but I've installed the FUTO keyboard and so far it seems fine.
 
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Flaming Dumpster said:
Genuinely excited for this one. FUTO has paid for the development of a proper FOSS keyboard with voice dictation that is all processed on the phone.
My mom struggles immensely to type damn near anything and I've wanted to suggest voice dictation but held back because it's a privacy nightmare so this is very cool.

Personally I was using HeliBoard as it was literally the only FOSS keyboard I could find that supported swipe typing (through loading a closed source module sadly) and had functional suggestions, but I've installed the FUTO keyboard and so far it seems fine.
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I've been using the FUTO keyboard for awhile (not sure how this release is different), and I love it very much. In testing, I find it to be better than even Google's own voice input - it would actually put periods and punctuation in the correct places without needing to say those words.

I will reinstall it using this version though, as again, not sure how it's different, but now there are two versions in the F-Droid repo.

Google's TTS service was the last Google service I felt I needed to keep in my life until this keyboard came out. It really was a game changer for me.
 
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Ice Gun Ninja said:
Is this the same one that searched for "privacy TVs" after his rant on TVs selling the user data or did he got a new one?
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Voice sounds like the same one.

edit: He gets briefly salty about women in this one, so maybe I'm wrong?

 
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Lou appeared in a video by Coldfusion, a pretty good channel about tech, money, the corporate world, and scams in those areas.

Coldfusion interviewed Louis and used parts of the interview in the video.
 
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