Defletter

For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.

What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.

In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:

> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".

The prospect of the US going rogue has forced us to wake up and realise that every dependence we have on the US is potential leverage. For example, the US has levied sanctions against ICC judges, meaning that they can no longer use their VISA/MASTERCARD cards. This means that the French Judge Guillou for example cannot go to a shop in France, pay for French goods in Euros with a card from his French bank, because a US company is intervening to prevent it. As such they can only pay for things in cash... and Europe is becoming increasingly cashless.

Similarly, it might have preempted things like the $99 Apple Developer Program: if your software-engineering licence is at jeopardy, you may be less likely to upload malware, or target micro-transactions to children, or make cars lie about their emissions, etc. How many lives have those ruined?

It might help with the AI-slop crisis too: Speedy Web Compiler might not have needed to adopt a policy of rejecting every external PR out of hand if they could have chosen a "licensed software-engineers only" policy instead.

Some other things to consider too like what effect this would have on anonymous/pseudonymous contributions, and whether the regulatory body/ethics board would accommodate that in some way. There's been some discussion about how governments flirting with age verification laws could do so without forcing everyone to dox themselves to every website they use, or allowing the government to track everything they do. Perhaps a similar system could be adopted for contributions. Etc.

Overall, I do agree that the upfront cost would likely be somewhat higher, but I think the overall cost to run a modern OS would be somewhat lower, resulting in a similar-enough cost overall. Though this is just my opinion based on vibes. I'd love to see any data about this.

There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.

It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.

Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.

While I genuinely do not object to gender neutral language, I often find the opposite to be true: it's extremely obvious when gendered pronouns have been lazily replaced. For example, "If the Minister consults the Commission before they issue a direction, they must notify the Board before they take any further action." Who is "they" in this scenario? And is each "they" referring to the same entity? What this made-up example demonstrates is that, very often, switching to gender neutral language often requires you to rewrite and restructure the text, rather than merely find-and-replacing he/him/his with they/them/theirs. Though wrt to the specific Ladybird PR in question, it really was that simple.

Steel-manning the argument, I can understand a general aversion to updating language just for the sake of updating language: nothing is being added, clarified, or elaborated on. It's not like the section was rewritten to include a new feature and the rewrite used gender-neutral language. If anything, one could easily accuse the PR of being an attempt to pad a resume.

That being said, I do want to reiterate that Kling was being an absolute chud for rejecting the PR the way he did.

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> I don't think that saying someone "might be amoral" is an ad hominem

Ah, the "just asking questions" defence. Wonderful.

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> You may be thinking of the word immoral instead, which would certainly be an ad hominem attack.

Fun fact, saying someone is without morals is also an ad hominem attack.

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> You went beyond "questioning their boycott" when you stated assumptions

No? Me stating an assumption based on demonstrated behaviour is part of questioning their boycott.

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> When OP and others explained how they evaluate projects

Okay, this is the second time you've referenced conversations that have not taken place within this thread, so let me remind you of the flow of the conversation with 1attice thus far:

> I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha

> [flagged comment that said something approximating "I don't use browsers that don't respect human rights"]

> Fair enough. Which browser are you currently using?

> Iceweasel

> And you are certain that its maintainers comply with your requirements?

> Yes. [later edited to repeat the "yes" and state that I might be amoral]

> From what I can tell, Iceweasel is more or less a reskinned Firefox: there's some code changes to make it compatible with Debian's licensing guidelines, but it would be reasonable (in my opinion) to describe Iceweasel as 'Firefox for Debian'. And so are you also certain that the maintainers of Firefox comply with your requirements?

At no point during this exchange did they explain that they "researched the Iceweasel project before choosing it" or "explained how they evaluate projects" (both quoting you). In fact, prior to their comment editing, both of their answers to my questions were single-word responses. So once again I must insist that you actually show me these comments where they supposably said these things, because I cannot find these comments from 1attice anywhere in the comments or on their profile, so I'm starting to doubt their existence.

Fair enough.

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> Perhaps combating the hegemony is only worthwhile to OP if the incumbent treats its users with equal respect.

The issue arose from a pronoun PR, which I regard as disrespectful towards contributors. One can speculate whether that'll trickle down to the users, but I'd imagine most users being unaware of this drama going on behind the scenes. Then again it's a small project largely followed by people who care about the Chromium/Firefox thing so maybe not?

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> OP described that they researched the Iceweasel project before choosing it.

Did they? Where?

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> He's not interacting with the Mozilla community - he's interacting with Debian's Iceweasel community.

> whether it's dependencies support OP's views

Okay, let's say that I do the same thing: I fork Ladybird and give it a new name (Ladybug) and a new icon. Maybe I swap out the IO library for whatever reason. Does that free Ladybug from upstream's drama? Can 1attice now safely use Ladybug knowing that it respects human rights because Ladybird is a mere dependency?

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> I'm not sure it was an attack on your character.

> then devolves into an attack

You're unsure whether their ad hominem was an attack on my character, but you are certain that me questioning their boycott was an attack? Huh?