toomanyducks

Reading this, I feel less offended (really, I don't understand the use of that word in politics) and more scared and threatened. I'm a :sparkles: gender minority :sparkles: so politics can get really directly influential really quickly, and the picture of a gun-owning person who thinks taxes are theft is less than encouraging: that type of ideology usually does not account for people like me's existence. It's possible that it's just a hobby (heavy benefit of the doubt here), but it reads like a political statement against my ability to live freely.

Anyway, you asked: that's why I'd be scared to put much into the OP's hands.

As an addition to your request, I'd recommend reading some philosophy. If you want left-leaning, you can jump straight in with Marx, Foucault, and Judith Butler (some of my favorites), but you don't really need to.

I'd just recommend this because the news is useless without a meta-understanding of its purpose in public opinion, ideology, and power. If you want to skip dense philosophy readings, just make sure to ask yourself, "Who benefits from the story being told?" Try to seek out a large variety of sources in respect to this answer. The reason that this is hard though, I'll personally leave to Marx and Goldman.

So... it's a GUI package manager with extra steps?

The above x100. Technology isn't a cheat code for a hard problem, it's just another tool. When we assume that tech fixes everything with no further research, everyone gets a lot worse off.

I can see how somebody would go down this line of reasoning, but I wouldn't. It requires too many steps when compared with my personal alternative: literally just some paper, an email inbox, and a semi-structured directory of notes available for grepping. I have no brain cells, so anything more than this distracts and overwhelms me to the point of counter productivity.

Are there any more differences with qute? I've found the best solution to the web being broken is to use as little of the web as possible, but qute was the closest I think I came to tolerating it. Would I prefer Vieb?

I'd go one step further in that analysis. Why does it feel that large companies are the most representative to the people (like me) claiming that consumption under capitalism is unethical?

Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.

Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.

This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.

Are the produced mechanisms really the same when the incentives change? That's not really something I can quite get myself to believe.

The incentives in free software, in my limited experience, are to grow a productively maintained system, not necessarily a profitable one (assuming, of course, the existence of some outside source of stable income). And with that motivation, I feel that competition disappears. When I look at an alternative solution to a problem I'm trying to solve, it's more in the lense of 'oh, that's a good idea!' than anger that their solution is better than mine. Then, if I'm lucky, it might be the type of thing that can be refactored out into a library and shared across implementations. I still feel that competition precludes that, regardless of incentives.

Honestly I think this opens up a really interesting discussion in open source. I know this is satire, but bear with me.

If I see a project, and I get curious about its test results, I can just look at the logs of the tests running and the ways in which they're run. I can see exactly what's going on, and if something weird's going on, I can fork the project, enable tests, and start a discussion with the maintainers. Maybe it's important enough that the tests are enabled and the code is fixed.

What's really interesting to me about this is that there's no competition in sight. There are no market pressures that make someone look at the code or fix it, it's just the desire for good code. Whereas with market pressures, I'm incentivized to lock down code and hide test results! You can say that's an edge case or uncommon, but the fact of the matter is that it happened. Anyway, this makes me curious about two things:

1. In software specifically, does the reduction of competition necessarily contribute to a more collaborative and more productive development process than what we expect with traditional systems?

2. If 1 is true, how widely does this scale? What could be better if some of the control of owners was removed? For instance, if the test processes of VW were public, none of this would have happened.

I've spent so long being told that competition is the be all and end all of productivity, so I'm just curious about what's happening here, and I want to know how far it goes.

Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.

Ah, I see how I communicated that poorly - it's not that the meetings aren't there, it's that they're oriented towards production.

I do not expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.

> We used to make things. Now we have meetings.

Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the people who by definition exist in the company to make things, were to own their means of production, this would look very differently. But anyway, I digress.

It might not be fair to assume that OSHA, etc, and the NSA, etc, operate under the same agenda. Some industries do have standards for tech. HIPAA, for instance, sets some minimum expectations for cyber security with regard to private health information (PHI). And there are HIPAA inspections, right along with OSHA ones. Of course, it's a fairly clunky solution given that government is slow and tech is fast, but it's certainly there, and it's certainly helpful.

I personally tried this for a few weeks: I set my clocks to GMT, and converted everyone else's silly little timezones into one unambiguous number. All I accomplished was memorizing the offset between GMT and local time and getting marginally quicker at the required arithematic to convert between them. It didn't even solve any problems, because a) nobody else was doing it, so, shrug, and b) I immediately lost all context for the earth's rotation, and that turned out to be a massive pain in the ass. I think the very least we can do, though, is get rid of DST.

We can't keep pretending that our justice system is utilitarian. It's so very clearly not about helping those that commit crimes improve themselves. If it was, we wouldn't be punishing people with literal torture methods such as solitary, and we wouldn't care so much about being 'tough on crime'. We need to refocus our justice system on the criminalization process so that we reduce the importance of 'correctional' facilities. There is nothing utilitarian about the above story, let's not deceive ourselves.