dingus

dingus, 9 months ago

Wow, I’m so shocked that Democrat turnout is depressed in *checks notes… states that go out of their way to gerrymander so only the Republicans can win, and use authoritarian tactics and putting Yes Men in key positions, have laws like it being illegal to give water to people standing in the voting line, and in general violently repress their Democratic constituents.

Gee I wonder why those votes might be depressed! It certainly has nothing to do with a system that has already been rigged against them! /s

Being real though, that’s purposeful on the part of Republicans. They want Democrats to lose hope. Makes their job easier.

dingus, 9 months ago

Right, but the fact that people in red states have to fight that buffoonery tooth and nail every day is part of why they’re tired and feel like voting is hopeless.

dingus, 9 months ago

BG3 isn’t quite as thematically awesome as Disco Elysium, but it’s close.

dingus, 9 months ago

Well it did take Klingons a long time to become allied with the Federation. Just give it time.

dingus, 9 months ago

These were debunked like three years ago, I thought. Was a little surprised to see them being shown off by Mexican authorities as though they were real.

dingus, 9 months ago

Man, I’m so glad that the Border Patrol is using my tech to violently abuse refugees! It’s extra awesome that they sent back some modifications! I love it when I get help from *checks notes… fucking Nazis.

This is a joke, right? Cool beans that the people who decided to use the code for nefarious purposes helped make it cleaner. /s

Seriously, that’s really pathetic for an “upside.”

dingus, 9 months ago

Nobody listened to Negativland enough when it mattered. They helped develop Creative Commons licenses and were pretty much the spearhead for the “no attribution but you can’t use it for commercial purposes” license. I’m not sure if that one even exists anymore, but it seems like Creative Commons is also pretty dead-in-the-water these days. They understood the need to define ownership and be able to say “No, corporations can’t just use it freely.”

dingus, 9 months ago

Valve probably stands at the company who has “given back” the most in recent history (making Desktop Linux viable for the first time ever, mostly through gaming), but even Valve has corporate America skeletons in their closet. (Like the only reason they have a decent refund option now is because Australia basically forced them, and they had to change their flash sales for European laws.)

dingus, 9 months ago

Negativland helped create a Creative Commons license whose purpose was literally that. You didn’t have to give attribution to the original artist, but you were disallowed from using the work for profit/in advertisements/et cetera. The issue is backwards copyright law that says the only way copyright should be distributed is through ownership and capital. We need a copyright law that respects the original creators intent, if they don’t want it used commercially/in government. Not all of us are Tom Waits (who famously refused to license his work for commercial purposes) and happen to have the money to fight misuse of our creations in court.

dingus, 9 months ago

I don’t hate Valve, but let’s be real, they’re not adding to Linux out of the goodness of their hearts: They’re doing it to protect their profits because they see that Windows is quickly becoming more closed and has its own Xbox gaming storefront. It isn’t about belief in Linux as a product, it isn’t about improving it for everyone, it’s about improving it enough for gamers so that Steam won’t be eventually locked out of the digital games sales market by Microsoft. They’re basically just buying their way out of the vendor-lock-in of putting their store on someone else’s proprietary operating system.

I don’t think Linux desktop usage jumping from 1% to nearly 3% equals “everybody wins.” Sounds like to me a lot of fuckin people are still losing. Like 97% of them at least.

dingus, 9 months ago

I’m not the one who said “everybody wins” in regards to private corporations adding to open source projects while also not making clear what people are “winning” from it.

dingus, 9 months ago

Exactly.

dingus, 9 months ago

Both parties come before a judge, accusing the other party of misusing your software. Border patrol says the immigrants are endangering american people with crime etc. ,and the immigrants accuse the border patrol of violent beatings.

I agree with this except the refugees categorically aren’t using software if they’re at our borders with empty hands. The only argument that would matter in the court was whether or not the CBP was breaking the software license. The refugees aren’t in a position to use the technology, and as such, arguments about whether or not they’re violent are immaterial to the legal question of whether the Border Patrol broke the license and illegally used the software.

While I agree that in the end, it’s a decision by the courts, you’re still detailing the answers to how it would be handled based on how copyright currently functions and I’d wager with a re-organized and re-written copyright law, you’d have a lot fewer instances of being able to argue that.

I mean, we have court cases that never make it anywhere all the time based simply on the idea “standing.” Hell, our legal system doesn’t even respect the idea of it even though they reject it half the time. Conservatives wholesale made up someone refusing to make web pages for a “gay couple” who turned out to be a straight guy who never wrote such an email and the Supreme Court swallowed it and said “fuck standing, we’re giving him standing because we’re corrupt fucking assholes.”

So what I’m talking about includes legal system reform as well, which would preclude a lot of ability to waste developers time by illicitly using their work and then taking them to court over it.

dingus, 9 months ago

He also didn’t predict a class of people born with no labor to sell because so much of it has been automated away. How are they supposed to use their labor as a bargaining chip if they can’t find labor to do to begin with?

dingus, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The point is the claim was “everybody wins.” My point is “everybody” at best is 3% of the population who gives a shit about having control of their own software. No, mostly corporations win. Consumers get some fringe benefits at best. I’m not seeing regular people become multimillionaires simply because they use Linux instead of Windows. Mostly its weird fucking shut-ins.

dingus, 9 months ago

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. -Adam Smith

If you think Guilds would solve security problems instead of just propping up security theater, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

dingus, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.

Uhhh, Google Workspace isn’t FOSS and the only FOSS Office project that has market share is Libre Office with a whopping…1%.

Chromium may be “open source” but Google is definitely trying to make a walled garden, especially in respect to ads, and Chrome rules the roost. Chrome itself has plenty of proprietary software in it.

How is this any argument for something else? Your examples are weak, MS Office does rule the roost, and Chrome only rules the roost due to it being a Google product, not because of its open source bona fides.

Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.

Android is literally the reason bloatware from phone developers made a resurgence. It made modern phones worse than the shitty proprietary OSes driven by shitty phone manufacturers from the 90’s to 2007. Google allows manufacturers to install applications you can’t uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.

How did that benefit consumers? To get a decent Android phone, you’re paying a shitload of money, just like you would be for an iPhone (a completely closed source product) and iPhone at least doesn’t have software bloat from your phone carrier/phone manufacturer.

Further, Google is literally attempting to use their web dominance to make it nearly impossible to implement ad blocking with Manifest v3. Their ad profits are more important to them than FOSS. How is denying the ability to block ads a “benefit” to consumers?

dingus, 9 months ago

I don’t disagree, but a “guild” is not it. Engineers in other disciplines have to actually have “engineering” credentials. Software engineers do not, but it sounds like they probably should considering other engineers are held to standards. The States have their own engineering boards to give out and monitor engineer license status. Why isn’t there one for software engineering? There needs to be, but it need not be a guild.

dingus, 9 months ago

That requires some technical knowledge that most people simply don’t have.

dingus, 9 months ago

I agree with this take, but Google does stand pretty tall on Open Source. Android is technically the most widely used Linux variant in use.

dingus, 9 months ago

That would have required a lot more of my labor than I was willing to give to it.

dingus, 9 months ago

You’re right, but the thing is most of the time companies do horrible things to boost their profits. Like Unity in the last few days. Valve doing seemingly pro-consumer things to protect their profits is a rarity, and it’s really only a side-effect that there’s consumer benefit. They aren’t doing it to benefit consumers, they’re doing it to preserve their marketplace. It’s a side effect that it gives consumers more options. Valve is an unusually forward-thinking company when it comes to its long-term viability.

dingus, 9 months ago

Except this is really reductionist and ignores there is very little “open hardware” out there, and few people producing it. So while you might have access to the “means of production” through software, you absolutely do not in hardware.

Great that software tools are in the hands of the worker, but the means to fabricate the machines that code runs are definitively not owned by workers. (To say nothing of issues with getting drivers for a DIY motherboard working with Linux long-term.)

Also, not everyone is born to code, so it’s a bit elitist.

dingus, 9 months ago

That last bit makes a lot of sense, actually, about not having enough licensed P.E. to work under for four years or more. That’s kind of a bummer, because the person I was responding to isn’t wrong, we’re handing the reigns of sysadmin duties to a lot of relatively under-trained folks.

However, on the flip side, the fact that we don’t have such a thing is part of what makes the internet so open. Literally anyone is allowed to make their own website.

dingus, 9 months ago

“How did you get in here?”

“I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith. The unstated part of this joke is that us locksmiths make locks super easy to crack, we just don’t share the details with everybody.”

A lock is just a suggestion. A determined thief will find a way beyond it.