Marketing gets people in the door; everything else about the experience determines if they stay on the fediverse or not.

Why don’t liberals just spin up their own instance? Wasn’t that the point of making the code base open?

deleted by creator

Here’s another aspect of how crappy Lunduke is, as he literally always has been (seriously, I saw that guy speak at one of his first “Linux Sucks” talks IRL and he was fucking awful then too, I don’t know how people never picked up that he was a massive asshole). Danielle deleted those tweets because they contained sensitive information about Cassidy’s exit negotiations. It’s just crappy to both Danielle – on top of being a fucking transphobe – AND Cassidy to dredge them up from the Internet Archive anyway.

EDIT: I do like how Lunduke’s bootlicking ass admits at the very end that he can’t tell the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. Since the terms were published anyway – Cassidy has the legal right to do what he’s doing, but he’s still being an asshole about it. The first purchase agreement was totally reasonable especially for a project that’s likely to die. His revised terms make it clear he’s now just trying to bleed the project for money.

deleted by creator

We’re all going to be in for a nasty shock when we get the schematics and realize there’s simply no way to make those cards stable. (I’m joking, don’t harass me with anecdotes about NVIDIA cards’ stability)

“Multi-polar” literally just means there are multiple “poles” of power. This is in contrast to the “unipolar” world order the US set up after WWII. Unipolarity is the real historical anomaly here.

There is nothing inherently radical about wanting a “multipolar world.” Do you know why we wound up with a unipolar world to start with? The capitalist international system was “multipolar” up until the end of WWII. WWI and WWII were the result of “multipolarity.” America took advantage of the chaos to position themselves as world hegemon. This is not an inherently stable configuration for capitalism so it’s now falling apart after a few generations. Now we have “multiple poles” again when in reality having multiple great powers competing for power and influence has literally always been the norm.

It is plainly in the rational self-interest of every state other than the US to want a multipolar world, but in fact, all it means is the collapse of American hegemony. In itself, the collapse of American hegemony is fine, but we still should care about what comes after it.

In case anyone is confused, I’m not in favor of American hegemony, I think there is no winning within the capitalist world-system and literally the only bright spot of a “multipolar” capitalist world system in contrast to postwar American hegemony is that global capitalism overall will be less stable. But that’s explicitly not why Dilma Roussef et al want a multipolar world.

Decentralizing network ownership is the best way to go imho. Start building locally-owned and controlled networks! Then start building connections between them!

Users get to use networks on terms dictated by their ISP’s. My ISP blocks self-hosted email. They did so because it was not in their interest – spammers were using the functionality to run spam ops. They still allow for self-hosting, but as self-hosting becomes more popular, ISPs’ residential networks are going to become a security minefield and an increasing liability. They will tighten the screws on what people are allowed to self-host and how, or they’ll just make it painful to impossible.

There are political premises embedded in the framing. It’s an intractable question up until you ask homeless people as though they were, like, people. Dehumanization and exclusion of homeless people from discussions of how to help them are the norm.

You ask what “society” does with “homeless people” as though “homeless people” aren’t part of “society”

deleted by creator

See table “Email Hosting market share table” https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23

Google, Microsoft, and Godaddy collectively control 79% of the email market. You effectively can’t deliver email if they – the first two in particular – say you can’t. So every other provider has to dance to their tune. This is, at this point, an economic problem.

If you want to re-decentralize email, and the web overall, you have to figure out what to do about the increasing concentration of Internet infra into an ever-smaller number of hands. I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this.

I always turn it off. It’s literally never reasonably accurate and it gets in my way more often than it helps.

Nope. Web tech is designed from the ground up to give the end user full control over how they render the documents they are sent. That’s why the pages are sent without DRM to your browser using a well-documented standard and every browser has extensive infra to let you write code that modifies browser behavior and allows you to automatically edit the pages you’re sent.

Content creators are free to bundle ads with their content, and content consumers are just as free to strip the ads out and refuse to view them. This is literally how the Web was designed to work.

You want something else, go help Google kill the Web and replace it with DRM-infested walled gardens and let Google tell you how and when you can communicate with other users as the inevitable price.

Under most circumstances you can’t even call adblocking a DMCA DRM circumvention violation because for most web documents there isn’t even any copy protection embedded in the page??? (Might be different for YouTube admittedly since there absolutely is DRM embedded)

It’s literally as if as someone was selling their novel as an unprotected Word document, included a bunch of paid product placement in their novel, and then got mad and called it piracy when readers opened the Word document and stripped it out AFTER the users had downloaded it.

Of course this is different with YouTube and streaming video platforms in general since they generally have TOS that cover adblocking and they do bundle DRM. However, it’s up to the video platforms to actually do the legwork of implementing DRM and enforcing the TOS, and putting up with irate users who inevitably get screwed out of money for one reason or another or just have the user experience degraded in the name of intellectual property.

Why does nobody ever stop to ask what the implications will be of allowing actually-existing capitalism to fuck around with advanced biotech?

Isn’t that just survival bias?

Well, no. If they had not performed the largest Arabidopsis mutation accumulation experiment in history and had not carefully tracked all mutations occurring across a population of thousands of plants growing in controlled conditions across multiple generations, you might be able to argue survivor bias.

They demonstrated that germline mutations that affect actual functional proteins simply are not passed on half as often as mutations in junk DNA. That’s a pretty big deal.

Based on their description, this sounds like they rewrote ananicy in rust and added some kernel tweaks. I worry about NIH syndrome, since ananicy already exists and the other optimizations described could literally be done with shell scripts and udev rules. But it’s a nice idea and tbh actually very useful for low-end hardware.

I use more or less exclusively low-end hardware and for laptops/desktops without a lot of oomph being able to intelligently parcel out cpu time to applications that are actually a priority for the user is pretty important.

This kind of optimization is probably useless on anything approaching decent hardware, however.

The part that really stuck out to me was where companies started calling the developer of cUrl demanding he fly out to their sites to fix their stuff just because they downloaded his software. So many companies are making so much off open source software, almost none of them donate, and then some of them even have the gall to demand open source devs function as free auxiliaries to their enterprises

Right, but my point is, they learned about the pragmatic benefits of cooperation from the ecosystem the free software movement had already pioneered for explicitly political reasons.

Free software, for all the faults of the FSF, is valuable but not just because the development model can help companies cooperate where it makes sense and soak up contributions from the community – it’s valuable because it aims to establish ecosystems of software (and increasingly hardware) that allow people to use their devices on their own terms.

But that doesn’t matter to big companies who showed up and saw – a variety of ways to lower costs by externalizing them in a variety of ways (getting other companies to underwrite part of development, using open source without contributing anything back, in Amazon’s case, copying the competition to undercut them, etc) and spun off open source into its own thing that explicitly had no higher aims regarding the need to establish a copylefted software commons to safeguard user and developer autonomy.

Showing up to an economic and political project to build a commons and turning it into a corporate cash cow in a variety of ways seems pretty inherently exploitative to me. Also, it’s not mainly about AWS creating “Amazon Basics” versions of open source software, although that’s definitely an interesting one. It’s much more about situations like, for example, how so many people used, but nobody thought to fund OpenSSL until there was a catastrophic security bug and the only explanation was “OpenSSL can afford exactly one developer to maintain mission-critical encryption software for like, everybody, because nobody contributes back.” Only then did companies start pledging money to make sure their “mission-critical” infrastructure was up to snuff.