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

I find that degraded performance is pretty much always preferable to playing Russian roulette with system processes.

I wish I could just buy more RAM every time I hit a memory constraint.

EDIT: There’s a more general performance reason for using swap at the default settings (doesn’t cover every case but is fine for lots of situations). At the default settings it will start actively swapping at about 40% memory used. This is because the system actively benefits from the fs cache mentioned in the article and performance suffers in low-memory conditions due to the fs cache not having free RAM to work with. You’re waiting more on I/O (which has a big performance hit even with fast storage) as opposed to getting files from the cache. As RAM use increases, you can swap some of the less-needed program code to disk to keep more free space available for the disk cache. The default swappiness parameter might not be optimal for your computer/RAM use patterns and you might need to do some experimenting to find optimal values, but overall some amount of swapping is probably a good idea

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.

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)

The nice thing is, since NVIDIA licenses IP from third parties it’s quite likely that the most rational course of action for them will be to not respond. Either way, some number of trade secrets and IP owned by others that they’re obligated not to disclose will be disclosed, but if they do nothing, they can only be blamed so much for it.

I don’t really know why they tried for the ransom, but I’m excited that there will be better technical documentation for NVIDIA hardware soon though!

“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, territory, etc 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.

As far as I can tell, the only real bright spot is that without American hegemony global capitalism absolutely will be significantly more unstable, although as bright spots go, that’s pretty grim.

There are political premises embedded in the framing. It’s an intractable question up until you ask homeless 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”

This was honestly a terrible article. Social media is not now, and never has been, a genuinely viable way to organize. At best, organizers can use it as an auxiliary to spread info etc. This is what /r/antiwork was good for. But people tried to use it to actually organize. No. Organize in your community. Spread the word on social media.

The NYT’s basic thesis – this wasn’t going to make the leap to real organizing – was predictable even before the “collapse” (it still has 1.8m subscribers). Sorry if that bursts anyone’s bubble. Sharing content and consciousness-raising can lead to organizing, but how people were going about it on /r/antiwork was not realistic.

Of course, that’s to be expected. It was a lightning-rod for discontented workers. Almost none of whom have any organizing experience. It’s difficult to make good organizing decisions when you have no organizing experience.

The NYT’s way of exploring this, however, just amounts to a hit piece. After all, countless people reported standing up to their bosses in that subreddit and getting raises and improved working conditions. It does foment worker action and it was encouraging people to start standing up in their workplaces in a disorganized way.

The contribution this can make to organizing is lessening workers’ fear of doing anything at all.

The fact that the NYT didn’t cover this aspect and just focused on “quitting your job” and “hating your job” speaks a lot to their “journalistic integrity” in publishing this piece.

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.

Hostinger runs firesale first-year deals – like, under $5 – for certain TLD’s like .xyz or .online. The trick is that some TLD’s are also well-loved by spammers and you have to know which ones aren’t just going to get you auto-blacklisted. .xyz domains have caused me issues like this in the past.

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

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 shit just because they downloaded his software.

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.

I mean, the point of open source as against free software was to make it easy to make money off of. It’s a little contradictory to turn around and call developers greedy for wanting literally exactly what big companies want from open source – value – especially when developers are trying to keep the lights on and these companies are literally just trying to extract as much value as they can.

I can’t really view this differently from, say, workers being called greedy for wanting better wages. It’s the same. Of course people want to be paid for their work, especially if they’re going to be expected to maintain something important for a private, for-profit business – or depending on the code in question, hundreds to thousands of them – especially when we still live in a capitalist society.

Well, it’s early, I’m caffeinated, it’s on a topic I’m interested in, here are some takes

The author’s approach feels fairly abstract and I feel this undermines his analysis.

• It’s easy enough to psychoanalyze the scarcity mindset instilled from 5,000 years of class society, but also, actual individuals who are prisoners of class society still have to pay rent.

• He ignores the collective economic and political project of building a software commons – the “pay it forward” incentive of free software is that you know future work on your code will be public in a society that otherwise places absolutely no value on this. Seems kind of weird to act like capitalism’s approach to the commons isn’t a problem.

• He ignores that companies all over the world, as long as companies have existed, have rapaciously exploited to the point of exhaustion every single common resource they can figure out how to tap into. The risk that open source as such could become untenable because all it does is create value for shareholders is very real.

• This guy dismisses literally everybody’s ideas other than his own as irrational, psychologized reactions and tbh it’s kind of gross. His critique of Richard Stallman’s essentially libertarian take on why free software would matter is fair enough – who really wants to spend time defending Stallman anyway – but he ignores that even within the FSF Stallman is just one guy and that much of GNU and most of Free Software in general is not written or maintained by Stallman.

• He also misses the exploitative dynamic – parallel to dynamics in the non-profit industrial complex and in more traditional workplaces – wherein open source software developers are guilted into maintaining core infrastructure for hundreds of software companies for free or a pittance because of everybody relying on their ever-so-important code. This is also the same tactic used against workers who might consider withholding their labor for improved working conditions – has anyone ever observed the reaction to nurses or schoolteachers going on strike? “Won’t someone please think of the patients?” “What will families do?” etc etc etc. The end result is the same – some poor person with bills to pay generates vast amounts of wealth for private capital but still barely scratches a living by.

• But he also ignores the impacts on users, who are also victims of the exploitation of open-source, when companies skimp on R&D by using someone’s spare-time volunteer project without spending a dime to make sure it’s up to par and not spending a dime to make sure it’s being adequately maintained. This is how we end up at disasters like log4j. This affects working-class people’s lives literally because they have to interact with businesses that are built on top of volunteer projects that don’t have the resources to do Q&A needed for use in production. Because, again, disturbing amounts of important or critical infra are held together by volunteer projects. Why did this guy forget this aspect of the whole discussion? What companies do with their code matters because they monopolize social production.

• Dismissively psychologizing any effort to resist exploitation within capitalism as “trauma from 5,000 years of class society” necessarily presupposes the people considering using a proprietarian framework (within an oppressive class society that violently coerces all of us into participating in a proprietarian framework to survive) are not being exploited and are not struggling to survive

• You know who else takes the perspective that they don’t care if some company makes a fuckton of money off their work and gives nothing back? Well, academics with a bit of job security seem to be fine with it, because they keep creating permissive licenses named after their institutions – MIT, BSDL, etc – that them for their work. They don’t have to directly hack it on the market like the rest of us, so they can afford to be generous.

EDIT – also, this guy co-owns a privately held company with $7.9m in annual revenue and one of their main projects is maintaining Ruby on Rails so he is explicitly speaking from a position of like, extreme privilege and does in fact appear to be being paid for open source

a small ux request – is there any way to make it so that notifications clear when I load the notifications page instead of persisting until i manually dismiss them? Like maybe this could be a setting?