• 4 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power

    MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control

    Are these not different words for the same fundamental concepts?

    I fail to see how “the state” and “capitalism” aren’t just a more developed form of “structures” and “agreements”. And if the community decides punishment is an appropriate response to breaking an “agreement”, how is that any different from “coercive control”?

    And if you’re community gets large enough (say even like a couple hundred people), how are any decisions gonna get made even remotely efficiently?

    Feel like you’re a hop skip and a jump from a representative democracy. And as soon as bartering becomes too inconvenient, I’m sure a new “agreement” still be made to use some proxy as a form of current and boom now you’ve got capitalism too.






  • If someone makes a dangerous product, it is reasonable to expect them to include appropriate safety features to reduce the risk their product poses to society.

    The “victims” here aren’t the automobile manufacturers, they’re the people whose cars got stolen and those who were run over by a reckless joyrider or shot in a drive-by enabled by criminals having easy access to insecure, easy-to-steal vehicles. These are all people who wouldn’t have befallen harm if these vehicles had standard anti-theft features.

    The reason nobody’s talking about suing bike manufacturers is because nobody was stealing bikes and riding around shooting people or crashing through the sides of buildings.

    I think there is absolutely a legal argument that anti-theft features are critical safety features in cars, specifically. Not sure whether that argument will hold up in court, but it’s not anywhere near as straightforward as “bike manufacturers don’t have to care about theft, why should car manufacturers?”




  • Completely agree on the notion of the community needing “good faith” over “kindness”.

    A discussion forum loses much of its value when even a modest percentage of its userbase isn’t participating in a free exchange of ideas, but rather evangelising their favorite ideas or beliefs by abusing the tools provided by the forum in bad faith to promote or suppress ideas that respectively support or contradict their ideology.

    It’s one thing to present your contradictory/minority beliefs with supporting evidence to the forum in the hopes it stands on its own, and quite another to coordinate w/ others or create alt accounts to invade that forum and create an illusion of consensus through voting/commenting accordingly.

    It doesn’t matter whether the ideology is white supremacy, communism, or even something apolitical like preferring Linux over Windows – astroturfing and bad faith interactions of any allegiance are toxic to a discussion forum.




  • I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he’s missing something.

    He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don’t want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:

    1. Taking an “ends justifies the means” mindset (e.g. stepping on the “growth” gas pedal and accepting sloppiness because it will get better later with Labs)
    2. Letting “objective facts” justify big subjective decisions w/o much consideration (e.g. thinking the Billet Labs video didn’t need to be re-shot because the “objectively” product rec conclusion wouldn’t have been different)
    3. Substituting actual solutions to problems w/ commitments to solving them (e.g. implementing “Accuracy KPIs” instead of slowing the pace of video releases)

    None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.

    I’m sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who’s acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.

    Here’s hoping this leads to positive change.


  • I try to structure my commits in a way that minimizes their blast radius, which usually likes trying to reduce the number of files In touch per commit.

    For example, my commit history would look like this:

    • Add new method to service class
    • Use new service class method in worker

    And then as I continue working, all changes will be git commit --fixuped to one of those two commit’s hashes depending on where they occur.

    And when it’s time to rebase in full, I can do a git rebase master --interactive --autosquash.


  • I’m absolutely thrilled to have sync on the Fediverse, and will happily pay for a yearly subscription to help ensure LJD has sufficient compensation to keep the app up-to-date with whatever changes come to the Android/Lemmy APIs years down the road.

    The problem with (even excellent) free apps for platforms like this, is they require consistent maintenance to keep up with both the platform they run on (Android), and the platform they serve content for (Lemmy). That is not a trivial amount of work, and is absolutely deserving of continued, recurring compensation IMO.

    A one-time payment might make sense for a simple native game that gets produced once, has no web component, and never needs another update for its entire lifetime, but not for this. You aren’t paying for a singular product, you’re paying for a service. You wouldn’t go to the barber and winged about needing to pay every time I get my hair cut.




  • This.

    I think of buses as the caterpillar to a tram’s butterfly.

    You can start with a comprehensive bus network, and as a particular route stabilizes and the bus starts struggling to meet throughput needs, that is an indicator that a tram may be worthwhile.

    Starting w/ a tram line is a pretty big financial bet that it will be useful/needed, as once you build it, you’re locked-in to that specific route.