Generally speaking, the statement “Tankies made the X face the wall” is true for all X. Anarchists, monarchists, fascists, capitalists, Mensheviks, Jews, Doctors, poets, authors, musicians, peasants, soldiers, factory workers, Marxists, Bolsheviks, wives and children of all of the above, and eventually even Stalinists.

I feel like libertarians would love the concept of FOSS and decentralization, and I don’t think anyone would argue they skew left.

Yup, there has always been a large libertarian contingent in the OSS community.

Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they’re Marxists. They’re also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

I mean, it was more like over the course of a millennium, starting with the Roman destruction of the 2nd temple. I’m sure it picked up with the Muslim conquest, but that wasn’t the start of the diaspora.

What’s funny?

Seems to break along subreddit lines.

According to Zionist logic, the West would be justified in annihilating them to the last man, civilian or otherwise.

Ah, this person is pointing out the irony of Israel defending a total war against an entire people, in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’. That’s certainly a reasonable point to–

From the river to the sea.

Oh wait they’re actually calling for genocide, they just disagree with the radical Israeli Right over who ought to be genocided…

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I’ve installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can’t remember ever having a compatibility issue. I’m sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it’s still 2005.

They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!

That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.

These days there’s 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don’t even have to know ls to use it.

Fair. I’ve worked in tech for just over a decade now, and I’ve only been in the polar opposite environment, and found it sorta suffocating. Everybody knows this guy is pumping out crap, and every bug in the system comes from his part of the code, but well…if anybody says it, or even hints it, they’re being unnecessarily confrontational, and nobody ever gives anything but positive feedback in peer reviews.

I feel, from my limited experience, like the 90s might have been peak machismo rock star hacker work culture, and the pendulum has now swung to the very far side.