Would I be able to join the IRC channel with Element/Riot? How would I do that?

Well, not all hackers are anarchists (in fact I don’t think the majority of hackers are). So I didn’t want to put it there.

For example, ESR is a classical liberal, many of the hackers who post are Marxist-Leninists, and there are even some hackers who are conservative.

Manjaro has done some shady things. I think Mobian is more promising.

https://lemmy.ml/post/38078

Hahaha I’m the one who wrote that paragraph.

If anarchy means no laws or anything,

Wait wait wait. Anarchy means lack of hierarchy, not lack of laws. Put very simply, anarchism is a philosophy that combines revolutionary socialism with egalitarian direct democracy and a libertarian commitment to individual freedom.

what if people naturally form their own governments? Is that not allowed?

The hope is that once people experience anarchy they won’t want to go back. Forming your own government is allowed as long as you get the consent of the governed (which is not likely in a successful anarchist society because people would be perfectly happy not to be governed)

won’t the people with the most physical power rule the world?

No, the people with the most numbers rule the world. Because one man/woman with lots of physical power is no match for a mob. Dictators don’t rise by strong-arming the populace, they rise by gaining the support of the populace.

Surprised that Scala and Haskell are so low on that list, given all the hype for functional programming. And Elixir/Erlang aren’t even on the list

Nobody was getting rich off the workers in USSR. There was no generational wealth, and top pay was capped at 8x lowest pay. Politicians and administrators also weren’t the highest paid professions in USSR. Labour was predominantly directed towards socially useful work and the benefit of the state.

Do you have any unbiased, well-researched sources for this (not USSR propaganda)?

I’m open to suggestion as to how a better system could be formed, but I have not seen any working alternatives so far. The reality is that the world is ruled by capitalist empires that will actively work to tear down any socialist nations as soon as they form. Any more liberal alternative to Marxism-Leninism has to be able to defend against that.

The whole idea of “socialist nations” is very antiquated and impractical; instead of building “socialist nations” through violent revolution, we should aim for socialist spaces within the framework of a pluralistic society. If people can experience multiple systems of social organization for themselves, they will be able to decide for themselves which one is superior. For example, we should build free software (like Mastodon), we should build co-operatives and communes, we should establish info-shops and bookstores, etc. Eventually, when people realize that socialist societies can succeed at small scale, they will be more willing to support us, and our spaces will grow in power. Only at the point where the majority agrees with socialism can we begin talking about breaking away from the state, i.e. revolution.

Why do they write system monitors in Python? Do people realize that when I’m checking a system monitor that means my computer is running slowly, and I don’t need a super heavy Python script to make it run even slower?

When people think of socialism they think of pictures of gray buildings and limited variety in clothes and consumer goods.

Are you sure? Because I think of something like this:

I’d argue that we have clear evidence that the communist model works quite well in the physical world. Consider what USSR managed to accomplish in an incredibly short period of time. Russia went from a backwards agrarian society under Tsarism, through the devastation of WW2, to being the first nation in space. USSR was a world leader in technology, and it was doing it on a far smaller budget than capitalist US.

I would argue that the USSR was not truly communist or socialist since it also exploited workers - it was just the government exploiting workers, instead of private corporations. Russia’s rapid industrialization was due to the fact that Stalin was literally willing to mass murder peasants who didn’t give up all their grain to the government so the government could give it to factories and industrial projects - a policy that was incredibly brutal, but worked.

A pattern I’ve noticed in history is that the speed of industrialization is dependent mostly on how much state power is aligned with the bourgeoisie (in “communist” countries they may not call themselves the bourgeoisie but they certainly act like it, pursuing “development” and “progress” over all else). In Britain, the enclosure movement used massive state power to force peasants to give their land to large landowners to be farmed more efficiently and forced peasants into the city to take up miserable factory jobs. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s forced collectivization and grain confiscation did the same. And today in China, the same is being done.

In many ways Marx was very right. Nobody but the bourgeoisie (or a “communist” party that acts like the bourgeoisie) can successfully pursue industrialization, because a (democratic) socialist government would never have the brutality and coercion required to successfully force a drastic and unprecedented change of lifestyle for the majority of the population.

While it’s true that mass scale exploitation under capitalism can increase the amount labour that’s generated, a lot of that labor ends up being applied towards things that have questionable value to society. As with your example of clothing production. Capitalist model creates a huge amount of waste because companies need to continue selling new clothing. A socialist model would simply produce less clothing that lasts longer, which is far more efficient.

Touché. Agree on that one.

Guess it’s time to whip out EMACS like a real hacker…

Sadly I can’t figure out how to configure any editor but VSCode to have decently ergonomic IDE like features, so it’s VSCode for now :(

• Google with Chrome OS (Gentoo, Wayland, GNU/Linux and a ton of other open-source apps and libraries) and Android (Linux)
• Most web servers run open source operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux)
• Widely used languages in proprietary software development: C/C++ (GNU Compiler Collection, clang/LLVM, GNU libc, Boost, and a ton of major math/graphics/etc libraries), Python (cpython, Django, numpy), Ruby (Rails), and PHP
• WebKit (Safari) is a fork of KHTML, and Blink (Chromium) is a fork of WebKit, so both Chrome and Safari are based on KHTML, which was a (now discontinued) open-source browser engine developed by the KDE project
• Darwin (foundation for macOS, iOS) is derived from BSD

These are just a few examples off the top of my head. There are many more.

Many people (e.g. Eric S Raymond) would argue that this type of efficiency gain from switching to a communist economic model is only experienced in the software industry. The reasoning behind that would be that software (and other digital contentworks) has special traits: it is cheap to produce and infinitely reproducible (the economics of free software are essentially post-scarcity economics).

On the other hand, certain industries, like the mass production of clothing and mining for precious metals, would massively lose out as a result of a communist economic model because they can no longer extract maximum value from laborers by underpaying them and must provide quality working conditions, which would result in a decrease in productivity. Additionally, there would be an allocational problem: if a resource is scarce, where should it be sent, and for what purpose should it be used?

It should be noted that I’m not intending to criticize socialism in any way - it’s just that socialists should gain a better understanding of economics so that socialism can be presented as a highly sophisticated alternative economic system rather than some knee-jerk ramblings.

EDIT: Crossposted your post to /c/debatepolitics in a shameless effort to promote my community :)

I use sublime

uses proprietary software to avoid Microsoft

It’s a replacement for UNIX users. Basically, instead of adding yourself to /etc/passwd, you create a file called /home/<username>.home. This file is an encrypted archive containing your home folder and a file called .identity that contains your group memberships and other user attributes.

The idea is that you can pick up your “home file” and plop it on any system with systemd-homed and it should work without further intervention. It also makes it incredibly easy to encrypt your home directory.

Oh goodness, I write TypeScript in VSCode, use Github at times, and package with NPM. Microsoft has got me!

I license all my open source server code with the AGPL, and all the better if Google can’t steal my work :smiling face with sunglasses:

Kate and KDevelop aren’t half bad and they’re pretty lightweight, although I personally use VSCode because of intellisense support for a variety of languages.

GNU, Linux, Python, KDE, Firefox

Manjaro

Aged like milk :)