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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2024

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  • Imagine you are an expert in software engineering, and imagine I asked you, “How do you build an app?” How would you directly answer that question?

    Moreover, if it was obvious to you that the person wasn’t really interested in how to build apps, but they actually doubt it’s possible to build apps at all and they just want to waste your time arguing with you would never get your app approved on the App Store or something like that, how much detail would you be willing to go into about how to build apps? Would you take them through the whole process, start to finish? Would you point them towards resources they could use to learn how to build an app?

    I answered the question quite extensively, with explanations and caveats. It should be very clear that while he (and you) may disagree with me, I am not making these arguments in bad faith, I’m not trolling, and I’m not being particularly rude or breaking any rules.

    I’m definitely not playing any “games”, I’m just explaining my position the best way I can, but I’m also not trying to waste my time arguing with people who have zero genuine interest in taking what I say seriously.




  • It was a message I accidentally submitted before I had finished writing, then deleted so that I could continue to write it, but by the time I finished it, I was already banned. It was something along the lines of “I don’t really think you’re arguing in good faith here, because as you said, you “knew” before even starting this conversation that I wouldn’t have any practical ideas”, or something along those lines. If there’s any way to un-delete it I’d be happy to do that, if you know how I can? Or somehow recover the original text?

    Edit: Never mind, figured out how to undelete it. Original comment is restored. I accidentally submitted just that fragment instead of a longer message I had intended on replying with.





  • Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”

    it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.


  • You’re so totally wrong. Storing passwords in plaintext is such a dangerous, obviously wrong mistake that it can only be considered wanton disregard for the safety and the security of your users, and it should carry the equivalent of a life-in-prison sentence for the corporation which breaks that rule. Not only should the company be completely fucking destroyed over this but the CEO should be criminally liable.

    The legal system does not take corporate crimes seriously at all. Perhaps it’s time to take justice into our own hands.



  • Right now it looks like a pack of dogs barking around thinking they’re witty and clever for doing so.

    Sure, but that’s pretty much any online community. We’re doing it right now. You did the exact same shit in your original comment where you called the GitHub commenters a bunch of children. We are the dogs in the mirror, if you want to change that culture, be the change.

    Personally, I don’t think that being a smarmy prick in the comments of some corporation GitHub repo is “bad behavior”. It’s definitely not as bad as profiting from the exploitation of unpaid or underpaid labor, anyways.

    When corporations destroy lives, it’s “just business”. But when people refuse to act civilly towards or about corporations, it’s “childish” and “immature”. In that case, I am very proud to be an immature child telling the adults that they’re brainwashed obedient drones complying with the will of then ruling elite.



  • You’re acting like releasing the WinAmp source code is like some sort of great gift to open source devs, lol. It’s a community that works based on a set of rules and expectations, if the company doesn’t want to meet those expectations, then an appropriate response is to bully them out of the space (or to bully them into meeting those expectations)

    Projects are not entitled to be received gratefully and respectfully if you treat open source devs like a disposable source of free labour.

    And the concept of “civility” in the face of corporations telling us what we can and can’t do, can well and truly get fucked.




  • The internet is worse than it used to be. Free internet services aren’t free because corporations want to help people out. They’re free because they’re trying to out-compete people who want to just help people and make the world a better place.

    The early internet was a glimpse of how our world could be if we all just worked together, shared resources, followed our passions and collaborated to make cool things. There are still plenty of examples of products and services provided entirely free by people who do so just because they want to.

    We get to see, in real time, what it looks like for private corporations to enclose common land, but digitally. And now people are forgetting - or maybe they didn’t even know to begin with - that all the shit that’s now covered with ads and has horrible design patterns - all used to be free.


  • Thanks for the well-considered and thoughtful response - I appreciate it.

    Just to clarify, I’m not trying to make some typical liberal argument that China is evil or anything like that - I’m very far left and I’m not here just criticising China just because that’s what the mainstream media has told me to do. I just think it does leftists like myself no favours to pretend that China is perfect and that we shouldn’t criticise it - and the essay linked above, in my opinion, seems to be a bit of a reflexive defense of China, rather than actually considering the criticism - to me it seems they are choosing arguments to support their position rather than letting the facts and their beliefs lead them to a conclusion.

    I don’t think we have to accept that any amount of imbalanced transactions of value necessarily guarantee that billionaires are inevitable - plenty of systems exist where there are “winners and losers” but the system itself reaches an equilibrium state. There are so many solutions which could be implemented to prevent billionaires from existing, and I would say that billionaires can only ever exist when there is a fundamental flaw in the society which produces them. It should be impossible to so thoroughly capture and centralise wealth and power to a point where an individual can have that much.