self @ self @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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so I got angry

I really hope atwood’s unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, I’m fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever

@mawhrin@awful.systems summarized it nicely but if you want some fresh abyss to stare into, here's some links to fedi posts with details:

• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6AHA0BNBBX616JGDJHYET36
• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6E3G2Z19M82BWRB3SPADHP9
• https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115286316219357517

this is a great first post, and it touches on a lot of things I've struggled with as well.

there's a concerted effort on several fronts to grant fascist interests an unassailable position within community-oriented software projects; that effort is usually backed by powerful corporate interests, as you've already seen with DHH and the takeover of RubyGems. simultaneously with that, and nearer to my own heart, the long-running project to make NixOS and nixpkgs unworkable for anyone but corporate and military interests has gone fully mask-off and started coordinating and talking openly about their plans to make Nix fully a fascist project. I have a longer piece I'll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there's interest, but in short: this is a coordinated attack, and it uses methods that have been tried and have succeeded many times. programming communities are being turned into fascist pipelines for many of the same reasons the fascists targeted punk and furry communities, but thanks to being founded on horseshit cyberlibertarian principles and unexamined conservatism masquerading as engineering, our open source and educational communities are uniquely primed for takeover.

for the fascists, of course, any sufficiently isolated community will do. the health of the community and its projects don't matter; the fascists are fine with communities that cannibalize their own and technology that barely works or doesn't work at all. the quality of nixpkgs has dropped sharply since the fascists kicked out the skilled marginalized people keeping the project alive, and every project started by fascists I can think of has been broken and worthless. the fascists don't care: they're here to weaponize a community in both the metaphorical and the very literal senses, and whether or not anything of value is left once they're done is of no concern to them. the isolation works in their favor: it lets them employ all their usual tricks to turn a community on itself. that those tricks were eventually beaten by large parts of the punk and furry communities means there's hope in fighting off these assholes -- but most likely the changes that need to occur will happen in new communities, founded under better principles.

from your post, it seems you've immunized yourself against the game development to fascist pipeline, which is very lucky. you now know what dogwhistles and tricks to expect from most of the fascists you'll run into in programming communities. I saw that Corbin recommended picking up functional programming or a non-Algol-derived language in a sibling comment and from an educational perspective I can recommend that, but unfortunately a lot of functional programming communities tend to be either utterly pro-AI (because they think they're going to inherit Lisp's prestige) or are being pushed towards fascism (look for weirdos who aren't mathematicians obsessing over how pure lambda calculus is and you'll see the red flags) -- if you want a fresh abyss to stare into, search our instance for posts about Urbit if you want to see our efforts at documenting one of the earliest attempts at entryism into functional programming. of course almost any functional language (other than Urbit) will be more rewarding to learn than whichever reactionary Go-but-memory-unsafe language these guys wanted you to learn as an attempt to isolate you further.

while I have no general solutions to what's happening right now, there's a few actions I'm taking that I hope will lead to better things:

• from now on, my software will all be very queer, very political, and utterly poisoned against corporate exploitation.
• while it's not always practical to switch off of these fuckheads' software immediately (our instance still runs on NixOS, great lock-in they've got going), remember how often we've been told that software communities run on advocacy. these fuckheads don't deserve your advocacy or your labor. as far as is practical, give them the opposite. kill the evangelist in your head.
• healthier communities exist, and they're worth our time. they're not large, but you'll meet some of the most gifted people imaginable there -- and all of them most likely have an experience or two similar to yours.

for that last bullet point, I can recommend the better parts of Mastodon -- avoid the tech instances like the plague and focus in on the queer ones with techy users. our instance also has an attempt at a homegrown tech community organized around healthier principles called FreeAssembly, which never quite got off the ground because the fascist takeover of the Nix project happened right after it launched, and then ahaha everything else happened after that, and I never got the chance to kick off that community properly. I still recommend Mastodon because it's established, but if you'd like the same experience as here but in a community more oriented towards posting about personal projects or programming in general, FreeAssembly might be worth a try. I'm finally finishing some of the software I meant to post about way back when we started FreeAssembly, and I'll be writing those up for that community fairly soon.

he keeps hanging out with fascists and receiving money from organizations that support fascists and something about his personal brand in interviews being wearing “Big Tech is gangstalking me” t-shirts also very much rubs me the wrong way

ladybird is a ridiculously unserious project (last I heard they were considering a rewrite in Swift and ignoring everyone who told them why that’s a terrible idea, maybe they’ve given up on that by now) and I frankly have no idea why it’s being hyped over Servo as an independent browser project other than a general willingness in tech to play ball with weird little fascists

e: also this lobste.rs subthread

shoutouts to @dgerard@awful.systems and @mawhrin@circumstances.run for reminding me that Steve Klabnik being really shitty isn’t a temporary state of affairs

you have 16 posts on Lemmy and most of them are you Genuinely Curiously JAQing off about shit you already damn well knew before going into the thread so lol no nobody owes you a fucking explanation

@froztbyte@awful.systems is coming in a bit hot, but they’re not fundamentally wrong. @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems, you’ve received some pointed but good feedback on your writing style recently in MoreWrite and in other threads; I think you’ll be able to make much the same points more persuasively if you incorporate some of that feedback. I also recommend breaking out of doing predictions; I think you might get more mileage and variation out of a journalistic approach, and either way we know from crypto that prediction is a bit of a fool’s errand. these fuckers will remain irrational long after we’ve gone bankrupt, etc.

I’m not gonna force you to do anything; if posts like these are what you’re comfortable with then it is what it is. I just feel like if you break out of your current pattern, you’re capable of achieving great results.

who the fuck are you again? what in the fucking world made you think your 14 comments and 1 post meant you got to decide who gets to have an account here?

no

you know I fucking hate the classism implicit in the common telling of the hitchbot story

“wow! this robot made it just fine through the richer parts of Europe and Canada but the instant it touched Philadelphia they tore it apart!” good. they had better things to do than engage in your weird fucking roleplay.

this is a garbage can with telemetry

all of the technology that came after it is also a garbage can with telemetry

Really hope nobody here did that.

if anyone from here did then they’re fucking banned, but I need better evidence than none and a standard for anti-Semitism that doesn’t include views that are just anti-Zionist and anti-genocide with no hatred behind them

only if you hate fun and embarrassing the shit out of Taco Bell

I've just enabled authorized_fetch; give it a try and see if it works!

I'm finally on desktop and the tooltip claims "show hidden posts" and "hide hidden posts"? so that's new

this might be a federation breakage, or the queue catching up

I have yet to see any roving Brave infosec mall ninjas react to the fact that they plan to do this agentic AI shit too:

Brave gets credit for finding this exploit in Comet, so well done! But how did they find it? Well, Brave is trying to do its own AI agent web browser. Even though this is a fundamentally stupid idea that cannot be secured.

it’s definitely slightly more modern (derogatory) but I don’t think I can agree on it being sleeker

my lemmy came preconfigured for eyes? where we’re going we don’t need eyes

god somehow it’s even worse in the inbox — the whole thing turns to a gigantic placeholder every time you mark a post as read. it’s such a React problem for software to have