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I'd like to propose here that we stop to say "America" when we mean the US.
#America is a great #continent, rich and manifold with excellent people of diverse cultures and a history that proceeds the #US for millennia. We should not confuse this with a terrifying #empire which is spreading #fascism and plunging the whole #planet into a nightmare horror scenario.
#StopSayingAmericaForUS #USempire

@jenniferplusplus @zeank There will not be a tourism benefit for far future generations wanting to see data centers.

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

@adbenitez It's just the systemd crowd reinventing the wheel, as usual.

@adbenitez Debian is stable. But KDE isn't. And no, that didn't change much after Plasma 6...

@mclare If you are interested in the field in general, thesearch.space has a few excellent podcasts.

@mclare do share what you end up finding useful. I write code as I see fit, maybe refer to metalevel.at/prolog but I am just a dabbler.

@lxo
>but I didn't expect the religious connotations of "repent"
I personally don't consider it as such, I just know that some people consider FSF guideline/rms as the most extreme thing possible as if it was a sect, while it's just what computing is normally.
Thus why I would use another word.
#ilovefs

free software is a wonderful conceptual framework that enables users to have control over their digital lives, instead of being subjugated by others through the software they use

there's this one person who figured out the ethical, social and political problem with nonfree software, and showed us the path to freedom

it didn't make everyone happy, of course. those who wanted to keep their power and privilege first ignored him, then laughed at him, and then fought him in very very dirty ways.

a number of people fell for the lies used to attack him, and foolishly made the attacks against their own freedoms stronger.

others knew they were lies, but joined the lynching for personal advantage.

on this day of celebration of free software, I thank everyone who didn't join the lynching, and stood firm in defense of free software, even from these ad hominem attacks against our movement.

I also thank those who came to realize their error, publicly repented, and worked hard to undo the harm their error enabled.

@adbenitez FWIW, it eliminates the need for separate auth too.

quantum computers are around the corner! 😓 beware of your non-post-quantum-encrypted messages!

@mhoye Sure, but as evidenced, they *are* actually giving something back to us -- so these are the good guys.

Let's get mad about all the 99.99% of free software contributors who have not received anything out of donating their time and expertise to the open source ecosystem.

@xgranade The issue I always have with this discussion is that the people making 100 000 - 300 000 dollars per year (myself included) don't actually meaningfully engage with the material problems of the far less fortunate people, presumably in the same class as them, that do not. People simply stop at "we are all part of the same class" without engaging with the basic reality that making that much money unlocks a great deal of privilege:

1) One month of my salary would be a debt-destroying, life-stabilizing, unfathomable amount for many people.

2) Jobs which offer this much money are not only privileged due to money, but due to being much less precarious. Some people here may say "ah but I'm at risk of layoffs all the time" but being laid off from a full-time, professional, 9-5 job with benefits is not the same as working 3 jobs with no benefits and variable hours.

3) People making this salary have a greater opportunity to put money into investments and retirement savings. As a basic example, people in Canada have the opportunity to open a Registered Retirement Savings Account (this is a tax-free savings account you contribute your own money to, not a pension). Every one of my professional friends has one, but across Canadian society, the participation rate in this contribution program has hovered at 30% for years.

4) People living in high-cost-of-living areas who make closer to that 300 000 dollar income say that a large part of their income is spent on essentials such as housing, so really the income does not stretch that far. But the natural next question to ask is: What are the people who don't even make close to 300 000 in your city doing for housing? (The answer, often, is that they can't live in your city.)

5) It is much, much easier for people making this amount to become a part of the owner class, by accumulating the capital required to do so.

6) The sense of alienation when someone is talking about engaging in an experience or purchase that you could never afford, as if it's a normal thing, is indescribable. I always come back to this article from an organizer describing very frankly her experience working with well-meaning people who are much more economically privileged than her: theguardian.com/global-develop

Without acknowledging this, you end with up with political movements that are vaguely leftist but that are dominated by people who are far more privileged than the people they purport to serve, not least because only certain people have the time and capital to politically participate in the first place.

The @nlnet GenAI policy is the only one I've come across so far actually making a clear statement on the incompatibility of LLM outputs with open source: nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/g

Have any of the big license organisations (thinking OSI, FSF, Creative Commons) said anything like this (either pro or anti)? Can LLM-derived code be released under the GPL if you don't know where it really came from?

Or would org funders (I'm thinking of Google, MS, etc here) disapprove of such statements?

@corbet Very tough.

But such content mills can be reported in some places - e.g., blog.kagi.com/slopstop

How realistic it is to keep up with the slop? Unclear.

But validated "small web" sites (which is another layer Kagi supports) might be a way. Back to curated Internet site lists as if it's the 90s again!

The only Minority Destroying this country are the billionaires

toot.yosh.is/@yosh/11580926144
When people say: "billionaires shouldn't exist" that isn't a call to violence. "Being a billionaire" isn't some inherent property in the way that say, skin color is.

Wealth taxation is a perfectly acceptable way of eliminating all billionaires. That doesn't mean billionaires stop being people, they just stop being billionaires.

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