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@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.

@mjg59 Reading this and thinking about LuaJIT-FFI's approach, which is that instead of parsing C header files it defines a easily-parseable subset of C and parses that. You wind up editing your header files into long strings and passing them into Lua.

Maybe this "parseable header C" should be a cross-language standard.

@mjg59 We could trigger even more people by stating that using whatever the fuck the rust people cook up will probably be worse than what we have now.

@donaldball It's still a death dealing fascism machine, I'm not going to set the world on fire just so I can code faster, and I look with a lot of askance at the men who think this is okay.

@dckc @royaards how do we know it is not a joke? I understand "robots'd be expensive, so humans" but still.

@lxo I think such care seems to have great advantages down the road. e.g. Emacs packages simply have no equivalent.

@lxo it is a healthy success rate for a volunteer-driven movement!

But Sather et al never fitted into the big picture. And there were a multitude of them in free s/w, mimicing the scratch-an-itch nature of OSS. All that volunteer energy organized towards, say, GNUstep or Haiku might have made a difference; they could have written GNUstep(-only) apps in Sather/SmartEiffel/GNU Smalltalk. This not happening is what I was terming hubris, a lack of the care that made big parts of GNU work.

@lxo To explain my Sather-bashing bent of mind, I would rank project ideas by need in the GNU era and see if the needy ones got worked on.

A C compiler, libc, either Hurd or Linux, desktop environments, code forges. I think the first 2 worked out well (for society, but also for corporates). Maybe it should have been HaikuOS for the 3rd (better suited to society)! GNUstep was the right way for the 4th, since Apple didn't (couldn't) trip up libobjc. I guess it was a problem of plenty on the 5th.

@lxo oh, GNU and 0G are definitely not hubris! It is disheartening to hear websites have already started going away. BTW, and have a leg up at this with in-chat apps.

if you happen to have #GooglePlay on some device, please give #ArcaneChat a review so it gets more visibility in the main stream, your sacrifice getting your hands dirty with Google will not be in vain 🎖️

play.google.com/store/apps/det

#boostswelcome #pleaseBoost #boost
#foss #openSource #privacy #encryption #messenger

yeah, the mobile landscape is a horrible mess, with so many interlocked dependencies ensuring the soldier's boots remain on our faces forever 😞 operating system duopoly, locked down hardware, exclusive shops, tons of proprietary apps mandated by governments and businesses, antisocial walled gardens... it's very hard to devise a way out of this mess.

I still think 0G and GNU could provide us with a way out if people were to use their dissatisfaction with the growing pile of enshittified stuff to migrate en masse to an alternative that enabled them to run the stuff they want on hardware that's not locked-down and that doesn't track their every move; make and install and run and share apps of their choice like we did on PCs back in the day. it's the only way out AFAICT, but (i) we don't really have that kind of hardware available and affordable all over, and (ii) I see no evidence that people would even get to know about such an escape route. now, crossing subthreads, I don't think pursuing it is hubris either 😉

we can't count on websites remaining available. banking in Brazil has moved on, for one, and government is doing so. lots of "mandatory" communication platforms (WhatsApp, I'm looking at you, but thinking of Signal as well) are also (at least in part) locked to mobile devices. we're surrounded, and they know it.

@lxo mobile software is hostile to user moddability, and its hardware follows laptops in locking down the bootloader except tighter. Alternatives have no chance, unfortunately, even more so now that many websites refuse to remain websites on a mobile browser and push the app instead.

Neither GNU nor 0G can be expected to surmount these. Thankful even if just websites remain, with open laptops to access them on.

@lxo it was more about Sather, less about GNU, an example I wanted to call hubris-driven social initiative (no real need out there). I think the sort of social change that has democratic impediments probably is hubris rather than an actual alternative.

I agree GNU wasn't hubris-driven, and also that it succeeded. I never understood why people expected it to solve later challenges too! At best, GNU could have explicitly supported others tackling those challenges, like the criteria.

@lxo a long-winded way of suggesting that constructive initiatives should start at where people were before destructive initiatives took hold. GNU seems to have done exactly that in the Lisp Machine times. What else has done that since?

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