The tools I love are made by awful people
80 points by abhin4v
80 points by abhin4v
I’ve been working on a general purpose OS project for years, and will still be working on it for decades, inspired in part by these same frustrations.
Here’s the problem: funding. We could have great things, but nobody can afford to do it full time and live comfortable lives, take care of their families, see any financial growth, etc. These companies do, because it’s their business model to do so.
Ranting is fine, but until that problem is solved, good technology free from the burden of predatory capitalism (or however you want to spin it) will take many multiples more time. And that’s assuming they can be solved.
Yes, this.
Funding for marketable products always outpaces funding for genuine advancement, by a factor of literally millions to one.
You have a great idea? If someone doesn’t think it will line their pockets, or threaten their gravy train they aren’t interested. In the latter case they pay you to fuck off and most people do ($20m? Bye future)
good technology free from the burden of predatory capitalism (or however you want to spin it)
Whenever I read something like this, I reword it in my head as “free from the burden of human nature”.
That’s what the real complaint is about. But it doesn’t sound as good when you put it that way.
The biggest problem with funding is deciding what to fund. There are good projects covering everything mentioned in the article, but clearly none are good enough for this author. Which one do we fund? Or start something new?
How would you like funding to work?
I don’t have an answer to that. I’m not equipped with the knowledge to even guess. Just that it’s indeed a problem worth solving.
Have you explored funding options? I was able to raise quite a lot of money within the existing system. There are many ways to get funding.
For open source, where there is virtually no deliverable or guarantee of one, and where profits are not a focus at all?
You’re telling me getting funding for that is easy? (It isn’t, I know for a fact, because I’m surrounded by people trying to solve the problem).
If there’s no deliverable why would anyone fund it under any economic system? That isn’t an issue of capitalism.
That said, there is presumably a deliverable - some sort of novel research, or novel value of your OS. There are many research grant options you could explore. Early on when I was raising money I considered taking R&D money from the airforce, for example (there are a lot of government R&D funds, I’m sure others exist as well but I didn’t explore much), but I went the VC route instead. There are research grants and all sorts of R&D funding but, yeah, you need to deliver something.
You’re telling me getting funding for that is easy?
I’m sure it’s hard, but it’s hard to get funding regardless. The more you can demonstrate value, yes, the easier it is. If you can demonstrate profit, that opens up a whole other line of funding too.
Anyways, I agree that there should be more funding opportunities and easier access, certainly. It’s a tough problem.
If you can demonstrate profit
That’s exactly my point. OSS isn’t profit driven. There’s no profitable deliverable.
I feel like maybe I wasn’t clear, I’m saying that demonstrating profit opens up more funding opportunities. Not that it’s a requirement.
Of course that’s the case, it’s just a company at that point though.
Hm, I’m trying to be clear here that profit is not a requirement to get funding. Profit opens up more opportunities, but you can get funding without it. There are R&D projects that receive funding. But they all have to show value. For example, the government invests in R&D because they want to make use of the value - I mentioned the airforce fund, that’d be one of many such examples. Schools also are given research grants to fund these things. In neither scenario do you need a profitable company.
There is a related paradox: FOSS on its own cannot create the kind of computing systems we need. Those efforts require medium and long term funding, usually with few strings attached. Linux has become the sort of Ur-system in these conversations, but at its core it is a Unix. Unix did not emerge from the goodwill of a community of open source hobbyists. It came from a well funded research culture that no longer exists. This loss is tragic because it has left the computing world in a kind of stasis that most have become blind to. Even the original Unix team had moved on to more interesting ideas with Plan 9 and Inferno (to say nothing of all the other promising systems out there). But because our culture demands short term profits above all else, we have built all of computing on what is available, and on what can be modified in the shortest amount of time, with the smallest amount of effort, at the lowest cost. This applies to FOSS as well. Hence the dominance of linux among its commercial peers.
Just as the original article hints, the problem isn’t technological at all. It’s a matter of political economy.
Well said. In case you happen to have a blog and need encouragement, I’d absolutely read an article exploring this topic.
I have tangentially touched this topic in a book review I wrote years ago [1], but also in a documentary film I made with some colleagues [2]. For the latter, we were able to film about 14 hours of sitdown interview footage with Alan Kay, and he touches on these issues quite a bit.
[1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-long-view-surveillance-the-internet-and-government-research/ [2] https://messagenotunderstood.com
Interesting! Is the movie available somewhere? Quick search didn’t provide much results for me.
Until that day arrives, I have to learn to live in a state of tension with my tools. I have to acknowledge and accept the fact that I use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things.
You’ve been defeated by mere inconvenience. Honestly, try harder if you really care.
Yeah. I could have written this same post the year before I actually accepted the burden of learning Linux. I’m not an “it just works” guy, every little thing that doesn’t work represents probably an evening or two of dedicated tinkering to fix. That’s just how it is, perhaps on some happy day it will not be so but that isn’t today. Every thing I fix gives me a bit more knowledge about my system - that’s the mentality you have to have, you’re investing in a system that grows with your knowledge of it.
I’ve long believed that the rise use of Linux in the 1990s was because of a wealth of perfectly good hardware that was either functionally obsolete due to Windows requirements or seen as obsolete due to marketing. This enabled enthusiasts to repurpose this hardware for FLOSS OSs. But crucially, the reason this hardware was developed and built at all was because of Microsoft Windows being the dominant operating system!
That’s got to be a major factor. I can run a nice server on a Raspberry Pi, or an old laptop or PC.
But the reason use I Linux as a daily driver is convenience. It’s easy. I can configure it how I like. And BIG factor, NO ADs, no pushing me to do things the hard/manual way, to maximise cost to me.
Much of the rise of Linux in the 1990s was due to companies using it in products. Enthusiasts were not paying people to develop Linux and write drivers, companies were. Often government funded companies.
I didn’t come to Linux until the mid 2000s, but what drove me in to Linux was the desire to learn more and control more about how my computer worked. man pages were so empowering compared to Windows help or having to get a book. apt was an entire world of choices and free software you could learn from! This was incredible for those of us who didn’t live near a major tech city and know about or have access to a lot of resources in person.
A thought: You might approach this as less of a semi-annual battle, and more of a long term war/campaign.
The first thing that changes is the notion that you have to do everything at once. Small changes added up over time are much more likely to result in long lasting change than a burst you fully retract every time. For this, it might look like switching one program a month to something you’ll be able to use on a different OS. Or finding one task to take analogue. Eventually you might find yourself in a much better situation to step away from a given piece of software than you would have expected a year previous.
Another thing it opens up is the possibility of more direct actions you could take to lower the influence of those organizations. For instance, I’m currently volunteering with a local chapter of the Software Freedom School, to help provide teach people alternatives to the things provided by megacorps. It’s a small thing, but taking agency and building bonds with other folks who share your desire to see a thing changed is a great counter for the apathetic malaise that comes from not being in a position to do something about things that bother you on a deep level.
Keep your eye out for opportunities to help change things. There won’t always be an opportunity to do so, but they might come more often you might expect if you’re not watching for them.
I’ve read countless of these posts or comments and I don’t like them at all. These basically boil down to:
“I hate this company/capitalism (usually for some fuzzy reason) and I tried switching to an alternative I deem moral, but at the slightest difficulty I moved back so I want the government to threaten them with guns to change their product in a way I personally like.”
I like Apple products and I don’t like forcing people to do what I want on a whim. I don’t like Microsoft and I don’t use their products even if it’s inconvenient. I’ve refused good job offers from companies I didn’t morally like. Not once the thought of forcing private organizations to do what I personally want has ever crossed my mind. Isn’t this the real tyranny?
If this comment is too off topic for this site tell me and I’ll remove it.
I want the government to threaten them with guns to change their product in a way I personally like.
We must have read completely different posts
Apparently government policies are violence now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence is a thing, actually. I have no opinion on that, but it’s an interesting concept to know.
I’m aware of that concept, but to say it applies to all policies like the root commenter is doing is pretty dishonest, imo.
For me at least (and possibly the above poster), it’s hard to see how all government policy is not ultimately backed by violence.
Argument: If you openly violate a government policy (no matter how small or benign) and they decide they do not want you to do that, they will take some action against you. If you resist that action, they will enact another, ad iterum, until the last government action is akin to “have a team of men with guns knock down his door in the middle of the night and take him to prison.” If you resist that action, that group of men will use violence against you. Therefore, all government policy is ultimately backed by violence.
I agree with this in some extremely limited, literal sense, but also we all know that “government threatening someone with guns” has wildly different connotations than “mundane regulation”. If the objective of their communication is to be clearly understood, then they should consider something closer to the latter. If the goal is to mislead, then 10/10, no notes, keep on keeping on, etc.
While I disagree with the top response, this part is not just true in a limited literal sense.
Apply it to any other entity, and it’d be seen for the coercive force it is.
Imagine the biggest company in the world wants to buy up all its competitors or even potential competitors. That’s its policy. Even if they start off by offering money, then more and more, then penalising non-sellers with blocking their apps on its stores, then more and more harsh penalties, then send enforcers with guns to their private residence to kidnap them and lock them up in a tiny cell, etc., and that’s the clearly outlined policy and escalation procedure, even if all their competitors sold instantly at the first offer, it’s still severe coercion.
The whole point is that there’s no such thing as “mundane regulation”, so it’s that side that’s being dishonest when they try to minimise the coercive structure of what a state is. For any proposed regulation, you have to ask, if they fight to the end not to comply, are we willing to enforce it with our maximum enforcement methods? Ignoring that is disingenuous and dangerous.
It’s like that bit from parks and rec or one of those sitcoms, “because of the implication”, edit: but more severe, because a) it’s not merely implied, this is the explicit way the government works, and b) unlike that character who claims, “I’d never do it, of course”, the government will do it, and in fact, it’s the routine way they operate.
I don’t think anyone really disputes that laws are fundamentally coercive in a literal sense–everyone understands that laws require enforcement and that enforcement is literally coercive. That we don’t talk about it every time we invoke the word “law” isn’t dishonesty (as you claim), but rather people rarely elaborate about implicit details (for example, you used plenty of words without unpacking their every implicit nuance–does that make you dishonest?).
And yes, democracies have a monopoly on violence which implies that corporations are not allowed to use violence. On the surface that may seem terribly unfair, but the key distinction is that under democracies, the governed have a voice in their government. Democracy is imperfect to be sure, but it’s the most just form of government humans have discovered to date–certainly more so than government by corporation.
And more concretely, I guess I’m okay with a government using force to prevent corporations from selling poisoned food or enslaving their workers. That seems eminently better than allowing a corporation to use force to enslave its workers or acquire competitors or whatever. A state monopoly on violence seems optimal (read: “least bad”).
The whole point is that there’s no such thing as “mundane regulation”
I mean, do you find prohibitions against slavery or murder to be terribly controversial? Do you complain that the government is “threatening you with guns” when you just want to enslave your neighbor? Presumably not, right? It seems like concern about the government “threatening someone with guns” when it comes down to regulating corporations, billionaires, etc and that seems dishonest/disingenuous to me. If the rule is that we have to discuss the coercive nature of law enforcement every time we talk about regulation, then we necessarily need to wring our hands about the coercive nature of prohibitions against murder, right? Anything less would be disingenuous.
You’ve made several (almost certainly unintentional) misrepresentations and false assumptions in your comment.
That we don’t talk about it every time we invoke the word “law” isn’t dishonesty (as you claim)
I don’t think not talking about it every time the word law is invoked is dishonesty; that’s a strawman. My exact words were, “so it’s that side that’s being dishonest when they try to minimise the coercive structure of what a state is”.
“Minimisation” here is not referring to simply not talking about the coercive nature of how states work every time the word law is invoked. It’s referring to comments like these:
We must have read completely different posts
Apparently government policies are violence now.
I’m aware of that concept, but to say it applies to all policies like the root commenter is doing is pretty dishonest, imo.
which are responding to the top comment’s characterisation of the article:
“I hate this company/capitalism (usually for some fuzzy reason) and I tried switching to an alternative I deem moral, but at the slightest difficulty I moved back so I want the government to threaten them with guns to change their product in a way I personally like.”
None of these are simply choosing to not elaborate about the implicit fact that all government regulations as coercive and enforced via violence, they’re making a positive claim (or implication) that the top commenter’s elaboration is false.
“Minimisation” is also referring to people (in general) who are way too eager to make regulations without seeming to consider that, which is why some people feel the need to explicitly elaborate it, because there are people who seem to believe that, which the responses only demonstrate.
And yes, democracies have a monopoly on violence which implies that corporations are not allowed to use violence. On the surface that may seem terribly unfair
The issue I have isn’t particularly the unfairness of states’ monopolies on violence.
It’s unfair that a teacher in an enforced educational establishment has the monopoly on teaching despite the possible presence of a student who knows more than them; they might happily be corrected by the student on something, but that’s their choice, and they still fundamentally have a monopoly, even when they’re wrong.
This doesn’t immediately then mean that the student has a moral right to go up to the whiteboard, force the teacher to sit down, and start teaching instead because the teacher was teaching falsehoods. The teacher’s monopoly is legitimate, even when what they’re teaching is wrong, hell even when it’s unfair.
but the key distinction is that under democracies, the governed have a voice in their government. Democracy is imperfect to be sure, but it’s the most just form of government humans have discovered to date
I disagree that democracy is the most just form of governance, both on the meta and object level (though it can be hard to disentangle the two, especially because things might fall under the object level within the democratic way of thinking and the meta level within a competing paradigm or vice versa, or even be in a grey area within one paradigm).
However, I’m happy to grant for this discussion that it is the most just, and most efficient, and best represents the will of the people if you care about that — a monarchy way of thinking might argue that monarchy best represents the will of kings, after all — and stands above the competition in all the universally acknowledged virtues, plus the self-identified virtue of representing the people’s will.
And more concretely, I guess I’m okay with a government using force to prevent corporations from selling poisoned food or enslaving their workers.
Well, sure, and this is why I disagree with the top response. When @nomnp said:
Not once the thought of forcing private organizations to do what I personally want has ever crossed my mind. Isn’t this the real tyranny?
they went way too far in the other direction in my opinion. My point is that the right response to their comment isn’t to deny that laws are coercive, it’s to point out why it’s justified (especially) in the instances pointed out in the article.
I mean, do you find prohibitions against slavery or murder to be terribly controversial? Do you complain that the government is “threatening you with guns” when you just want to enslave your neighbor? Presumably not, right?
Right, and I hope that’s clarified in this response.
It seems like concern about the government “threatening someone with guns” when it comes down to regulating corporations, billionaires, etc and that seems dishonest/disingenuous to me.
I’m sure I’ve heard this concern come up about the war on drugs, for example, or the second amendment, but I’ll be charitable and assume that not only is it your personal experience that it most gets brought up when it comes to regulating corps/billionaires/etc., but the data shows that to be the case everywhere.
There could be other reasons for that, like using other arguments which may be more domain-specific. So, maybe drugs and 2a, for example, the people arguing against all the, in their eyes, overly strict laws and regulations, feel that, rather than people being unaware or too inconsiderate of how coercive the law is there, the opposition has done too effective a job at convincing the general public that the harms of drugs or guns or whatever outweigh that, so they basically skip to that discussion and spend all their time talking about how overblown the harms are or arguing about whether the school shooting epidemic is an inevitable outcome of guns or whatever.
It hurts me to know that the tools I share such a deep connection with are made by corporations that exploit workers in developing countries, greenwash their products while generating tons of electronic waste, fight against the rights of people to repair their possessions, engage in malicious compliance when governments try to regulate them, spy on their users, hold their users’ data hostage, and commit a long list of other crimes that would take too long to recount here.
[…]
Things will only change when democratically elected governments across the world step in with regulation, drag Big Tech through the courts, and fine them billions of dollars.
While I feel some of these might be justified in being regulated, I can see how it can prompt some people to ask, “you seem way too happy to regulate everything, have you really considered what a regulation amounts to?”.
If the rule is that we have to discuss the coercive nature of law enforcement every time we talk about regulation, then we necessarily need to wring our hands about the coercive nature of prohibitions against murder, right? Anything less would be disingenuous.
That’s not the rule, and I hope I’ve clarified that, too.
That said, murder as an example there? Come on, that’s trivially respondable, anyone can see that escalating to force against murderers is more than justified; if force is bad, then murder is force waaay beyond force
and responding to murder with violence, even killing, which is far lesser than it, is hardly an overuse of the government’s monopoly on violence comparable with responding with force to tech companies not offering free data export to their users or even locking out any ability to export (i.e. “holding their users’ data hostage”).
If you want to prove (or ascertain) these peoples’ double standards, ask them about regulations on the little people that are comparable to these current or proposed regulations of big corporations, or dig up what they’ve said or done about them in the past (though I hate this option, I find people constantly trying to dig up the other person’s past speech or actions or lack of them to discredit them, while ignoring how much gets said or done privately for various good reasons). Are they equally speaking out or fighting against them well?
As for groups or ideological movements, it’s a bit harder to prove that their aggregate inconsistencies are always a result of double standards on the part of many or most individuals within the group, but there are ways to prove that, too; comparing the law against murder with regulations against corporations is not it.
For any proposed regulation, you have to ask, if they fight to the end not to comply, are we willing to enforce it with our maximum enforcement methods? Ignoring that is disingenuous and dangerous.
Quoting for emphasis.
there are cases where that’s not true
they can work with your employer or bank and just take your money. no input from you is required, and nobody needs to show up at your door with burly men
same for seizing assets. that’s more likely to escalate to violence, but if you simply refuse to hand it over (rather than escalating with violence of your own to stop them), they still take your stuff and don’t hurt you
and then there’s cases where they were giving you something (a grant, for example), and they stop because you’re no longer following the policy
It’s an hyperbolic phrasing that’s pretty common in right-libertarian political circles. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s definitely intended to evoke an emotional response. I’ve seen it in left-libertarian/anarchist circles, too, but it seems to be a more common rhetorical tool on the right.
Forgive me if I’m being patronizing by explaining it, but since this is a topic (political philosophy- both quasi-academic and “pop” varieties) I’ve actively immersed myself in for periods of time, I sometimes don’t know what things are common knowledge or not.
The idea is that all laws and regulation, essentially, boil down to threats of violence. The train of logic is something like this:
I won’t add more of my personal feelings/analysis here. Just explaining where that phrasing or point of view comes from.
It’s an hyperbolic phrasing that’s pretty common in right-libertarian political circles. […] The idea is that all laws and regulation, essentially, boil down to threats of violence.
It’s not a hyperbole, as your rundown illustrates. A government’s legitimacy derives in no small part (cynically, perhaps solely) from its ability to coerce the governed into doing what it wants. If you can just tell the government, ultimately, to piss off when it asks you to do something and it can’t or won’t do anything further, then you no longer have a government but instead a failed state. Obvious implications for current times are intentionally left to the reader.
The anarchist objection is specifically to rules and laws that we do not freely agree to. Communities have norms and rules, but you can surely see how laws backed by the state are different to a situation where you genuinely have a voice in shaping the community rules and a choice to leave the community and live in your own way if your differences are irreconcilable.
OP’s comment could’ve stood without the politically-charged phrasing, and would’ve been stronger, IMO :/
Things will only change when democratically elected governments across the world step in with regulation, drag Big Tech through the courts, and fine them billions of dollars.
Isn’t the ultimate logical conclusion of this just a threat of violence? Imagine that policies like these were applied not to a private company but to normal citizens? This already happens in most countries. Where do we draw the line? What if I don’t pay? Won’t armed policemen just come to my house?
Regulations make sense for things that damage other people (like poisoning water and so on). Not because you don’t like something.
Imagine that policies like these were applied not to a private company but to normal citizens?
This is the UK’s Online Safety Act.
What if policies like these were applied not to a private company but to normal citizens?
And what if pigs started flying? What then? Pontificating about extremes isn’t a convincing argument. You aren’t a billion (trillion?) dollar company, so this fantasy won’t ever happen. These companies do massive environmental AND social harms to everyone.
What do you mean? Extreme regulations are already in place here in Italy and it’s difficult to argue that this isn’t one of the biggest reasons that are making the country suffer from an economic standpoint. As we’ve seen from recent events in the US the damage can absolutely be caused by high taxes and tariffs.
It’s not only about trillion dollars company, my comment is about the morality of this type of regulation.
Then you’re putting everything in one basket: one thing is to force a company to make a product you like (and I don’t) using the government and another is to prevent companies from doing environmental damage.
Ok but you could say this about literally any change in law or policy whatsoever. And this article isn’t even really advocating for a specific policy change.
Also note that “a company” isn’t just a group of people working towards a totally neutral goal. It’s a group of people working g to generate profit for - in general - a different group of people. You’re performing a certain sleight of tongue here.
Well…
Things will only change when democratically elected governments across the world step in with regulation, drag Big Tech through the courts, and fine them billions of dollars.
If you think about why a company might agree to pay a “billions-dollar fine”…
I dunno. I agree with you in this case, because I don’t think it is particularly hard to use Fedora/Ubuntu.
But there are situations where companies do practically coerce you. For example building factories close to where you live, poising the waters you used to swim in and locking away roads you used to walk on.
Or maybe if you’re concerned about health issues with plastics in food, try to avoid not eating food with plastics. It is practically impossible.
In many parts of Latin America, almost all bookings are done with WhatsApp, its very hard to not have it there.
In Sweden, you practically need an android/iPhone phone to authenticate yourself to the government websites.
To me it’s a case by case basis. Sometimes I think people need to step up and accept some inconveniences to make a change. Sometimes I think you need to push for policy instead.
The poisoning and all of this is a completely different matter because it affects you even if you don’t interact with the company. It’s not some “social” thing either. If they poison your water they’re actively harming you and the use of force is then justified.
So the government mandates the use of a smartphone and somehow the fault’s on the smartphone maker? The government’s the only organization that has legal power over you.
Yes, everyone uses WhatsApp here in Italy too, but I’ve never said that it would be easy. I removed instagram and got cut off from some social relationships. I have a mortgage to pay and I could really get that job that paid more, but in a company that does morally bad things.
The things to keep in mind are: does this justify the threat of violence? Am I completely objective or am I only doing this because it currently benefits me? Obviously we’re human, but we should try to be as objective as possible when proposing this type of political ideas, applying the same standards to any human being, not just ourselves.
The poisoning and all of this is a completely different matter because it affects you even if you don’t interact with the company.
You yourself just enumerated how these other things affect you (social relationships, job opportunities) even if you aren’t interacting with the company. And not in trivial ways, either. Arguably, in ways even more impactful than environmental poison, depending on how harmful the poison is. I don’t see any bright line difference at all.
The poisoning and all of this is a completely different matter because it affects you even if you don’t interact with the company.
The problem is that you’re practically forced to interact with either Apple’s or Google’s smartphone software. This isn’t the case when it comes to desktop computing for multiple reasons. Linux is a perfectly usable daily driver (at least for now, until Web Environment Integrity is implemented). I would agree that the OP simply wasn’t trying hard enough to stick with it. But more importantly, having a desktop computer is not essential to participating in modern society, and a significant portion of the population doesn’t even have one. As Steve Jobs once said, “you can throw [your computer] out the window if the relationship isn’t going so well”.
So the government mandates the use of a smartphone and somehow the fault’s on the smartphone maker?
The government didn’t invent our reliance on smartphones. Government-sponsored apps aside, it’s still difficult to argue that you can meaningfully participate in modern society without an Android or iOS phone. And would there really be much of an issue with that, if the companies involved always played fair? (I still think it’s a huge mistake to mandate smartphone use by law just based on the principle of it, but I’m failing to see how it would have much real-world impact considering smartphones were already de-facto mandated by private companies and society at large.)
In Sweden, you practically need an android/iPhone phone to authenticate yourself to the government websites.
I’m pretty sure a phone + service subscription is included in the basic economic assistance you are entitled to if needed in Sweden. And I believe the cheapest Android phone that can run BankID is in the order of €100.
The point isn’t that people don’t have access to phones, the point is you need to be in either Google or Apples ecosystem to access Bankid on mobile. It’s not supported on other Linux phones.
Bankid on desktop is only officially supported on Windows and Apple.
Compare this to banks. It is impossible to function without a bank account in a modern western society, yet all the banks where you can get one are commercial. This is considered less of a problem because banks are heavy regulated and there are rules to ensure everyone has access to them. They are not forced to use other services from the bank, nor are there requirements to purchase other commercial products or services.
Kinda related, it’s apparently not that easy as a newcomer to Sweden to get access to banking, partly because you need a personal number, and partly because of increased KYC scrutiny. And without a bank account you can’t get BankID.
Trying to change things itself is not tyranny. These companies exert huge power on us under the name of “freedom”. But everybody doing everything they want is not freedom since things I want to do may prevent others to do what they want to do. It’s impossible to have unlimited freedom for all. There needs to be some restrictions so that everybody can have basic freedoms and strong entities don’t control aspects of our lives.
Not sure I agree with the “at the slightest difficulty”, not speaking about this particular example of the post.
But that’s usually a gradient and I’m not sure people correctly convey how much it impacts them really (both exaggerating and playing it down), so I personally would be a little cautious there.
That said, I think everyone has many principles that are either hard or soft rules. I stopped using Chrome, but I am only very mildly inconvenienced, which is not /a/ reason, but it certainly makes me smug on my fiery foxy horse. But I also tried to de-windows my current gaming PC. The games per se run on Linux, but it’s not stable enough yet and there are several small things that break the full-time switch at this time. And I hate it. But standing for my principles would kill a lot of the enjoyment and sabotage the whole attempt at doing things I enjoy…
I agree that it’s a spectrum. For example: there’s a particular software license I don’t like for a specific clause included in it. I use some software distributed with this license because it’s a small thing, but I try to avoid it when I can.
But I think that if you really believe something is bad and you can avoid it (i.e. it’s not mandated by the government) you should avoid it.
But I think that if you really believe something is bad and you can avoid it (i.e. it’s not mandated by the government) you should avoid it.
This is one of those “we live in a society” comments.
I want the government to threaten them with guns to change their product in a way I personally like.
I dislike reflexive “capitalism bad” content as well, but I didn’t see anything in TFA that says anything like this. Can you quote the bit where it argues the government should threaten them with guns to change their product?
As a meta note, I saw this article when it was posted and considered removing it because I thought it might just lead to a political flamewar. But it started from making technical decisions and had a clear focus and point, so I hoped we’d do OK.
I wanted to highlight pan excellent comment](https://lobste.rs/s/fkw9va/tools_i_love_are_made_by_awful_people#c_3egkcq) by @koala that added context to the spiciest part of the post and led to a great thread exploring its political perspective without having a fight.
I actually posted that without thinking- I kinda regret I posted that now. Although I believe that the philosophy of politics is a fascinating topic, that I think that you can have interesting civil discussion… and that I completely miss having a community where this topic fits… if I had thought twice about what I was posting, I wouldn’t have- too much risk. (Although I’m glad apparently it turned out ok.)
(edit: s/pan/[an/ in your post, btw.)
There was no code in this article, there were no diagrams, and the bloody title of the article is “The tools I love are made by awful people”–we don’t even get through the title without namecalling or moral judgement.
How did you think this was going to end, sir? We’ve got people surprised (apparently) about the monopoly of force by the state and reinventing state violence from first principles. Is this really topical?
Yes.
Your link isn’t working for me. Was the comment deleted by chance?
It’s this bug, should be sorted in a couple days.
Just for fun, here’s a bookmarklet for the meantime that scrolls to any linked comment on the current page :)
javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20cmntUrl%20%3D%20document.URL%3B%0Avar%20cmntId%20%3D%20cmntUrl.slice(cmntUrl.lastIndexOf(%22%23%22)%20%2B%201)%3B%0Avar%20cmnt%20%3D%20document.querySelector(%60%23%24%7BcmntId%7D%20.details%60)%3B%0Acmnt.scrollIntoView()%3B%7D)()%3B
Can you expand on that instead of just linking to an old meta thread?
What in particular about this submission do you think makes it topical, and what in particular about this submission makes the discussion “surprising” when it veers off the rails into the novice political science hour?
The link to the specific comment is broken right now, but I was trying to link to my comment about not having a heckler’s veto. This is an article about how the author made a decision of what system to run. We tend to have have pretty good discussions when posts start from a specific situation and refer to politics, and pretty bad discussions when posts start from political principles and try to derive technical decisions from them. I prune threads when things get heated or head way off-topic towards “defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world”. They’re harder conversations and valuable because of it.
So I tend to be pretty relaxed about descriptive comments that link off to more material and tend to remove normative comments that litigate political positions here. Lobsters doesn’t have special expertise about politics, but we’re also not an elite cadre about core technical topics, either. We have a lot more experience and knowledge, and we see obvious errors in stories and comments every day. If I moderated to enforce correctness about tech or politics, at best I’d quickly embarrass myself with my own limitations and more likely I’d demolish something precious. Or to put it another way: it’s OK that we’re ignorant and fallible, everybody is and a healthy community gives us opportunities to learn from each other and improve.
threaten them with guns
The worst that could happen is that the company is fined, or that they simply pull out of the region in question. Nobody’s going to be assaulted. Do U.S. companies have some inalienable right to sell their products in every region of the world without regulation?
I kind of agree. I think I usually tend to be less extreme about it, but when I try to think objectively about the problem, it’s as simple as that: you don’t like them? Don’t use their product. I try to do it, and I try to be honest with myself when it’s inconvenient so I don’t avoid the “bad company”, pun intended.
99.5% of the time, I avoid meta products. Just click back. But I fully use WhatsApp, cause I’m too lazy to actually call my friends and relatives on an actual phone. I avoid e.g. Microsoft, and avoid GitHub, yet I tolerate LinkedIn because it’s relevant to my future.
So I agree with the sentiment, “don’t like them? Don’t use their product”, but I would like to add the bit about being honest about my own duplicity.
[Updated to strike out my reply. Read pushcx’s meta-note, instead.]
If this comment is too off topic for this site […]
Not a mod, but your comment is definitely off-topic. Take a look at the moderation log, for example around 2025-03-01 10:37 (page 5 or a bit further back): you’ll see lots of comment deletions with reasons like “Pruning off-topic political argument.” or “Political arguments aren’t topical here.”
[…] tell me and I’ll remove it.
That seems like a good plan – the less comments get added to this thread from now on, the less work for the mods.
The “tyranny of convenience” is subjective, and a large part of it is probably just familiarity.
For the two examples: I write notes on paper because I find it more convenient - there’s no pre-designed structure and I can just braindump. All digital task trackers etc feel inconvenient in comparison. I use Linux exclusively and couldn’t get used to Mac OS when I tried, because it’s strange, the strangeness is not customizable, and it keeps changing under my feet.
Now if I was already used to one of those things it might look different.
In general, what’s the point in switching if there’s no subjective benefit right away? Stick to what works for you and get good at those things, rather than switching around constantly in search of some holy grail (or philosophical / ideological ideal etc)
I have a similar post somewhere that I need to write down about how despite my annoyances with the emacs community (and don’t get me started on rms), there really isn’t quite anything like it.
I’m surprised I’ve been using Emacs for… more than two years now? And I have only had a single isolated episode where I rolled my eyes…
(Emacs has surprised me. I should recommend it more. It’s unfortunate that Emacs is not designed for more common keybindings [there’s CUA mode etc., but I feel that will always be an uphill struggle.] There’s a lack of great non-modal OSS editors.)
I’d read this if it is based on the current state of the community.
Is rms even, like, that relevant to the emacs community at the moment? The past several years have seen a ton of momentum, and I barely see his name mentioned in any of it. Prot is a far more prolific figure in the current community than rms for sure
RMS comments in the Emacs devel mailing list pretty frequently. I wouldn’t say he’s steering it or even making many decisions, though - 9 times out of 10 he’s just part of the discussion rather than dictating anything. He doesn’t chime in on everything, and he doesn’t always get his way on decisions, but he definitely has outsized influence.
I’m not complaining, btw. I’m not a big rms fan, but it started as his project, so it’s only right that he has some input.
Interestingly, I once sent an email to the Emacs mailing list and I got a couple of replies from rms. The replies were completely normal and useful.
However, I noted once an odd behavior in Emacs. I found a bug closed as WONTFIX and the rationale completely boggled my mind. But that wasn’t rms.
I am not saying your preferences are invalid I’m just incredibly confused?
I switched from Mac to Linux because of convenience and it wasn’t until a few years later that I even started becoming aware of Apple being “bad” (in my defense I was young and ignorant). Linux has always felt like a much better programming environment than Mac.
I switched from VSCode to Zed because of disliking Microsoft and was happy to find that I liked Zed much better so long as I turned off autocomplete. The downside was that it didn’t have Jupyter notebook compatibility but I just used spyder for that and while I switched because of ethics I stayed because I liked the tools. I switched from Crome to Vivaldi to Zen browser because of purely practical concerns - I like the zen workspaces and configurability and speed.
This week I switched from safari mobile app to quiche mobile browser purely because I wanted a better bookmarks system. I learned after downloading it that it is developed by one individual person but I wasn’t surprised because in my experience solo devs and small companies are just much better.
The ONLY time that making the switch from an “evil” company has been a “hardship” was Google to DuckDuckGo. Google is evil but such a damn good search engine.
I know that preferences for tools are subjective. I’m just so surprised to see an experience totally opposite to mine.
The reason we can’t get away from it is because it is everywhere. Pick a few businesses to punish by withholding your love and don’t worry too much about hypocrisy.
Compensating people for their work is imperative for me.
It’s really hard to compensate people for that work when I don’t receive— or, don’t have the leverage to demand— adequate compensation for my own work for others, yet some people for whom I do work want to pay me less or not at all, expecting me to charge others more to subsidize the gap.
So, I have to pay people who are less likeable because they’re cheaper than paying people who are likeable, because I try not to be the customer— or friend— who asks for a discount. Maybe that’s a personal flaw, but it’s more of a systemic problem that no economic model fixes without creating a cornucopia of other problems.