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[-] h14h@midwest.social 27 points 7 months ago

Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power

MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control

Are these not different words for the same fundamental concepts?

I fail to see how "the state" and "capitalism" aren't just a more developed form of "structures" and "agreements". And if the community decides punishment is an appropriate response to breaking an "agreement", how is that any different from "coercive control"?

And if you're community gets large enough (say even like a couple hundred people), how are any decisions gonna get made even remotely efficiently?

Feel like you're a hop skip and a jump from a representative democracy. And as soon as bartering becomes too inconvenient, I'm sure a new "agreement" still be made to use some proxy as a form of current and boom now you've got capitalism too.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 29 points 9 months ago

IMO there are big risks consuming news & opinion from any single source.

Whether it's the CCP manipulating the TikTok algorithm, Russia buying ad space on Facebook, or American conglomerates pushing narratives on western mainstream media, there will be implicit biases everywhere.

The only real answer is to get news from multiple sources with diverging perspectives, try to find where facts overlap, challenge your own implicit biases, and form a perspective in line w/ your values.

Seeing America blame TikTok for pushing propaganda is the pot calling the kettle black -- and honestly more of a distraction than anything else.

The real important issue is that people are dying, and the existing power structures are doing jack shit to stop it.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 3 points 1 year ago

Oof yeah was not aware of these at the time of my original comment.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

LMG (Linus Media Group) was making careless mistakes and publishing a lot of inaccurate data, sometimes going as far to not recommend or label a product as "bad" after misusing it. This was likely due to an unnecessarily rushed pace of video releases that came from prioritizing sponsor revenue over accuracy, which many feel is a pretty massive ethics breach for a news outlet that is marketing itself as a home for highly objective, data driven content (LTT Labs).

Gamers Nexus called out this behavior in a 40 minute video which kicked off all the drama, and Linus posted a kneejerk response on the LTT forum where he largely defended his behavior and conclusions and badmouthed Gamers Nexus for going public with these criticisms instead of sharing them privately.

A few days later, LTT put out a video that was almost entirely LTT leaders other than Linus admitting how bad everything was, sharing some details on their processes, and committing to being more transparent & taking a week off uploading videos to rework things. But the video also included some tone deaf moments, like a plug for merch and Linus talking for a bit where he sort of apologized but didn't really talk for long enough to acknowledge all of his fuck ups. He did say "I'm sorry" at one point which was pretty meme worthy.

The video was also monetized when it went up and the description had links to their merch store in it, which people called out as slimy and LTT subsequently removed.

Different people have different conclusions -- some think it was a total non-apology, but I personally am satisfied. To me all their issues were the result of bad processes/automation run amok, so their commitment to reworking their processes and being more transparent about them with the community is exactly what I wanted to see.

But that's just me -- I think there are many valid conclusions that can be drawn from this.

Edit: There was also a reddit post on Reddit made by a former employee, Madison, that made allegations of sexual harassment. If true, these would be extremely damning, and to my knowledge LMG has not spoken on them yet. I also am just learning about this, so I don't know whether these statements have been corroborated by anyone.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

No that actually helps a lot! I was actually trying to filter an entire instance, but thought I had to do so but putting the domain of that instance into "Domain Filters"

3
How to use filters? (midwest.social)

I'm having trouble getting community/domain filters to work the way I expect.

My goal is to be able to filter out certain domains/communities that tend to post spam and inside jokes when browsing "everything" (same way I used to filter out random communities from /r/all on Reddit) but adding domains or community names does not appear to work at all.

Is this a bug or am I missing something?

[-] h14h@midwest.social 64 points 1 year ago

I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he's missing something.

He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don't want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:

  1. Taking an "ends justifies the means" mindset (e.g. stepping on the "growth" gas pedal and accepting sloppiness because it will get better later with Labs)
  2. Letting "objective facts" justify big subjective decisions w/o much consideration (e.g. thinking the Billet Labs video didn't need to be re-shot because the "objectively" product rec conclusion wouldn't have been different)
  3. Substituting actual solutions to problems w/ commitments to solving them (e.g. implementing "Accuracy KPIs" instead of slowing the pace of video releases)

None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.

I'm sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.

Here's hoping this leads to positive change.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

I try to structure my commits in a way that minimizes their blast radius, which usually likes trying to reduce the number of files In touch per commit.

For example, my commit history would look like this:

  • Add new method to service class
  • Use new service class method in worker

And then as I continue working, all changes will be git commit --fixuped to one of those two commit's hashes depending on where they occur.

And when it's time to rebase in full, I can do a git rebase master --interactive --autosquash.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago

I'm absolutely thrilled to have sync on the Fediverse, and will happily pay for a yearly subscription to help ensure LJD has sufficient compensation to keep the app up-to-date with whatever changes come to the Android/Lemmy APIs years down the road.

The problem with (even excellent) free apps for platforms like this, is they require consistent maintenance to keep up with both the platform they run on (Android), and the platform they serve content for (Lemmy). That is not a trivial amount of work, and is absolutely deserving of continued, recurring compensation IMO.

A one-time payment might make sense for a simple native game that gets produced once, has no web component, and never needs another update for its entire lifetime, but not for this. You aren't paying for a singular product, you're paying for a service. You wouldn't go to the barber and winged about needing to pay every time I get my hair cut.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 12 points 1 year ago

I know I've been commenting a lot more w/ sync.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 51 points 1 year ago

It's kind of alarming how smoothly Apple made the transition to being a bank.

They're slowly transitioning into the type of megacorp you usually only see in science fiction.

[-] h14h@midwest.social 14 points 1 year ago

I fully recognize I'm in a position of relative privilege, but I am more than happy paying an annual subscription of <$20 for an app like this.

Building an app of this quality with this level of polish is a massive time investment, and I'm more than happy to reward that time with less money per year than I spent doordashing lunch this afternoon because I was too lazy to make myself a sandwich.

4
Incorrect Quotation (www.gnu.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by h14h@midwest.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn't written by me.

Here's the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.

Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.

We don't use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.

-Richard Stallman

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h14h

joined 1 year ago