Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
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@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk I feel like this needlessly inflates how many fascists there actually are. every time someone is revealed to be a fascist, it’s a whole news story - because it’s relatively rare.
But because you hear about every fascist who happens to maintain or lead something, they seems a lot more than the thousands of people who aren’t fascist, who are just quietly maintaining something without fanfare or big red alerts.
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@fluidlogic @JdeBP @Floppy
away with your fascist earth theory
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I mean, its probably true, but get it away from me!
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@Floppy
Isn't putting labels on contributors fascism in itself?@vvilhelmus @Floppy I'm not saying it's *always* mastodon.social,
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
much of modern biomedical research depends on tools that were not patented by the people who discovered them
eg
Green Fluorescent Protein and 2 HybridPCR is an odd exception
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
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@Floppy
Isn't putting labels on contributors fascism in itself?@vvilhelmus @Floppy "but I'm just asking questions
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy the code is crucial. The guh is not.
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@kfdm @Floppy this doesn't surprise me at all
Give a person a platform and they will open their mouth.
It's well known engineers are way overrepresented in extremist circles, as islamic and right wing terrorists...
I reckon it has something to do with black and white thinking. And maybe lack of humanities in education...
@janvenetor I feel I need to say, "Not ALL engineers". And I am not one, but I know this is true for ALL large groups, of any kind.
But I did note that there is a common kind of 'engineer mindset' that seems to prefer closed-system thinking, or is uncomfortable with open-system thinking or unanswered questions. If you believe (or hope) that you live in a deterministic, closed system, then it's very easy to consider conspiracy theories and the like to explain complex, esoteric phenomena.
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@janvenetor @kfdm @Floppy no, it has to do with desirable (for the extremists) practical skills like blowing things up. Blowing hot air isn’t anywhere as valuable as humanities types believe.
@fazalmajid And yet, totalitarian regimes attack ideas at least as vigorously as they attack people. I don't believe it's because they're foolish and reactive (though they often are). It's because Bulwer-Lytton was right: The pen really is mightier than the sword, and they know it. As, I believe, do most people, even if not consciously.
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@Floppy ok, so you have certain percentage of fascist-made-but-still-free-code, which you can fork.
But with corporate infrastructure, fsscists can take over everything and you have no longer right to fork.
As long as it is free and open source, it is just that you are perphaps using something made by someone who turned out to be asshole later, but it works and will work. With true fascists, you are inside concentration camp and has to subdue to whatever the camp fuhrer tells you to do.
However you may dislike this, fascism is a system: system of hierarchy, control and power. Something like "standalone fascist" is nonsense. Someone with stupid behaviour and ideas, if not organized, is just asshole, not "fascist".
Fascism is working, deadly social machinery - not individual psychiv disorder.
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@fazalmajid @kfdm @Floppy see the linked book, skills do not factor in it per the research.
"We find that engineers are no more likely than other graduates to cover technical roles, such as bomb making [...] What engineers learn at university is unlikely to make them more practically proficient at bomb making than former military or car mechanics. [...] many non-Islamist extremist groups have been skillful at bomb making without engineers in their ranks."
@janvenetor Definitely true. And I think that most people who've ever gotten into technical fields of any kind are keenly aware of how limited that knowledge really is, in practical consideration of others, even related ones. I worked in FM for years, and I can't tell you much useful at all about AM. That might seem dumb to anyone who's worked in neither, but it's true; they're different enough that knowledge in one ports poorly to the other. Bomb-building is its own skill set.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy Needs a bunch of spikes coming out the side and falling off that say, "Projects that might have done different but everyone made fun of."
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@Floppy I wish I could downvote this, but the frequency in which this has been happening lately is very sad. I mourn being able to (naively) believe that tech was more altruistic than this
Even worse somehow is the hill that people are willing to die on. Sure, it's painful to our pride to admit mistakes, but are we all so bad at learning how to empathize and improve
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@janvenetor I feel I need to say, "Not ALL engineers". And I am not one, but I know this is true for ALL large groups, of any kind.
But I did note that there is a common kind of 'engineer mindset' that seems to prefer closed-system thinking, or is uncomfortable with open-system thinking or unanswered questions. If you believe (or hope) that you live in a deterministic, closed system, then it's very easy to consider conspiracy theories and the like to explain complex, esoteric phenomena.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy In the past, I was so naive that I thought most people in the open-source community would be politically stable, with only a few rare exceptions. -
@Floppy Fascism attracts people, because of deceptive beauty, order, and masculinity.
If only demonized, we won’t take away its power to destroy.
I believe label Fascism was created first by outside press in response to Mussolini, not him nor his predecessors.
Fasces is the key to understand Mussolini.
He saw Roman militarism as the socialist unifier, which was influenced in part due to his exclusion from internationalist privileged circles & ironically British financiers.
@gustavommg The term 'fasces' refers to a bundle of rods which are each individually weak, bound together to make a larger, sturdier, stronger whole. It was commonly done in the ancient world to make temporary axe handles (for camps) and the like. The Ancient Romans used the fasces to symbolise the power of the state. That symbol is still used in the modern world to mean the same, the greater power of cooperation.
'Fasci' was a c. 1900 term in Italy for various cooperative groups.
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@gustavommg The term 'fasces' refers to a bundle of rods which are each individually weak, bound together to make a larger, sturdier, stronger whole. It was commonly done in the ancient world to make temporary axe handles (for camps) and the like. The Ancient Romans used the fasces to symbolise the power of the state. That symbol is still used in the modern world to mean the same, the greater power of cooperation.
'Fasci' was a c. 1900 term in Italy for various cooperative groups.
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@gustavommg 2/ In 1919, Mussolini founded his own 'fasces' group, the Italian Fasces of Combat, renamed the National Fascist Party two years later. At the time, the fasces was more commonly associated with leftist movements. It's only an accident of history that it became associated with right-wing thuggery. (Kind of like how it's only an accident of history that that swastika, perhaps the oldest known human symbol there is, and one of the most universal, became a hated symbol in the West.)
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@Floppy
Did the xz utils guy turn out to be fascist? Did I miss something? If not, then sorry, but that one random person in Nebraska still remains among all the assholes building upon his/her work to enslave all of us.@ditol Yep. Individuals do not typify groups, even though instinctive human heuristics urges us to believe otherwise. Name any large group, and you can find heroes and villains in it. My own rule of thumb is that any group more than around ten people will show this, and by the time you reach around 100, it's certain.
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@Floppy ok, so you have certain percentage of fascist-made-but-still-free-code, which you can fork.
But with corporate infrastructure, fsscists can take over everything and you have no longer right to fork.
As long as it is free and open source, it is just that you are perphaps using something made by someone who turned out to be asshole later, but it works and will work. With true fascists, you are inside concentration camp and has to subdue to whatever the camp fuhrer tells you to do.
However you may dislike this, fascism is a system: system of hierarchy, control and power. Something like "standalone fascist" is nonsense. Someone with stupid behaviour and ideas, if not organized, is just asshole, not "fascist".
Fascism is working, deadly social machinery - not individual psychiv disorder.
@xChaos Fascist-made doesn't bother me; it's fascist-RUN that does. I'm not troubled by enjoying Wagner's music, but I won't toss a penny towards anything associated with Harry Potter, because I know that Rowling is using that money for evil.
Same with software. If a jerk is still running it, then fork it if you want to use it. If not, then shrug it off.
