Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
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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.
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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 I should have acknowledged that you are absolutely correct, that by definition, 'fascism' REQUIRES cooperation, or it's just one screaming nut job everyone's free to ignore.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy Superimpose this over the "project of a trans furry" one and you realize that nobody can win in this situation.
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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 @fazalmajid @kfdm @Floppy Any farmer can build a bomb in multiple ways. It's a practical skill you just acquire. Some will even have a stock of detonators and shit. Often that's improvised...dangerously.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy As a software engineer, I just now had to look up what this was in reference to, I assume neovim? I do not think a tiny handful of people running completely forgettable projects should be suggested to represent MANY ACTUALLY important projects...
I've never used neovim. I don't know anyone that has ever used neovim. That isn't critical infrastructure. It's one of the tiny blocks on the upper right corner supporting literally nothing.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy is there a list? I can think of:
- Ruby on Rails
- Omarchy
- XlibreAny others?
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@Floppy As a software engineer, I just now had to look up what this was in reference to, I assume neovim? I do not think a tiny handful of people running completely forgettable projects should be suggested to represent MANY ACTUALLY important projects...
I've never used neovim. I don't know anyone that has ever used neovim. That isn't critical infrastructure. It's one of the tiny blocks on the upper right corner supporting literally nothing.
@JigenD neovim has become the most popular fork of vim, millions of developers have vim deeply integrated into their workflows as their primary tool - it has always been just as capable as any IDE but much more flexible
this isn't a nothing tool, it is as fundamental as curl or rsync or ripgrep
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@Floppy
Isn't putting labels on contributors fascism in itself?@vvilhelmus @Floppy yet you participate in society. curious!
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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.)
@wesdym Thank your the information I did not know all the details.
I believe people of his era classified him Fascist to distinguish them as different from mainstream, people that didn’t use Fasci in its older organizational form.
As time went on they used word Fascist as adjective of noun Party.
As for Hitler and swastika, he joined German Worker’s Party as military spy in 1920s.
Late 1800s, Herzl created a vision for State of Israel, nationalism.
Copied, inverted, confused.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy You could interchange fascist with whatever political movement you don't agree with. Are we to say that Stalin was a great guy after all? Communists were worse! Look at what they've done in Kommiefornia.
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy Still kind of new here -- but it seems to me the tin-foil hat guys, that did not wanted to be fascist have closed their X-accounts and came here. It is sure just a minute before someone calls Linus a tech-fascist because he calls AI just another tool...
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@JigenD neovim has become the most popular fork of vim, millions of developers have vim deeply integrated into their workflows as their primary tool - it has always been just as capable as any IDE but much more flexible
this isn't a nothing tool, it is as fundamental as curl or rsync or ripgrep
@jadedarko Not really comparable as neovim is not foundational, the infrastructure doesn't rely on it at any point (only some users prefer it), and it is not used by the majority of users. It's ultimately a replaceable high level tool, like Brave browser or the Git CLI, mpv.
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@jadedarko Not really comparable as neovim is not foundational, the infrastructure doesn't rely on it at any point (only some users prefer it), and it is not used by the majority of users. It's ultimately a replaceable high level tool, like Brave browser or the Git CLI, mpv.
@jadedarko mainly I don't want to give fascists more credit than they deserve. It's a tiny sliver of a tiny population that thankfully does NOT infest the infrastructure.