seems like every projects wants you to fork ans submit changes

I think that’s just how software devs tend to work: a main “trunk” of code, from which they branch off for a feature or change, then when they’re done writing the new code, merge it back into the trunk. That’s the mode we’re used to, the only tool we know for managing parallel code development.

How else would we do things? Or rather: how would you do things? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I genuinely admit I don’t know how you’d prefer to operate, or what you mean by punching in and out.

If you’re asking for specific tasks, projects may have an issue tracker of some form where you can find stuff other people found, but other than that, FOSS often is a “see something that needs fixing, go and fix it” thing. Particularly if the devs themselves don’t notice a problem, because they know what that confusing icon means or how that tool works, they won’t create a task they don’t even know needs doing. Even if they know something is bad, they might not know how to make it better.

If you’re using or trying to use a program and notice something has been done poorly, is too complex for an entry-level user, whatever it is you think could or should be improved, talk to the people making it, or look for a contribution guide.

Even if you can’t contribute code, it might be helpful to share your skills and knowledge by opening issues, explaining specific problems and offering ways to solve them.

The UX designers I knew had a bit of a circular problem: the poor UX put them off too much to develop that passion for FOSS that drives devs to work on it for free. They’d first have to puzzle out what things are supposed to do and how they’re supposed to go about achieving whatever they’re looking to do, basically reverse-engineering user flows that were never properly engineered.

I don’t have a solution for this and I don’t know if they’re representative, but acknowledging the importance of UX is a start for sure.

Absolute statements are never fully accurate, including this one.

Honestly, computer literacy in general. Even back when I was in university, basic comprehension of how computers work was lacking even among IT students. Not as egregious as the various user horror stories you’ll probably have heard, but bad enough.

I admit that our software dev 1 teacher starting the first lecure by opening a terminal, viming together a basic Java Hello World without explanation, then compiling and running it wasn’t a great start for anyone except the lucky few that knew enough to not be deterred.

But the general idea what files are should be common knowledge, the “hacker” impression of the command line should be demystified a little, and the distinction between monitor, computer and hard drive… actually, maybe we should leave that one out for the sake of entertainment.

The only way to meaningfully compete with freeware is a feature advantage: if your revenue can sponsor developers to focus on polishing and improving your system beyond the free alternatives, there will be a market of people willing to pay for (immediately*) better products.

It’s what keeps Excel a step ahead of Calc: between a rather clunky UX and frankly awful documentation for some features and functions, Libre just doesn’t quite have the same maturity. It’s good enough for the majority of use cases, okay for some more and I’m really only aware of one feature I miss (Power Query or equivalent) or haven’t found. But it’s not as polished, and for some, that alone is reason enough to stick with paid products.

Conversely, it’s why more people are starting to move off of Windows: between user experience improvements, smoother installation, the spreading realisation that most stuff happens in browsers anyways and Proton making a lot of gaming a lot more accessible, Windows is losing that edge in features. If the list of anti-features and drawbacks grows large enough, the familiarity alone just doesn’t hold people any more.

You can compete with free competition, but that requires an eye on the market. And performance-impeding spyware just isn’t must-have for everyone.

*as opposed to supporting open source devs to the point where they could focus on their software, hopefully leading to better products some time later, which is less gratifying and less reliable than paying for a project you get right now

I wish my real name was Lucifer :(

But also, I wanted to look up the history of BBS and had to spell out “bulletin board” to get the right results from DDG, so maybe what you learned thirty+ years ago just isn’t common sense among people that weren’t even on the internet when that market collapsed.

(I myself didn’t see the heyday either; I learned those lessons in games and on forum boards in the aughts and tens.)

In short: Administrative pragmatism meant that Latin never took as much hold in the east as it did in the west.

The central influence of Rome was constrained by a fundamental difficulty of premodern logistics and communication: When the fastest way to deliver a message on land is “messenger on horseback” and the only way to move large armies is along major routes in well-populated territory you can plunder “acquire” food from, the ability to effectively administer a region diminishes with distance. Naval transport and supply can extended that range, to the degree that territories are navigable. Thus, it is essential to have local structures to facilitate administration.

In western and middle Europe, such structures were largely absent, so Rome had to build its own, more or less by transplantation of Roman (educated) citizens via land grants to soldiers, creating a local military reserve and elite that could enforce Rome’s laws. However, Rome rarely bothered to stamp out local customs or enforce a strict cultural dominance: Whatever kept the locals content and compliant was good enough. This wasn’t progressive respect or inclusion or anything, just a pragmatic way to save on manpower.

That led to a form of bidirectional cultural blending: Romans would adopt customs from those around them, while those seeking social status would adopt customs and learn the language of the Roman administration (particularly if they hoped to become citizens themselves). This blending of cultures and identities meant that, even as Rome’s central power crumbled, the emerging local elites still spoke Latin, or some locally flavoured variant thereof.

In the east and south, the Macedonian conquest and successor states had already established an administrative system, staffed with a strongly separated Greek-speaking upper class. The same pragmatism that had led to the laissez a faire approach in Europe led to instead taking over the existing system, including Greek as dominant administrative language.

The Roman Empire was eventually separated into two sub-empires, each with their own subordinate emperor, because a single administration became unfeasible due to various conflicts and the sheer size of it. As the western half started collapsing, the eastern empire almost exclusively used Greek for official matters, eventually supplanting local languages. However, it had to contend with (and lost some land to) the Arab Empire, which brought its own family of semitic languages, then eventually fell to the Ottoman Empire, which also brought its own Turkish languages.

To sum it up, the reason it spread across Europe is the fact that it was a valuable language to learn for social and political reasons, while the reason it didn’t spread in the east is the existing of structures that made learning it obsolete, and its stand-in (Greek) didn’t survive the assault of other, powerful empires with enough administrative capacity to impose their own language.

Board the ship, then pull up the ladder

I had a promising career option at my workplace. Guess what field it would have put me in… Sigh.

Don’t you know that the solution to any and all problems with AI just need more training data to fix? If we can teach it to be just a little more human, it’ll surely stop going off the rails. We just need to feed the machine more data More Data MORE DATA MORE DATA

the chances of each one in fact being a violent criminal are vastly different.

Reducing people to chances based on a single factor is deeply dehumanising. The statistics aren’t wrong; the interpretation and application is.

But that’s how it is, there is nothing you or I can do about it.

Individually, we can’t do a whole lot. But we can do our part to break that cycle, to treat people as people and stop normalising or excusing racism.

Yes, that divide exists and is reinforced by the identities tied to the status within those relics of a segregation that was never effectively dismantled.

Discriminatory policing isn’t gonna help with that divide. Being prejudiced by someone’s ethnicity has nothing to do with statistics. Humans aren’t numbers or probabilistic distributions. We’re individuals that deserve being judged by our actions, not the colour of our skin. My white isn’t inherently more or less criminal than someone else’s black.

Leaning on statistics to justify the actions that reinforce the root causes of those statistics is circular logic. It’s not a valid justification for prejudice.

You mean whether a people trapped in poverty, deprived of perspectives, desperate and frustrated by the injustice that continues to be done to them, develops a culture of violence?

Yeah. Probably. That’s what centuries of slavery, segregation and wealth-gating social mobility will do to people: they get stuck in a cycle of poor conditions harming childhood development, leading to ill-adjusted adults struggling to get or hold good jobs, some of which will resort to other ways of making money.

https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/violence

https://www.opencrime.us/analysis/crime-and-poverty

Pretending it’s a racial issue or a culture of violence is only half the truth. The other half is that it’s an economic issue arising from a history of treating them as second-class citizens at best, at worst basing your entire government on the conviction “that slavery subordination to the superior race is [the black man’s] natural and normal condition” and going to war over it.

Then it would be the new CEO’s duty to likewise object to unethical instructions.

Mind, I’m not saying the board shouldn’t be held responsible. I’m saying the CEO is still complicit, even if he’s “just following orders”.

Unfortunately, yes.

A machine trained on human decisions isn’t gonna make better decisions, and I’m not aware that a sufficiently advanced machine reasoning from principles instead of correlations exists yet. So as it stands, the best we can do is try to minimise the problematic aspects of humanity.

It’s not a good solution, just the less bad one.

According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolan’s head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as cops—patrolling the neighborhood, snooping on protesters if they happen to be in the area. You don’t have to enter a Dolan venue to be under his watch.

Sooooo basically ICE painted corporate? Fuck MSG security and every cunt that voluntarily works for them and tells themselves this is fine.

This is more of a NIABY: Not in anyone’s back yard.

Nah, these facts are not the issue. Omitting that the statistics themselves are the result of discrimination is kinda negligent though.

The solution wouldn’t be to try to balance out a bias in a fundamentally flawed dataset, but to establish a human system of decisionmaking that’s resilient to prejudice and bias instead of relying on machines that can only imitate their makers’ mistakes.

Because the executives are carrying them out (or instructing others in carrying them out) and thus complicit. By rights, they should be objecting to those decisions and refusing to do (or order) unethical or unconscionable things.

Seems perfectly safe and scriptless to me, but I understand the caution.

Summary is that in South America, Africa and South Asia among others have huge parts of their economic, healthcare, disaster response and even government functions running on it. WhatsApp Pay and WhatsApp for business communication (particularly small businesses), doctors coordinating over large distances, Syria’s White Helmets (serving as replacement for defunct emergency services), migrants communicating with families, migrant workers making sure the payment they sent home arrives properly…

In all those places and for all those people, WhatsApp shutting down would cause disastrous disruptions. Even during previous outages of a few hours, smaller businesses lost a lot of money.

The knock-on effects would probably be felt world-wide. WhatsApp has managed to worm its way into so many important places that the dependency is hard to break, much like Instagram has become an important platforms for small businesses to market themselves. And a sudden mass-migration to Signal or Telegram might overload their servers, if they’re not built to handle the same scale. Matrix is technically more complicated for smaller businesses that can’t easily redirect internal resources or hire external contractors or service providers.

The ones least affected by such a shutdown would be the bigger companies with more resilient infrastructure, redundant alternative systems and the capacity to quickly roll out other tools (such as setting up matrix servers).

This dependency on a central service would be a terrible risk, even if it were the most good-natured, honest, charitable organisation running it. We both know Meta is far worse.