I find that degraded performance is pretty much always preferable to playing Russian roulette with system processes.

I wish I could just buy more RAM every time I hit a memory constraint.

EDIT: There’s a more general performance reason for using swap at the default settings (doesn’t cover every case but is fine for lots of situations). At the default settings it will start actively swapping at about 40% memory used. This is because the system actively benefits from the fs cache mentioned in the article and performance suffers in low-memory conditions due to the fs cache not having free RAM to work with. You’re waiting more on I/O (which has a big performance hit even with fast storage) as opposed to getting files from the cache. As RAM use increases, you can swap some of the less-needed program code to disk to keep more free space available for the disk cache. The default swappiness parameter might not be optimal for your computer/RAM use patterns and you might need to do some experimenting to find optimal values, but overall some amount of swapping is probably a good idea

Here’s another aspect of how crappy Lunduke is, as he literally always has been (seriously, I saw that guy speak at one of his first “Linux Sucks” talks IRL and he was fucking awful then too, I don’t know how people never picked up that he was a massive asshole). Danielle deleted those tweets because they contained sensitive information about Cassidy’s exit negotiations. It’s just crappy to both Danielle – on top of being a fucking transphobe – AND Cassidy to dredge them up from the Internet Archive anyway.

EDIT: I do like how Lunduke’s bootlicking ass admits at the very end that he can’t tell the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. Since the terms were published anyway – Cassidy has the legal right to do what he’s doing, but he’s still being an asshole about it. The first purchase agreement was totally reasonable especially for a project that’s likely to die. His revised terms make it clear he’s now just trying to bleed the project for money.

“Multi-polar” literally just means there are multiple “poles” of power. This is in contrast to the “unipolar” world order the US set up after WWII. Unipolarity is the real historical anomaly here.

There is nothing inherently radical about wanting a “multipolar world.” Do you know why we wound up with a unipolar world to start with? The capitalist international system was “multipolar” up until the end of WWII. WWI and WWII were the result of “multipolarity.” America took advantage of the chaos to position themselves as world hegemon. This is not an inherently stable configuration for capitalism so it’s now falling apart after a few generations. Now we have “multiple poles” again when in reality having multiple great powers competing for power and influence has literally always been the norm.

It is plainly in the rational self-interest of every state other than the US to want a multipolar world, but in fact, all it means is the collapse of American hegemony. In itself, the collapse of American hegemony is fine, but we still should care about what comes after it.

In case anyone is confused, I’m not in favor of American hegemony, I think there is no winning within the capitalist world-system and literally the only bright spot of a “multipolar” capitalist world system in contrast to postwar American hegemony is that global capitalism overall will be less stable. But that’s explicitly not why Dilma Roussef et al want a multipolar world.

There are political premises embedded in the framing. It’s an intractable question up until you ask homeless people as though they were, like, people. Dehumanization and exclusion of homeless people from discussions of how to help them are the norm.

You ask what “society” does with “homeless people” as though “homeless people” aren’t part of “society”

Nope. Web tech is designed from the ground up to give the end user full control over how they render the documents they are sent. That’s why the pages are sent without DRM to your browser using a well-documented standard and every browser has extensive infra to let you write code that modifies browser behavior and allows you to automatically edit the pages you’re sent.

Content creators are free to bundle ads with their content, and content consumers are just as free to strip the ads out and refuse to view them. This is literally how the Web was designed to work.

You want something else, go help Google kill the Web and replace it with DRM-infested walled gardens and let Google tell you how and when you can communicate with other users as the inevitable price.

Under most circumstances you can’t even call adblocking a DMCA DRM circumvention violation because for most web documents there isn’t even any copy protection embedded in the page??? (Might be different for YouTube admittedly since there absolutely is DRM embedded)

It’s literally as if as someone was selling their novel as an unprotected Word document, included a bunch of paid product placement in their novel, and then got mad and called it piracy when readers opened the Word document and stripped it out AFTER the users had downloaded it.

Hostinger runs firesale first-year deals – like, under $5 – for certain TLD’s like .xyz or .online. The trick is that some TLD’s are also well-loved by spammers and you have to know which ones aren’t just going to get you auto-blacklisted. .xyz domains have caused me issues like this in the past.

The part that really stuck out to me was where companies started calling the developer of cUrl demanding he fly out to their sites to fix their stuff just because they downloaded his software. So many companies are making so much off open source software, almost none of them donate, and then some of them even have the gall to demand open source devs function as free auxiliaries to their enterprises

Right, but my point is, they learned about the pragmatic benefits of cooperation from the ecosystem the free software movement had already pioneered for explicitly political reasons.

Free software, for all the faults of the FSF, is valuable but not just because the development model can help companies cooperate where it makes sense and soak up contributions from the community – it’s valuable because it aims to establish ecosystems of software (and increasingly hardware) that allow people to use their devices on their own terms.

But that doesn’t matter to big companies who showed up and saw – a variety of ways to lower costs by externalizing them in a variety of ways (getting other companies to underwrite part of development, using open source without contributing anything back, in Amazon’s case, copying the competition to undercut them, etc) and spun off open source into its own thing that explicitly had no higher aims regarding the need to establish a copylefted software commons to safeguard user and developer autonomy.

Showing up to an economic and political project to build a commons and turning it into a corporate cash cow in a variety of ways seems pretty inherently exploitative to me. Also, it’s not mainly about AWS creating “Amazon Basics” versions of open source software, although that’s definitely an interesting one. It’s much more about situations like, for example, how so many people used, but nobody thought to fund OpenSSL until there was a catastrophic security bug and the only explanation was “OpenSSL can afford exactly one developer to maintain mission-critical encryption software for like, everybody, because nobody contributes back.” Only then did companies start pledging money to make sure their “mission-critical” infrastructure was up to snuff.

I mean, the point of open source as against free software was to make it easy to make money off of. It’s a little contradictory to turn around and call developers greedy for wanting literally exactly what big companies want from open source – value – especially when developers are trying to keep the lights on.

I can’t really view this differently from, say, workers being called greedy for wanting better wages. It’s the same. Of course people want to be paid for their work, especially if they’re going to be expected to maintain something important for a private, for-profit business.

Well, it’s early, I’m caffeinated, it’s on a topic I’m interested in, here are some takes

The author’s approach feels fairly abstract and I feel this undermines his analysis.

• It’s easy enough to psychoanalyze the scarcity mindset instilled from 5,000 years of class society, but also, actual individuals who are prisoners of class society still have to pay rent.

• He ignores the collective economic and political project of building a software commons – the “pay it forward” incentive of free software is that you know future work on your code will be public in a society that otherwise places absolutely no value on this. Seems kind of weird to act like capitalism’s approach to the commons isn’t a problem.

• He ignores that companies all over the world, as long as companies have existed, have rapaciously exploited to the point of exhaustion every single common resource they can figure out how to tap into. The risk that open source as such could become untenable because all it does is create value for shareholders is very real.

• This guy dismisses literally everybody’s ideas other than his own as irrational, psychologized reactions and tbh it’s kind of gross. His critique of Richard Stallman’s essentially libertarian take on why free software would matter is fair enough – who really wants to spend time defending Stallman anyway – but he ignores that even within the FSF Stallman is just one guy and that much of GNU and most of Free Software in general is not written or maintained by Stallman.

• He also misses the exploitative dynamic – parallel to dynamics in the non-profit industrial complex and in more traditional workplaces – wherein open source software developers are guilted into maintaining core infrastructure for hundreds of software companies for free or a pittance because of everybody relying on their ever-so-important code. This is also the same tactic used against workers who might consider withholding their labor for improved working conditions – has anyone ever observed the reaction to nurses or schoolteachers going on strike? “Won’t someone please think of the patients?” “What will families do?” etc etc etc. The end result is the same – some poor person with bills to pay generates vast amounts of wealth for private capital but still barely scratches a living by.

• But he also ignores the impacts on users, who are also victims of the exploitation of open-source, when companies skimp on R&D by using someone’s spare-time volunteer project without spending a dime to make sure it’s up to par and not spending a dime to make sure it’s being adequately maintained. This is how we end up at disasters like log4j. This affects working-class people’s lives literally because they have to interact with businesses that are built on top of volunteer projects that don’t have the resources to do Q&A needed for use in production. Because, again, disturbing amounts of important or critical infra are held together by volunteer projects. Why did this guy forget this aspect of the whole discussion? What companies do with their code matters because they monopolize social production.

• Dismissively psychologizing any effort to resist exploitation within capitalism as “trauma from 5,000 years of class society” necessarily presupposes the people considering using a proprietarian framework (within an oppressive class society that violently coerces all of us into participating in a proprietarian framework to survive) are not being exploited and are not struggling to survive

• You know who else takes the perspective that they don’t care if some company makes a fuckton of money off their work and gives nothing back? Well, academics with a bit of job security seem to be fine with it, because they keep creating permissive licenses named after their institutions – MIT, BSDL, etc – that them for their work. They don’t have to directly hack it on the market like the rest of us, so they can afford to be generous.

EDIT – also, this guy co-owns a privately held company with $7.9m in annual revenue and one of their main projects is maintaining Ruby on Rails so he is explicitly speaking from a position of like, extreme privilege and does in fact appear to be being paid for open source

lol here you go https://imgur.com/a/QelqulU

Karl Marx analyzed how explotation is inherent in wage labor by pointing out how the use-value of something is different than the value/exchange value of something. You show up to work and make your boss thousands of dollars, and that’s the use-value of your labor. But the exchange-value is just about enough to keep you showing up day after day. Your boss knows they’d be a terrible capitalist if they paid you more than enough to keep you showing up day after day. Their job is to maximize profits, and that means they have to pay you the bare minimum regardless of how valuable you are to the firm.

A lot of volunteer open-source development is exactly like this except the volunteer is being exploited by about 40 firms none of whom owe this dev anything on paper, so you end up with these absurdities like the corejs person having to beg for a job in NPM while providing core infra for huge swathes of the web.

A lot of open source is way more exploitative than traditional software development if you actually factor in how much money is being made off projects volunteers do in their spare time.

And this is dysfunctional and exploitative as hell, but it actually makes sense. Open-source was an effort to rebrand free software to appeal to companies on depoliticized grounds. We should completely expect that companies who embraced open source because it saves them money and no other reason would freeload. That’s what they were sold on – you can just show up and take it, no questions asked, no price tag attached. So they do.

/r/Linux has an official policy of removing and scrubbing comments from non-verified accounts and threatens users with possible “action” if they keep commenting without verifying their email.

The threatening message the automod sends now told me to switch to Lemmy if i don’t like it, so I did.

I can totally understand how not requiring email verification enables harrassment etc, it’s just odd because reddit has literally always been carefully structured to enable and promote harrassment. It’s why their user block feature stops you from seeing content by users you’ve blocked, but it doesn’t stop them from seeing and interacting with you.

I started using non-verified accounts on reddit precisely because of how inherently unsafe the platform is by design.