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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • I agree to some extent, as there are plenty of distros that don’t do anything significantly different from each other and don’t need to exist. I also see what you mean about desktop environments. While I think there’s space for all the small exotic window managers that exist, I would say we probably don’t need as many big fully integrated desktop environments as there are now. (Maybe we should have only one aimed at modern hardware and one designed to be lightweight.)

    That being said, there is plenty of duplication of effort within commerical software too. I would argue that if commercial desktop GUIs currently offer a better user experience than Linux desktop environments it’s more in spite of their development model than because of it, and their advantage has mostly to do with companies being able to pay developers to work full time (instead of relying on donations and volunteers).

    There are a couple reasons I think this:

    • In a “healthy” market economy there needs to be many firms that offer the same product / service. If there is only a small number (or, worse, only one) that performs the same function the firm(s) can begin to develop monopolistic powers. For closed source software development this necessitates a great deal of duplicated effort.
    • The above point is not a hypothetical situation. Before the rise of libre software there were a ton of commercial unices and mainframe operating systems that were all mostly independently developed from each other. Now, at least when it comes to running servers and supercomputers, almost everyone is running the same kernel (or very nearly the same) and some combination of the same handful of userspace services and utilities.
    • Even as there is duplication of effort between commercial firms, there is duplication of effort and wasted effort within them. For an extreme example look at how many chat applications Google has produced, but the same sort of duplication of effort happens any time a UI or whole application is remade for no other reason than if the people employed somewhere don’t look like they’re working on something new then they’ll be fired.
    • Speaking of changing applications, how many times has a commercial closed source application gone to shit, been abandoned by the company that maintains it, or had its owning company shut down, necessitating a new version of the software be built from scratch by a different firm? This wastes not only the time of the developers but also the users who have to migrate.

    Generally I think open source software has a really nice combination of cooperation and competition. The competition encourages experimentation and innovation while the cooperation eliminates duplicated effort (by letting competitors copy each other if they so choose).


  • I vibe with this a lot. I don’t think the movie needed to exist in the first place, and if it did it would probably be better if it were fully animated, but nothing about the trailer provoked any strong emotions in me.

    I’m not going to watch it but I also didn’t go “wow this is an insult and a tragedy”.

    I guess I’m happy for all the tiny children that are gonna watch it and probably love it though.









  • Sorry I took so long to reply

    Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier I don’t really have a problem with small dick jokes or the phrase as such. Like you said it doesn’t really affect an underprivileged group, although I think in certain uses it definitely is toxically masculine.

    I was replying to you not really because of that, but rather because I’ve seen the same reasoning, literally almost word for word as what you wrote in a few of your earlier comments, used to justify the use of slurs. Like I said I really wish teenaged me had been exposed to the point of view I’ve been trying to convey. Because of that it’s a mode of thinking I really want to try to ward people away from, even if in this case it was used in regards to something fairly innocuous.


  • My thinking here doesn’t have to do with being polite or individual instances of hurting individual feelings. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking on this case-by-case basis, but the world doesn’t just consist of you and the one person who has a 0.001% chance of getting their feelings hurt by one interaction.

    It has more to do with the fact that when you put toxic shit out into the world you are actively making it worse. For example, every time someone who’s “not a racist” makes a biggoted joke actual biggots get a little bit more bold. And every time someone conflates being considerate of the implications of their actions with having a small penis toxic masculinity gets reinforced a little bit more.

    It’s like littering, no single person does much harm by themselves but the cumulative effect is pretty bad. So, I’m not trying to put you down or verbally joust you. I’m trying to make sure a place that I care about, --this community-- remains a pleasant place for everyone. And since we’re both here, and we both dislike misogyny, we probably have pretty similar worldviews and we probably care about this place a similar amount. I hope that means we can work together instead of fighting.

    To that end I want to say that I’ve tried to be polite and diplomatic. If I’ve come across as smug or something then I’m sorry. And I realize that the person that initially replied to you was a bit of an ass, but that’s no reason to take it out on me.


  • If you just called them “a dick” maybe that would be comparable, as it stands it’s more like calling someone “a fatass”.

    And if my comments are long it’s less because I take umbrage with a specific phrase and more because I take umbrage with the idea that you can somehow dictate the implications of your speech based off of your intent. If you want to argue that the phrase “small dick energy” isn’t a big deal then be my guest. I honestly don’t think I would disagree, at the very least there’s far worse things going on right now.

    But when someone points out that something you said can have unfavorable interpretations thinking “wow how dare they try to psychoanalyze me over a single internet comment, they should know that’s not what I meant” isn’t a good attitude to have. Once something leaves your mouth (or the tips of your fingers) it exists independently of you, and it has all sorts of implications and effects whether you want it to or not, especially when you’re talking to strangers. This is something I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self.

    EDIT: it’s true that sometimes people can go too far in grabbing the worst interpretation of something they can, running with it, and deciding the person needs to be punished for that. But this isn’t an example of that.


  • The thing is that whether that guy was trying to “decode” you or not, a person’s intentions don’t determine the effect that their actions have. Furthermore, just because something is a commonly used phrase doesn’t mean it’s good.

    If you didn’t mean to bodyshame people in general, then that’s great. You’re probably a cool person. But if someone says “hey please stop punching those innocent people” you can’t say “oh don’t worry, it doesn’t count because I was trying to hit someone else, I’m going to keep punching them and it still won’t count”.



  • US auto-domination isn’t even the result of market forces though.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of laissez-faire policy or capitalism in general, but government funded highway lanes are no more capitalist than government funded rail tracks. The current situation in the US required enormous government intervention to establish, in the form of the forced seizure of property to make way for highways, hundreds of billions of dollars (inflation adjusted) to build those highways, mandatory parking minimums for new construction (to store all the cars from the highway), government subsidies for suburban style development and later on tax schemes that resulted in poorer inner city areas subsidizing wealthy suburbs, and zoning laws that made it illegal to build a business in a residential area (which worked together with anti-loitering laws to make it so that if you didn’t live in a neighborhood you had no “legitimate” reason to be there. It’s not a coincidence this happened in the wake of desegregation.)

    Similarly fossil fuel production in the US actually receives direct government subsidies at the federal and sometimes state level (some of which have been in effect since 1916).

    Now, we can get into the weeds and talk about how government action is actually a necessary part of capitalism and the intertwined nature of power structures and so on and so forth, but it’s important to remember that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about the mess we’re in right now, as some would have you believe. It required conscious planning and choices, as well as tremendous effort and tremendous injustice to get here.




  • Star Trek isn’t woke enough these days.

    TNG had Picard give a speech to a person from the past about how the Federation was able to accomplish so much only because society stopped being oriented around the accumulation of wealth.

    Discovery had a character praise Elon Musk for being a pioneer.

    To be fair to Discovery I think that was written before Musk had completely (or at least publicly) gone off the deep end, but even at the time I thought it was extremely stupid to have a character praise an early 21st century oligarch in the same sentence that they mention actual inventors and engineers.