Nevoic

@Nevoic@lemmy.world
0 Post – 29 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

"core values of socialism"? Like reintroducing landleeches after they were outlawed? Like allowing the bourgeoise to own the means of production and exploit the over a billion working class Chinese people in horrible conditions? Using the profit motive to "incentivize entrepreneurship"?

China is the epitome of SINO, they're an authoritarian capitalist regime.

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Over 85% of Mozilla's income comes from their Google search deal. Google is keeping Mozilla alive to prevent antitrust issues. If Mozilla rocks the boat too much, Google will fund a more obedient alternative.

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Do you actually hold this position in all situations? It was illegal to harbor Jewish fugitives in Nazi Germany, should those laws be respected?

When you say "no, of course not", maybe actually consider what your position is before posting. Because nobody's position is to just "respect laws" in all circumstances.

I didn't tell anyone how to run anything, I pointed out how they're an entirely capitalist nation that pretends to be socialist. Maybe the current authoritarian regime will suddenly revert all the market reforms they've implemented over the last 3-4 decades, seize the means of production, and then dissolve the state when it's no longer needed.

I don't believe this will happen, and I don't think many people do. Most of the "socialists" that support China are more than happy with the bourgeoise class existing and exploiting working class people "for the betterment of the State". This kind of thinking falls much more in line with Mussolini than Marx.

Reddit is an interest of mine, but I have no interest in going to reddit anymore. Is that an unimaginable position for you?

We have 3 paths forward:

  • liberal capitalist solution (à la Tucker Carlson): ban AI and allow workers to do bullshit jobs
  • alternative liberal capitalist solution: let excess workers die in the streets because they're no longer needed for production
  • socialist solution: distribute the means of production (AI in this case) so we can share equitably in its output

I'd advocate for the socialist one, it sounds like you might be more in line with Tucker Carlson's thinking here?

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I actually convinced my boss to get us a ping pong table, all I had to do was forego my pay for a year!

Totally worth, since I'm not working for the money, I'm working for the culture (our culture is now a ping pong table). It's so awesome that I can use it during my state-mandated breaks 🙂

This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it's fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn't a fix.

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Yeah for both Ubuntu and Arch on two separate computers in my house, the process was just install the distro then install steam + Lutris (steam for steam games, Lutris for every other kind of game like League or WoW).

Installing steam games is identical in Linux and Windows for the vast majority of games. Installing non-steam games is arguably easier since you never have to go to a web browser.

Honestly the only reason Windows is "easier" is because it's preinstalled on computers. As someone who has fresh installed Linux and Windows, Linux is miles easier to install. To install Windows 11 I tried following their recommendations (enabling TPM and secure boot in bios), but the W11 installer still didn't like my 2 year old computer, so had to open up the command prompt, regedit, and add 3 Bypass registry DWord 32 bit values. Then actually installing the O.S you just sit there and wait with an unusable computer. Linux installations have nice GUIs that are far more modern, don't require weird terminal hacks, and you have a usable computer while it's installing (you can open up Firefox and browse the web for example).

\rant

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That's the idea, but in practice since the data exists independently on each server, it takes network time and computational time for them to align. In practice I expect comments to function as you expect, and upvotes to be slightly off depending on which instance you're viewing from.

Things get a bit more weird when an instance gets defederated from another instance. My understanding here is that if you have instance A defederate from instance B, but instance B was listening to some of instance A's communities, that instance B will have an independent replica of that community that doesn't sync (this happened when beehaw defederated from open registration instances like lemmy.world).

It's also mad that this is also the case for adults. When you turn 18, you shouldn't suddenly lose basic rights (like access to food and shelter), but that's exactly what most capitalists want to happen (and so that's how it works).

Goods with inelastic demand shouldn't be driven by the profit motive. Food, healthcare, housing, etc. We can let luxury goods stay within the private sector for now since people don't need them to survive, and come back to that conversation at a later date.

Mostly agree, but the "incentive" focus is a misnomer. Humans don't just sit around and stare at walls when they're not "incentivized". Incentives in sociopolitics is just a rebranding of coercion, getting people to do things they don't want to do. People are incentivized/coerced to work at McDonald's because otherwise they'll live on the streets, the housing scalpers will make sure of it.

FOSS exists and isn't at risk of dying. Yeah, it's ideal if the people working on FOSS things don't have to also work a soul crushing day job, and yeah maybe when their soul is crushed they'll lose interest in the things they enjoy doing, but we shouldn't frame that as them getting jaded towards FOSS projects. It's actually just depression, and it impacts other hobbies too.

All that being said, I'm all for donations to people who do FOSS work so they can escape and do the things they love, it means better FOSS products and happier developers.

Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn't work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.

The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.

Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn't anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.

At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn't strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.

Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a "safe path" and now being told that it's impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they'll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we'll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.

We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).

While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we'll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they've already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.

We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.

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I'm a huge anti-capitalist/socialist, and often times I find it useful to use this mix-up of markets and capitalism in my favor.

When people say "but we need capitalism because the alternative to markets is so bad" I say plainly that I'm not advocating against markets, I'm advocating against classes. The vast majority of self-described capitalists aren't trying to defend massive corporations or employer exploitation, they're defending markets.

If all those pro market capitalists became market socialists, dismantling capitalism would be far easier, then we could have much more interesting discussions about the merits of markets and when to use them versus centralized planning, without a leech class exploiting wage slaves or scalping houses.

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And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it's hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we'd be at war within a decade.

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Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.

Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.

We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.

Every year or two I give Windows a genuine try for around a month. WSL2 is actually pretty decent, it's a massive improvement on the Windows development experience I had back in 2015 when I tried running Windows full time doing Python/Ruby/Java development. Required cygwin, git bash, power shell, and cmd depending on what I was doing. It was a special kind of nightmare. Lots of native gems couldn't compile, lots of tooling issues, etc.

Now you can use exclusively Windows terminal, keep essentially all your development stuff in a Linux subsystem, and pretend you're in Linux. Integration with things like vscode or intellij is quite decent with the WSL.

That said, I hate Microsoft, hate the lack of customization, hate the default UI, hate the split between Windows 95-style settings and new Windows 10+, it's inconsistent as hell. Moving windows across monitors with different scaling still resizes the windows in a very archaic way. You can't reasonably use multiple desktops because you can't easily rebind keys to swap desktops without third party software. I've changed DEs in Linux for smaller issues than these.

My alternative to a fascist America is a non-fascist one. Fascists are reactionaries, they see the writing on the wall and they come out of hiding.

As boomers die off, the percentage of bigots in relation to the total population will continue to drop. Instead of giving them safe refuge in another country, we actively combat these fascist ideologies, and also allow their main proponents to die off naturally.

Here's an example (first in Haskell then in Go), lets say you have some types/functions:

  • type Possible a = Either String a
  • data User = User { name :: String, age :: Int }
  • validateName :: String -> Possible String
  • validateAge :: Int -> Possible Int

then you can make

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age = do
  validatedName ← validateName name
  validatedAge  ← validateAge age
  pure $ User validatedName validatedAge

for some reason <- in lemmy shows up as &lt;- inside code blocks, so I used the left arrow unicode in the above instead

in Go you'd have these

  • (no Possible type alias, Go can't do generic type aliases yet, there's an open issue for it)
  • type User struct { Name string; Age int }
  • func validateName(name string) (string, error)
  • func validateAge(age int) (int, error)

and with them you'd make:

func mkValidUser(name string, age int) (*User, error) {
  validatedName, err = validateName(name)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  validatedAge, err = validateAge(age)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  return User(Name: validatedName, Age: validatedAge), nil
}

In the Haskell, the fact that Either is a monad is saving you from a lot of boilerplate. You don't have to explicitly handle the Left/error case, if any of the Eithers end up being a Left value then it'll correctly "short-circuit" and the function will evaluate to that Left value.

Without using the fact that it's a functor/monad (e.g you have no access to fmap/>>=/do syntax), you'd end up with code that has a similar amount of boilerplate to the Go code (notice we have to handle each Left case now):

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age =
  case (validatedName name, validateAge age) of
    (Left nameErr, _) => Left nameErr
    (_, Left ageErr)  => Left ageErr
    (Right validatedName, Right validatedAge) => 
      Right $ User validatedName validatedAge

On this note it's crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.

I can get if you're using some adobe products, or some game that hasn't been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it's a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.

Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it's not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.

Jesus fuck I wish you fascists would stay in hiding. Let the non-sociopaths make decisions that'll help people not die and just stay out of public discourse.

Note: Lemmy code blocks don't play nice with some symbols, specifically < and & in the following code examples

This isn't a language level issue really though, Haskell can be equally ergonomic.

The weird thing about ?. is that it's actually overloaded, it can mean:

  • call a function on A? that returns B?
  • call a function on A? that returns B

you'd end up with B? in either case

Say you have these functions

toInt :: String -> Maybe Int

double :: Int -> Int

isValid :: Int -> Maybe Int

and you want to construct the following using these 3 functions

fn :: Maybe String -> Maybe Int

in a Rust-type syntax, you'd call

str?.toInt()?.double()?.isValid()

in Haskell you'd have two different operators here

str >>= toInt &lt;&amp;> double >>= isValid

however you can define this type class

class Chainable f a b fb where
    (?.) :: f a -> (a -> fb) -> f b

instance Functor f => Chainable f a b b where
    (?.) = (&lt;&amp;>)

instance Monad m => Chainable m a b (m b) where
    (?.) = (>>=)

and then get roughly the same syntax as rust without introducing a new language feature

str ?. toInt ?. double ?. isValid

though this is more general than just Maybes (it works with any functor/monad), and maybe you wouldn't want it to be. In that case you'd do this

class Chainable a b fb where
    (?.) :: Maybe a -> (a -> fb) -> Maybe b

instance Chainable a b b where
    (?.) = (&lt;&amp;>)

instance Chainable a b (Maybe b) where
    (?.) = (>>=)

restricting it to only maybes could also theoretically help type inference.

I didn't equate them all to Nazis, you have an incredibly simplistic black/white view of the world.

The people who voted for Nazis weren't a uniform mass of people. Some voted for them on promised economic reforms, some voted on the basis of making Germany great again, some voted for them because they disliked the Lügenpresse (lying press), which the Nazis talked about all the time. The thing all Nazi voters shared was that the anti-Jewish/anti-communist rhetoric didn't turn them off to voting for the party.

Similarly, there are a ton of Republicans who vote Republican for many reasons; promised economic reforms, making America great again, a dislike for "fake news", etc. The thing all Republican voters share is that the anti-Mexican/anti-trans rhetoric doesn't turn them off to voting for the party.

They're fine with the promise of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. They're fine with legislating against trans people. They're fine with the rhetoric many southern Republicans are using about "solving the trans problem", similar to the final solution rhetoric Nazis used.

Republicans in 2023 are about as bad as Nazis were in 1930. That is to say, they've only done very lightweight rounding up of minorities and haven't started killing them en masse. Whether or not the fascist wing of the Republican party wins out and successfully genocides minorities is anyone's guess, but ignoring the similarities and history here is incredibly foolish.

Not all people who voted Republican are horrible. Not all people who voted Nazi were horrible either. The platform can get better or worse, we've seen a history where it can get worse, but it's also been shutdown before.

Either way, having spaces online that disallow protofascist or fascist parties is fine and not "unhealthy". Not every part of the internet has to allow for hateful rhetoric, it's fine to have spaces geared towards gaming, community, or just people in agreement that people supporting a bigoted party shouldn't be there.

"from a private third party" where? A (non-foolish) socialist would advocate for rules against renting people, just like we're not allowed to buy people right now.

That would mean there would be no private third parties that are renting out factories of rented workers.

If what you're saying is "from a private third party outside the socialist space", then that's a problem for all kinds of socialist spaces. We can't control productive forces outside of the space we have domain over.

It sounds like the market socialists you've been talking to haven't been socialists if they're in favor of private property, that's strictly a capitalist position. They're probably just welfare capitalists.

An actual market socialist is against private entities owning the means of production, they're owned communally by some mechanism (be it some democratically run cooperative, the state, etc .) It wouldn't be a group of stakeholders that are a separate, private entity disconnected from the workers (though the state arguably is an entity like that, and that's where the line between state socialism and state capitalism gets blurry).

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If you're not going to spend the 60 seconds it takes to read my comment, don't bother responding. Nobody mentioned a conspiracy to cull the population, the millions of people who are dying a year from hunger or entirely curable diseases like TB aren't dying because of some deep state conspiracy, they're dying because it's what's logical in a capitalist economy. These people have no economic power, so they get no resources.

Similarly, as the economy gets further automated, workers lose economic power, and we'll be treated with the same capitalist logic that anyone else in the world is treated with, once we have no economic power we are better off dead, and so that's what will happen.

The position that "alternative industries will always exist" is pretty foolish, humans aren't some exceptional supreme beings that can do something special artificial beings cannot. Maybe you're religious and believe in a soul, and you think that soul gives you some special powers that robots will never have, but you'd be simply mistaken.

Once the entire economy is automated, there will still be two classes, owners and non-owners, instead of owners and workers. Non-owners will either seize the means of production or die per the logic of capitalism (not some conspiracy).

This is the idea of class action lawsuits, a bunch of people who normally can be kicked around by giant corporations, coming together and taking them to court because the corporation abused everyone in the same way.

So the answer here is a strong "maybe".

There were people who voted for Nazis for "non-hateful" reasons, but it meant they didn't care enough about the anti-jewish rhetoric to vote against it.

It's the same for Republicans and trans people/Mexicans/etc. The party is full of hateful bigots, yes there are some people who are indifferent to the hatred spewed and stand with Republicans on some other basis, but indifference towards bigotry is an issue in and of itself.

Having a community explicitly ban people who support these bigoted groups (Republicans/Nazis/etc.) is not a problem. I prefer a space that allows people to share their views, I've debated self-identified fascists before, I'm fine in that environment, but I respect that some people aren't.

Just because someone doesn't want to engage with hateful communities only makes them "too sensitive to go outside" if "outside" is sympathetic to these hateful groups.

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