I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

That’s where the not that weird idea comes into play. It’s not that weird to not want to be misrepresented - that’s an entirely different thing from trolling, or strawmanning, or seeking out inflammatory topics on purpose. It’s a natural and understandable reaction, and we shouldn’t respond to it by deciding it’s ok to retaliate with increasingly less fair characterizations of their statements.

And again, that’s not even within an country mile of being a good faith attempt at charitable interpretation, for several reasons.

You’re twisting their words into some sort seemingly overnight goodbye to all software relying on third party libs. A more normal way of taking that is envisioning a more gradual progression to some future state of affairs, where to the greatest extent possible we’ve worked to create an ecosystem that meets our needs. An ecosystem that’s build on a secure foundation of known and overseen libraries that conform to the greatest extent possible to the FOSS vision. Ideally you don’t just say goodbye, you work to create ersatz replacements, which there’s a rich tradition of in the FOSS world.

Your other point was even worse:

important software shouldn’t reuse code already made, they should reinvent the wheel and in the process introduce unique vulnerabilities

Somehow, you decided that putting words in their mouth about going out of their way to solve the problem only with worst-case-scenario bad software development practices (e.g. lets go ahead and create unique vulnerabilities and never re-use code) is a reasonable way of reading them, which is completely nuts. FOSS can and does re-use code, and should continue to do so to the extent possible. And like all other software, strive to avoid vulnerabilities with their usual procedures. That’s not really an argument against anything specific to their suggestion so much as its an argument against developing any kind of software at any point in time - new games, new operating systems, re-implementations seeking efficiency and security, etc. These all face the same tradeoffs with efficient code usage and security. Nothing more or less than that is being talked about here.

we shouldn’t rely on free software made by free labor, and we need to say goodbye to some 60-70% or more of the software we use

Again I’m just reading along, and as a person who cares about, you know, the principle of charity, I don’t see how you can possibly think that’s the most charitable interpretation of what they said. I took them to mean we should do what we can to ensure these projects have financial resources to continue, not that we should “say goodbye” to them.

And here’s the crazy thing: I’m not even saying I agree. I just think it’s possible to address a face value version of what they’re talking about without taking unnecessary cheap shots.

Mate, we are discussing on two different threads. Chill out. Maybe I didnt get your point so feel free to elaborate or leave it.

I think it would be really good if all of us on the internet agreed to a rule, which is that if you mischaracterize someone or misread them, it’s not that weird for them to want you to not do that. So I don’t think it’s fair to response to a comment correctly noting they are being mischaractized by going out of your way to try and make it about their emotions/mental state.

In what way did I bend your logic?

Well for starters, the person above was pretty explicitly NOT advocating for reliance on third party libs, and perhaps more importantly, they were not in any way suggesting reliance on closed source software. In essence, diametrically the opposite of everything you were talking about.

I think your confusion came in their phrasing of not relying on “labor product.” I took them to mean, not relying on people committing their free labor to sustain FOSS. I think you must have read that as not supporting FOSS.

Also - not constructive? But you’re the one that’s being negative.

I think they are right. You took the exact opposite of what they said and “corrected” them for it, which is irritating as hell. And now you’re doubling down, which is worse. I would be irritated too!

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

Excuse me! I would never buy a thinkpad.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

Should Mozilla be a not-for-profit instead? Trying to figure out the upshot of that distinction as it relates to this thread.

Pretty sure all non-profits strive to be cash flow positive, in the United States and otherwise.

Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances

So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It’s a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it’s not, it’s just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.

The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn’t like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. Every point made, so far as I can tell:

• Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021
• Mozilla spent less on “expenses” from 2021 relative to 2020
• Revenue went up over the same time
• A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)
• They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla “relies” on individual donations
• The CEO made $5.6MM
• They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics
• They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren’t sure what they were.

This isn’t secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There’s no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that’s shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.

What would you consider an authoritative source on if something looks nice?