> It's an echo chamber here, too... > Any comment that challenges [ whatever else you dislike ] and leftist politics gets downvoted into oblivion.
It's not. Downvoting here is much less of a conversation-breaking action than shadow banning, outright banning and trash-comment-polution on other soc. med. sites. Downvoting has it's place, the occasional abuse of it should not be a problem, it hurts you so much because you want your views to prevail but that's your personal problem, not a site problem.
I get downvoted quite often here too but these days I usually challenge rightist politics - mostly due to it being used as an excuse for some wrong action or inaction at the moment. However, most of the time I have no idea if what I'm objecting to is leftist or rightist, I have to think separately to figure that out... but I don't do it because it's actually hard.
> most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions.
I suppose you think you can see your own presuppositions and I'm ready to challenge that. I'm also ready to challenge the notion that only leftist worldviews are promoted here. The world "enforced" is quite misleading too, some tradition does exist on this site, but it's different and a lot more nuanced than central "leftist" enforcement.
> nor do they see that their views are political in nature.
So are yours... A lot of views are political in nature, some realize it, some not, that fact has no bearing on the viability of those views and bragging about it helps nobody.
The EU is a highly protected market, therefore the market share of foreign (to the EU) products cannot be used as a measure for the quality or affordability of such products.
> The result is very fast native code with no GC, no syscalls, and no memory allocations at runtime.
I guess, that's only achievable for certain kind of code, already designed with hard real-time in mind. It would be good to have some information about the limitations of this approach.
> In this synthesized machine states era do I want to still run a bloated, buggy web browser?
I do. The browser is indispensable, at least for now, and it's much better to keep improving it for the age of AI than to jump to fairy tails and unproven replacement technologies.
> What tech people should be focused on is political action that keeps hardware open and models open and not locked behind data center.
And while they're working on this, you're going to do what exactly? You made a lot of forward looking claims that have nothing to do with the present reality, you just forgot to present any realistic vision about how to get there.
If you can't imagine procuring any those pink unicorns yourself why do you plead with others to deliver them to you? It just doesn't add up.
I mentioned I am working on replacements for the usual local PC software stack ..."exactly"
You breezed right over that, obsessed over a single statement in a rush to justify your choices.
In my day to day experience the browser is not indispensable, quite the opposite. I barely use one. Native phone apps work better than web apps for "present reality" use-cases. I will stick to phone apps and run what I want on my PC.
I am waiting for a new build of a vision model backed GPU accelerated Vulkan-based desktop replacement to compile.
I can submit a prompt, get a point cloud/depth map displayed onscreen and then it crashes. Memory management needs improvement.
And I have achieved this in just a few weeks with a single 3090 and local models. But I guess being an EE who has developed software from hardware up for over 20 years and not a web SaaS code school grad, has provided the context to bring "fairy tales" to life.
Meanwhile Web Assembly has been right around the corner for over a decade; a fairy tale with little value in present reality.
> I mentioned I am working on replacements for the usual local PC software stack ..."exactly"
Very good, when you replace it, use it to create all the shiny things you dream about, it should be a breeze, use AI to create everything you need. We, the less fortunate, are going to stay with the browser only until you save the world and not a minute longer.
> I will stick to phone apps and run what I want on my PC.
I also run what I want on my PC and what I want in my browser and I don't want phone apps because they are restricted to a tightly controlled environment. Are you going to replace that one too? With something free and open? AI should do it with a couple of prompts, right?
> And I have achieved this in just a few weeks
That's wonderful, I wish you luck, seriously.
> EE who has developed software from hardware up for over 20 years... has provided the context to bring "fairy tales" to life.
Until you bring them to life, they remain fairy tales - not my call, that's how it works and has always worked. I don't see why we should discuss something that isn't there and address claims that cannot be verified in any way.
More importantly, I don't see why we should abandon vital and indispensable infrastructure just because you say so and because you can get by using something much more restricted for your narrow purposes. I mean, show me, don't tell me.
> They were all bearish in 2025. Now they are bullish.
There's noting bullish in "America isn't ready". The technical success of AI can absolutely cannibalize it's economic and political feasibility - which is the opposite of bullish.
Besides, mainstream media's modus operandi has been fixed for along time and the switch in tone is perfectly explainable, but that's not the point here.
Some people are surprised to hear that, apparently for them profit is something that grows on trees, or somewhere... It's amusing to read their starry-eyed projections although I'm pretty sure the naked truth is quite ugly.
> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben.
It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.
Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
Right, it sounds like "you don't matter to me", which I read as "Oops, wrong address, go find somebody else".
The bigger problem here is that the OP author is pretending to be a speaker for all open source, I guess there's no other way to justify the uncompromising attitude he somehow developed.
AI will undoubtedly change how OSS works, bot-submited PRs can be overwhelming, authors should not despair though, where there's a will, there's a way.
> I guess there's no other way to justify the uncompromising attitude he somehow developed.
I disagree. When someone open sources code, they give away some of their work for free. That's all, and that's nice.
I really don't get how so many people think that if you give away some of your work for free, then you must give even more work away for free because they consider it "basic decency".
> people think that if you give away some of your work for free, then you must give even more work away for free because they consider it "basic decency".
I didn't say that and I have no moral objections to the hardline attitude you seem to like, I respect that choice.
However, we have to be careful here, every author may have to take a firm stance from time to time, but that's not a good idea for all or most of the time, thus the latter isn't the best for everyone or every project, a lot of authors will be happier with different approaches.
Building a project is a lot about building a community around it and while I understand that not everyone can do it, I prefer those who can for completely rational reasons.
We've entered a time when OSS is becoming more important while the technical part of it is becoming less problematic, in this environment interpersonal skills grow in importance and it would be hard to manage a successful project without them.
> Building a project is a lot about building a community around it and while I understand that not everyone can do it, I prefer those who can for completely rational reasons.
And I totally agree with that!
I am not saying that authors must take a firm stance. What I am saying is that users need to understand that they are not entitled to anything at all. It's all bonus.
I do help the users of the projects I maintain, as much as I can. Still they are not entitled to anything at all, I do it because I'm trying to be nice. And what I see is that it's not rare for them to not understand that; they behave as if it was my job.
> Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong,
Happens all the time.
> and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.
Not for the vast majority of political issues and indeed for most of Social Sciences. In these cases, empirical evidence is just an accessory, it's still evidence but it's never conclusive, you need reasoning to sort out the complexity.
It's not. Downvoting here is much less of a conversation-breaking action than shadow banning, outright banning and trash-comment-polution on other soc. med. sites. Downvoting has it's place, the occasional abuse of it should not be a problem, it hurts you so much because you want your views to prevail but that's your personal problem, not a site problem.
I get downvoted quite often here too but these days I usually challenge rightist politics - mostly due to it being used as an excuse for some wrong action or inaction at the moment. However, most of the time I have no idea if what I'm objecting to is leftist or rightist, I have to think separately to figure that out... but I don't do it because it's actually hard.
> most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions.
I suppose you think you can see your own presuppositions and I'm ready to challenge that. I'm also ready to challenge the notion that only leftist worldviews are promoted here. The world "enforced" is quite misleading too, some tradition does exist on this site, but it's different and a lot more nuanced than central "leftist" enforcement.
> nor do they see that their views are political in nature.
So are yours... A lot of views are political in nature, some realize it, some not, that fact has no bearing on the viability of those views and bragging about it helps nobody.
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